Synopsis
A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections, it is interspersed with delightful descriptions of daily experience with references to illustrious writers and thinkers of the past and their systems of philosophical inquiry. It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.
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About the Author
Lyn Hejinian (1941-2024) was the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of many books, including Tribunal, published by Omnidawn in 2019.
Reviews
Readers have perhaps grown used to American poets writing ongoing, complex, reference and symbol-laden poems as if talking to themselves, making the reader a witness to the activity of a dynamic thinker's mind. Pound and Stevens, in their very different ways, are immediate forebears of this style, but Emily Dickinson before them and John Ashbery since are other obvious markers: poets who find as much poetic force in a symbol revealed as in an opaque reference to a current, but hidden, stream of thought. Hejinian's stature in this tradition increases with the publication of this book. Even more than her long poem A Border Comedy and the shorter pieces that have appeared since (Happily; Slowly and The Beginner), The Fatalist takes advantage of the tropes of fiction while admonishing narrative for not being able to contain the will of the poet: "I'm just an existentialist moving pictures/ in a pool. Certainly I'm no novelist but if I were I would/ (that's for sure) cast these circles around a troupe of troubled comedians/ named Lola de Nova and Relative Inch and Daisy and Martha/ and Gus," as one of the rich, run-on verses of this poem begins. Hejinian has changed styles so many times, it's exciting to see her settle into a new grand, permissive and open format, and reel out some beautiful sentences in startling succession.
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