I just read an inspiring post over on Maddie Ruth's blog "Puzzling over Pound,"and it made me want to revisit Hejinian's "My Life" a bit. I'm still not sure what I really think of the book from a critical standpoint... the idea of analyzing it as a book of poetry in the normal sense is just as daunting as ever, and so instead I just want to share some of my favorite sentences/quotations from the book's "poems." If they seem like they shouldn't logically follow each other or connect in any way, don't be too alarmed - they don't make much sense to me when they're read in the context of the book either :) Enjoy!
Some good lines from "My Life:"(with corresponding page numbers)
"That single telephone is only one hair on the brontosaurus" (103)
"McDonalds is the world's largest purchaser of beef eyeballs" (75)
"Patriots drive larger cars" (120)
"Potato a fat walnut, the potato with checkered grit, by potato I mean low sunshine" (143)
"Duck eggs taste 'eggier'" (62)
"A real living centaur trotted across Dante's brain and Dante saw him do it" (88)
"Water cannot be a mirror, nor any more like a mirror than the skin of the forehead" (31)
"The refrigerator makes a sound I can't spell" (50)
each of these staements sound like something i would say and be completly serious about!
ReplyDeletealso, realy neat how you decided to apreciate the book on a smaller scale, much like how we must appreciate the small chuckles we get in life to break up the overwhelming confusion of it all.