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Originally published in a limited
edition of 300 copies in 2001 by Spectacular Books, The Beginner
forms the middle section of a trilogy (without a name), whose first part
is Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000) and whose last part is Slowly.
Tuumba Press is pleased to bring the book back into print. It is
significant that, despite its title, The Beginner, forms the
middle section of the trilogy: "This is a good place to begin,"
the poem announces in its first line. "From something." Beginnings
never depart from the midst of the things they find themselves among nor
from the midst of the things they begin.
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist,
and translator. She was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in
Berkeley. Published volumes of her writing include Writing is An Aid
to Memory, My Life, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, Leningrad (written
in collaboration with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten),
The Cell, The Cold of Poetry, and Sight (written in collaboration
with Leslie Scalapino). Her most recent books are A Border Comedy
(Granary Books, 2001) and Slowly. The University of California
Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of
Inquiry in 2000. Translations of her work have been published in Denmark,
France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, and Finland. She is
the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council,
a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian
translations) from the National Endowment for the Arts; she received an
Award for Independent Literature from the Soviet literary organization
"Poetic Function" in Leningrad in 1989. She has traveled and
lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description
(1990) and Xenia (1994), two volumes of her translations from the
work of contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, have been published
by Sun & Moon Press. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba
Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten)
of Poetics Journal. She is currently the co-director (with Travis
Oritz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing
cross-genre work by poets. Other collaborative projects include a work
entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane
Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996, a composition entitled Quê
Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian, a mixed media
book entitled The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill created with
the painter Emilie Clark, and the award-winning experimental documentary
film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jackie Ochs. In the fall
of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth Fellow of the Academy of American
Poets. She teaches at the University of Califormia, Berkeley.
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