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Lyn Hejinian's My Life and Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day both articulate a domestic quotidian devoted to what Rita Felski in Doing Time calls "the repetitive tasks of social reproduction" Mindful of the over-determined relationship between gender and the everyday, Hejinian and Mayer use the long poem to convey the elusive quotidian while engaging with its gendered associations. The exhaustive inclusions of Mayer's "day" and the unexpected selections and juxtapositions of Hejinian's "life" both use metonymy to represent a subversive poetics of the detail. Specifically, Hejinian reverses background and foreground, repeats phrases with shifting emphasis as analogue for the habits of everyday life, and defamiliarizes metonymic selection to render it visible. Mayer, in contrast, tests the long poem's capacity for radical inclusiveness and traces metonymic connections between daily routines and larger social issues. Ultimately, My Life and Midwinter Day both assert the co-existence and indeed the interconnectedness of intellectual inquiry and the domestic work of cooking, cleaning, and care.
Keywords: Lyn Hejinian / Bernadette Mayer / gender / the everyday / the long poem
"Call it water and dogs. Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there" (My Life 75). These sentences from Lyn Hejinian's My Life (1980) establish an opposition that resurfaces in her diaristic essay "Strangeness," which mentions a long-abandoned manuscript called "Water and Dogs." Hejinian explains, "I meant to juxtapose quiescence and vivaciousness, the elemental and the quotidian. Nothing seems more timeless than water to me and nothing more daily than dogs" (LI 151). Indeed, Hejinian maintained keen interest in poetry's ability to convey both "the elemental" and "the quotidian," and in My Life, the ordinary details of everyday life displace the milestones and events of traditional autobiography. In contrast to Hejinian's chosen scope of an entire life-to-date, Bernadette Mayer's roughly contemporaneous Midwinter Day (1982) was written on and about a single ordinary December day in Lenox, Massachusetts. I propose in this essay, however, that the exhaustive inclusions of Mayer's "day" and the unexpected selections and juxtapositions of Hejinian's "life" both produce compelling glimpses of the elusive everyday. Specifically, I show how Hejinian and Mayer make contrasting use of metonymic detail to question and reorient practices of life writing to convey a sense of the quotidian. These long poems also examine...