Jennifer Moore

Jennifer Moore is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches courses in literature, composition, and creative writing. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fugue, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and she is currently poetry editor at Another Chicago Magazine.

By this author

'Something that stutters sincerely'

Recently in Jacket2

Lyn, life

Margaret Ronda

Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.

May 14, 2024

There's dance yet

Swati Rana

Lyn Hejinian's 'The Book of a Thousand Eyes' (2013).

Our great teachers don’t stop speaking to us after they’re gone. I hear Lyn’s voice all the time when I’m writing: consider the possibility of adding some playful or lighthearted moments. When I’m doing the dishes: housework is less important than poet-work. When I’m worrying: have you thought about publishing yourself?

May 14, 2024

Alligators, Hendrix, lightning storms, and the Mister-ssippi

Tales of friendship and art from the road

Travis Ortiz

One of my fondest memories from my long friendship with Lyn Hejinian is a westward cross-country drive across the southern United States together. It was the spring of 1996, and Lyn had just completed a semester teaching at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Her husband, the composer and saxophonist Larry Ochs, was on tour in Europe and was not available to help with the driving. Lyn asked me if I could make the drive with her.

May 14, 2024