I didn’t go home from This Ain’t The Rosedale Library empty handed. I picked up The Language of Inquiry, a collection of meditations by Lyn Hejinian on potery and poetics, mostly previously published pieces. A LOT to digest here. A lot on and about and around and beside stein. And a lot of helpful stuff about issues that never seem to go away. Wish I’d read the piece called “Who’s speaking?” a few months ago, as it raises questions about the formation of communities, the power of speech and silence and silencing within those communities. The text is based on a talk she’d given at a panel in 1983; Johanna Drucker was one of the other participants. Some ideas that got me excited:

“To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capaqcity to acknowledge what others among them are doing.”

“The question ‘Who is speaking?’ implies, then, yet another question: ‘Who is listening?’ Consideration of how speaking is being heard and what is being heard in and of it involves another address ti power. Listening accords power to speech. It grants it its logic by discovering logic in it. In listening as in speaking, both meaningfulness and meaning are at stake. To trace the lines of reciprocity through which they are established is to map a social space, a community.”