The “Totally ’80s” Eating Matters of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

Abstract

This essay brings the discourse of “weak theory” to bear on Lyn Hejinian’s feminist experimental poem of the 1980s, My Life. It argues that the eating matters of My Life—the poem’s steady references to eating, cooking, grocery shopping, dieting, and so forth—open up a fresh account of the poem’s feminist and cultural historicity. Bracketing accustomed readings of the poem as exemplary of poetic postmodernism or as what Hejinian calls an “open text,” the essay situates My Life instead in the 1970s-80s emergence of anorexia as both a popular and a theoretical keyword. It revalues the range of eating matters that shape the feminist poetics of Hejinian’s best-known work.