Lyn Hejinian's THE FATALIST

Finally got to The Fatalist by Lyn Hejinian (Omnidawn, 2003), where I found the word "merriment," which is darn near a word that can't come out of the mouth of an American anymore, and indicates what is the greatest shift in this work over her previous, i.e., a willingness to accept that "Happiness is possible in unhappy times." No giddy hippy, she, esp. as she is looking into (I want to use quotes around many words when I talk about her work) fate, which at one point she equates with uncertainty (""). Inside the deeply soliloquistic structures of her mind and art is, in fact, a sense of exuberant, shared delight in the day-to-day. "A sense of the uniqueness/ and interrelatedness of things is fundamental here."
It's about time
that we got to someplace that we don't know
anything about knowing that we don't
and if we do we should leave it
unknown.
Sounds like the Sierra Club urging us all to tread lightly in the woods. Leave it as you found it, not quite wild. But what the passage and the whole poem urges itself toward is the unknown (read, among other things: death). Whatever is fated, I suppose, along with "the desperately ungraspable vastness of meaning."

But, all this is to try to extract a point, or a central thrust, in the work, and that I feel certain I've not done. And, if I had, it would have missed the point. What is most felt at the end and throughout is a stabilizing playfulness of intellect, a "merry" investigation (not a good word), insertion would be better, into something like the flow all things find themselves in.

Try this:
Sure modernism
claimed authority on the grounds of certainty and genius,
but Lorine Niedecker often asserted powerlessness
from folklore that's devoid of pathos. She was specific
and being specific is one of the things that is required
of a poem as it is of Santa's elves who quite properly go about
namelessly nonetheless to us and to each other since naming
is impossible -- there is, properly speaking, nothing to name
except your "tiny riot of contiguity and separation"
capable of taking its chance (and its chances)
to produce its own contingency, necessity, suspense. Many nouns fail
to remind us of the ideas they were intended to prompt. It wasn't "fate"
nor "memory," "the live oak tree," "Pythagoras," nor "this" I meant
the other day but there we were, "in and of" the moment
that related us to each other, bringing us face to face
like the "if" that arrives with its "when" or the "once"
that occurs in "awhile."

Needless to say (said he saying it), she does not "believe" in either certainty or genius.