“Cosmopolitanism and Internal Difference“: on the brilliant, hilarious My Life of Lyn Hejinian as it contributes to the project of cosmopolitanism. The capacity to find what is strange about oneself may be a way towards a more meaningful global community.

The readings demonstrate that this strangeness is a process of selfhood, not a state of selfhood — it exists in relation, in time, with a recursive rhythm. The conversation with conceptual poetry, which, as a confirmed outsider, I present here as an existential challenge to the spirit of dissociation of language poetry and its whole experimental tradition, is, I acknowledge, a bit stagy. I am, still, always trying to find my footing around the elitist avant garde. The real point here is that experiencing the self as a strange process can help the cosmopolitan project.