I neglected to mention how much I enjoyed the Clarice Lispector book as well. Though read it in spurts, and with absorption, then would put it down and forget everything.
=Really curious, though I don't think I ever got a handle on it. But writing towards a present tense, and about a present-- both her present of writing, and our present in reading, reminded me of Lyn Hejinian.
=Although Lispector writes more about the inadequacy of writing to relate the immediacy of thought ('the instant-now'), and the metaphor is always flowing water.
=Just listened to this (kinda cute) analysis of part of My Life, on the way up to my parents' house, deep in the triangle.
=There's this anecdote about Donald Barthelme telling his class “‘We have a wacky mode. What must a wacky mode do?
...Break their hearts.”
A stream of life?
=That makes sense, the prose actually feels launched, volubly moving along. So more than modernist distress with closing the gap of form and content.
=
They both have these philosophical modes that are also plain spoken and funny.
=Whereas Hejinian is always playing around with the way language constructs, the metonymy as a means of relating thought rather than the lyric and narrative tendencies of metaphor.
=I like the ending, which I think works similarly to how you describe the American language poetry
=The confluence of longing we'll call it, and something formally determined is something I think about often, and aspire to.
=Or from Lispector:
="You gave me a ring of glass and then it broke and love ended”.