“The next work I’m gonna read,” Lyn Hejinian says, peering into the webcam, “is from a work in progress that I didn’t mean to write. I didn’t mean to start it, and I don’t mean to keep writing. But I keep doing so.” It’s April 2021. She is 80 years old. I haven’t seen her in person for years, but on camera, in this Zoom poetry reading, she looks and sounds as I remember her. Her white hair hangs just over her shoulders. Her voice is soft but steady—glad, surprised. She’s at home in Berkeley—on the wall behind her hangs a blue-and-gold collage made by her father. “And the one thing I can say to its credit,” she says, shuffling papers, “is that I have no idea where it’s going, or what’s going on some of the time. Which is a new adventure in poetics for me, I guess. The title is Fall Creek .” The day I learned she had died was bright and windless. I drove to Target, as I’d planned to, and pushed a shopping cart down the diaper aisle. Eventually I realized I was crying.…