One of the opportunities offered by the publication of Lyn Hejinian’s The Proposition is to trace in it, in nascent form, many of the key concerns of the poet’s later, better-known work. As we read the longer poems, for instance, we notice the sudden shifts from playful quotidian, often meta-linguistic observations, to more direct philosophical claims—claims about how poetry takes on meaning, and also about how statements and thinking more generally do so. What emerges here is not only the project of doing rigorous poetics, but also the characteristic interweaving of that poetics within what we might think of as poetry proper. Or rather, not quite proper, because if theory bubbling up inside poetry was an affront to many conceptions of the field in the 1960s and 1970s (as it still is), so, in a different way, was the range of writing modes that might count as the baseline of experimental poetry for Hejinian at the time: punning neologisms (“hushabye,” “dawnple,” “altared”) that subtend an exploration, in the “Adam of the Animals,” of the “spell” (in the dual sense of casting a spell and constructing a word, letter by letter); reflexive attention to the threshold between poetry and everyday language “not yet separated from the world // ‘to fill pages’”; and wildly fragmentary short poems, like this one, comprised only of two lines: “everything’ll / if everything’ld”