there are different versions

"Plenitude" is a word that I came across in a 1995 interview between Craig Dworkin and Lyn Hejinian, who was (at that point) talking about Gertrude Stein:

… the Making of Americans, in which she categorizes different kinds of people and then realizes that oppositions don't work; she abandons the Making of Americans when she sees that there are co-existing ontological possibilities, that they're always vibrating next to each other, and that there are vast numbers of them. That's something that contemporary physicists can deal with, but contemporary literary critics are driven crazy by that degree of plenitude and then they blame Stein.

Hejinian's 2001 book, A Border Comedy, is 218 pages long, divided into chapters, and through the length of the text she often tells very short stories - sometimes realistic anecdotes, sometimes fairytaleish ones – not trying to present them as if they are components in some larger fictional story (as Schmidt does in Atheists) - though they are always contributing to a larger body of thought.

They never seem to be inevitable.

The driving suggestion of the larger poem-thought is really in that one line: "there are co-existing ontological possibilities, that they're always vibrating next to each other, and that there are vast numbers of them."

At times the stories are set in their own paragraphs, with headings or titles, e.g., The Tale of the Raven on p. 32, and The Plot Unfolds, on p. 76. "The experience of activity must entail episodes," she writes at the start of Book Eleven. Hejinian is a poet who tells you the rules she is operating by as they are being demonstrated by the medium that includes them. Within the poem she is never wrong. Elsewhere she tells a fictional story about rapists who sneak into a dormitory at a girls' school and fall asleep on the spot without committing their crimes. No reason is given. This is where the anecdote ends. One of the "co-existing ontological possibilities" has made itself known by breaking through in the least likely place. "To measure something | One must hunt its intersections," she writes. (Is an ending the place where a story intersects most decisively, cleanly, and obviously with everything that is not itself?)

She hunts but what does she find? The slipperiness of intersections seems to haunt her. What is the connection between the story of the flying woman and the transparent tree in The Plot Unfolds? The plot unfolds to a point where it seems about to develop and then it stops. Is that the joke? It doesn't do anything but perform an unfolding action. Two or three things are described and joined together. If this is what it takes to "measure something" then what is measurability? Someone ("a teller") relates the story of a bird, "Who once shared her many anxieties […] she cut off his head | Then she plucked him and turned him into soup | Soup or soot – there are different versions | Some mild, some vicious, some lewd." The intersection of the bird with the violence done to it keeps shifting. Then there is not one bird but many? Then where -

(Hejinian's language is typically formal rather than colloquial – "lewd" not "rude" – she maintains a distance, and you note that these things in her language "vibrate" separately or toy with "borders" – they do not merge, mesh, mix, or become indistinguishable from one another – so borders and separations exist, she feels, but how …)