Description: Poetry
“Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference
between form and content, so now they would separate "“theory” from “practice,”
and thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a
thinking about thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested
momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and practice as irrelevant
as that of form and content, mentality and physicality, art and reality.
Leslie Scalapino
is one of a certain number of contemporary poets who have engaged in the struggle, not
against distinctions but against the reification of false oppositions. Her work, in her volumes of poetry and in the
collection here, is a thinking and a thinking about that, including small details and
larger continua; these essays (works) are an essential testament to poetry and to its
embodiment and the book is an important contribution to the singularity and wholeness of
her project.” Lyn Hejinian
“Everything conceives of what Leslie does.
It’s one of the functions of literature to take us in and out of
time.
She writes directly at the subject from inside it.
Remembering forgets even itself when taken out of time.” Alan
Davies
“Leslie
Scalapino’s writing is grounded in a singular and acute critical intelligence. It is work which challenges the conventional
limits of genre and subject, even as it interrogates the surfaces and spaces of everyday
life, revealing the simultaneity of the “floating” – or hidden – world
beneath. The essays and plays collected here
represent a richly imaginative extension of that exploratory project.” Michael
Palmer
