“I hesitate to introduce any such terms as
‘meditation’ or ‘reflection,’ because this work is not apart from its
thinking and/or composition, so to speak–and that, among other things, constitutes
its exceptional value. I find the whole work
to be a deeply engaging preoccupation with, and articulation of, what life might be said,
factually, to be. But not as a defined
subject, nor even a defining one–but as one being one.
That is an heroic undertaking, or rather, place in which to work/write/live. Its formal authority is as brilliant as any I
know.” Robert Creeley
“Great writers–Blake,
Whitman, Dickinson, Joyce, Stein, Zukofsky, Ginsberg, Kerouac, even Pound–re-envision
the present. Literally, the present tense. In our time, New Time, it is Leslie Scalapino who most fully
articulates the constantly changing meaning(s) of now.
This crystalline epic may be Scalapino’s most ‘accessible’
book yet, but its surfaces perpetually peel back to reveal a further that could never have existed before, nor
in any other way. ‘This is eternity,’ Olson once wrote. You bet.”
Ron Silliman
Why would they dismiss it
because it’s not the same? It exists
because it’s not the same.
Why read?
Perhaps there are two kinds of readers in the world: those seeking
answers, and those seeking questions. Perhaps
that last sentence could refer to “writers” as well as “readers.” Leslie Scalapino’s latest book-length poetic
work. New
Time, ends:
The voluptuous choked thick, ‘on’ night, can’t
breathe (the hundreds of huge slightly moving choked: only ‘at’ night/—‘only’
is fear, single crows loading tree by thin wall) of one, at night—‘their’
dawn—as realigning present dawn, only—?
One could give
up—?
(as:)
‘their’ ‘dawn’ is thin blue of one—?
Scalapino leaves us with eyes and ears open (to the night, to breath,
to movements of air or birds, to fear, to dawn), with the upward-lilting cadence of the
question mark reverberating us back towards the
interior of her text and, simultaneously, out into the exterior of whatever text or world
we will next enter. Though sometimes
meditative, sometimes lyrical, often musical, always emotionally and intellectually
astute, these writings are inquiries rather than meditations or songs. In every way—through syntax, form,
punctuation, repetition, overt content, and intimations—Leslie Scalapino’s
writings move, are moving. Whether billed as
poetry, prose, or drama, hers is a writing that refuses complacency and ease with every
fiber of its being. No one, neither reader
nor writer, is immune from the pressures of a world where both the social and the personal
are subject to intense and insistent constraints, and where these pressures are themselves
both the occasion and the subject of the texts.
the pressure is violent cumulation of series, in
earlier youth (now, which isn’t it)—isn’t it, is caused by it (?) (series)
at that present
rain: falling in
sheets at the time, sitting floating (not in it) (fictive there while occurring)
Scalapino’s
syntactically impermanent descriptions of settings, objects, and events she encounters in
travel and daily life are compelling experiences in themselves. Her work resists the soothing maneuvers that allow
an image merely to be a pretty thing, never letting an image or moment, however beautiful,
hold still as such, but always subjecting it to the shifting scrutinies of analysis,
refraction, and interaction with other images and thoughts, other experiences: “pressure
so that the mind comes in to the social unit.” The
complex formal and thematic pressures Scalapino brings to bear in her work ask us—humanely,
generously, generatively—to read that work with a refractive openness of mind that
constantly allows for more complexity, more movement, more experience. “We’re getting to the point where
experience is incomprehensible. / Any experience is incomprehensible—Even that which
one is in.” If experience as we have
previously considered it is “incomprehensible,” we are here given an opportunity
to comprehend differently, to reconsider, to enact something other than “comprehension”
on, in, with our experiences.
In her essays as
well as her poems and plays, Scalapino uses the same tools—various and varied
language acts—to both deconstruct and restructure how we perceive as well as what we perceive.
“A dismantling of perception—” she argues in the essay “The
Recovery of the Public World,” “—so that hierarchical structure is not that
perceiving—changes occurrence itself.” This
is writing that in its very syntax does not accept the world-as-it-is (hierarchical,
imperialistic, capitalistic, dominating and/or dominated, colonizing and/or colonized). How can we inhabit a different world unless we act
differently in it, and how can we act differently without first beginning to think
differently? Certainly these are not
unfamiliar questions, but their very familiarity makes them more, rather than less,
urgent:
My
argument… was that no one can conceive within the ‘given’ language—and
articulate reality, as that. It can’t be
‘there’ because it isn’t that.
This may or may
not be a different concern from that of women and imported minorities working here as
illegal indentured servants who are slaves, for example.
That is,
individuals in writing or speaking may create a different syntax to articulate experience,
as that is the only way experience occurs. Or
they may describe their circumstances and contexts, as if from the outside, using
normative language.
Scalapino’s
radical rigor invites equal rigor, congruent radicality.
Insofar as we perceive (i.e., experience) a reality outside and beyond the
“givens” of our society, we have a responsibility to read, write, think, speak
outside and beyond the given means of expression. “The
difficulty of ‘reading’ it becomes the process by which the reader is realigned.
/ One has to seek to be realigned.” This writing does not just happen to us; we have
to meet it full-bodied, all our senses alert, our minds (and pencils) sharp. Such encountering of a text is not easy:
Scalapino, while often quick and fragmented in style, is a far cry from the seven-second
sound byte—but can be, perhaps, as fast-moving, as shifty. Occurrences don’t stand still but keep
occurring, recurring:
Poetically
in present-time this suggests to me writing that is syntactical and structural motion
(doesn’t exist—‘there’ at any place as a sole entity in the series of
sequence or whole—nor in any other form than its moves) by not asserting its content
simultaneously or sequentially. Authority
is ignorance.
One is to find
out what’s there, as occurrence.
These texts, like any, teach us how to read
them; it is the practice of reading (or, for the poet, of writing), of perceiving the
experience that is the text, that can ignite a radically different mode of perceiving all
experience. Such practice is available to
anyone who is willing to exist outside the ignorance of authority: “Social marginality is a state not producing
necessarily, but related to, thought/form as discovery.” The borders of the normative, however, are not to
be crossed only once, but repeatedly, as part of daily existence. “[T]hey appear—there // recurring”
as constant setting or background noise, against which we must articulate ourselves again
and again. Scalapino’s writing provides
both model and spark (both fire and kindling) to encourage radical reading behaviors,
which ideally may extend to pervade all our behaviors.
Scalapino refers to writing as “the practice of separating occurrence
as a form of attention,” and certainly it is this practice of attention that her
writing invites in its readers: “’Seeing’ is not separate from being action
and these are only the process of the text/one’s mind phenomena. Writing is therefore an experiment of reality.”
Though they
engage events as distinct as traveling in Bhutan and Thailand, canon formation, Robert
Creeley’s poems, starving children, and surgery (among many others), informs that
vary both within themselves and form one to another, what remains consistent throughout
Scalapino’s texts is her practice of writing as an action of inquiry, a living
terrain of scrutiny. In this sense, her work
is truly experimental, refusing any strictures of previously sanctioned structure in its
explorations:
(“Experiment”—not
as itself a brand of writing or as ‘unfinished” attempts’ rather than the
‘finished product’—but as ‘scientific experiment’: to find out
what something is, or to find out what's happening.)
A state of “syntactically impermanence,”
or the simultaneity of a new time in which “(the poetry not being a description of
anything outside, but a demonstration of one’s mind doing this—the syntax and
structure duplicating the process that is the reader’s own mind-phenomena), the
nature of the present is only disjunctive; the times occurring separately are at the same
time,” is a state of constant motion. A
writing where the questions keep asking themselves and “the criteria are that an
event is subject to its scrutiny only. Its
apprehension per se is an event.” Each expression arising from that apprehension, as
well as each reading of those expressions is also, per
se, an event. "“The fire doesn’t
arise from kindling; fire isn’t the same thing as kindling; kindling doesn’t
exist as fire.” Scrutiny and the
expressions thereof ask the attentive reader/writer to look, to look again: “scrutiny moves it off balance—when in
balance—inaccurate—/always—displays it—in existence even.” Both existence and scrutiny are in a state of
constant flux: a state of little comfort but deep engagement, where “balance” is
approached only in the repeated act of balancing.
Why read?
We read, we read
poetry, we read poetics, because it is “not the same,” because it is an
experience unlike experience, because we seek, because we seek realignment, because we
want the kindling and the fire, because we want
the past and the future and the present in the present, because the writing
creates in us useful turbulences, difficult turbulences, pleasurable turbulences.
they think (of it, this) knowledge is of
one—inner.
only. woman
carried can see
inner. this is some don’t
hate
everyone. this is being.
people need the
thought of comfort.
there’s
no comfort.
the physical
body has comfort
sometimes
(enervated)
whereas this
doesn’t
Jen Hofer
