The Public World

The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence

TITLE: The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence
AUTHOR: Leslie Scalapino

In this collection of “demonstration/ commentary” and Poetry, Leslie Scalapino brings two fields of her distinctive poetics practice into one (one’s) open view. Her Public World/ Syntactically Impermanence is the viewfinder, where Scalapino excels at a particular examination/ perception, which is freed from conventional practices. Scalapino ventures into territory that is as undiscovered as fresh kill—and who would want to tamper with what she herself has baited? In contemporary poetics, her fully radical expression exists solely. Her syntax recognizes impermanence; sustaining that action is part of her radical practice.

            Here, she illuminates the practices of poets Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley and Robin Blaser. She penetrates the landscape of filmmaker Peter Hutton as well as between collaborators Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle, herself and Lyn Hejinian (for “[t]he writing of a time is everyone”). Committing to eliminate the hierarchical in writing in favor of a syntax “whose very mode of observation [is] to reveal its structure,” she challenges Bob Perelman’s arguments and one of Ron Silliman’s poetic experiments—going one step further to reveal, and remove, bedrock assumptions. (The removal of authority helps reclaim the primary directive of experiment: "“to find out what's happening"). Her selection of poetry backs everything up—fortifies what is between gorgeous and grotesque, felt-seen and unfelt-unseen, “suffering” and “convivial.” From “The Weatherman Turns Himself In,” a play: …”it is like moving through the black irises, fields that are behind one, a gutted clear valve.”

            Scalapino clarifies just how extraordinary life is—ever in action: “The thought is the action.” She undercuts the rational (mind) with the “terrifying tense” of the present, (which is erotic as motion). From “Footnoting”: “The mind does not simply imitate (one’s own experiences, or language patterns one has read)—there is the moment of impermanence—that (when it) is something else. It has not occurred before. This is the exciting moment. One has forgotten what has occurred.”

Scalapino’s “Public World” is ever shifting, groundless—not syntactically impermanent, but impermanence itself. Experience is this impermanence, but what (unchanging) causes experience to manifest, to occur? “One has to seek to be realigned.”

            Scalapino has a penchant for illustrating “what’s between” the public world/ nature burgeoning and the public world of one’s consciousness. “Event is between.” Her lucidity arises (“irises”). There is a waking up effect to her ground-breaking realizations. One begins to see clearly (even if out of sheer disorientation): “dawn is dusk” In this “thin-space,” one can hallucinate the progression of a striking stability that is language acting out of itself. Her innovations are: “to have impermanence, to seek this—positively—as a gesture in the world, outside of oneself, not ‘about; one. And that minute ‘duplication’ as events simply go out and out, not recurring as a prior known shape.” In “bounding out of one” her poetry occurs vastly, as in the “limitless context” of a Robert Wilson performance or a Creeley poem. There is not fixation of self as an “I,” but as one’s being—(viewfinder). That “one is not separate from occurrence” becomes the underlying precedent for “[t]he recovery of the public world.” By excavating the capacities of “dismantling perception,” Scalapino expands the whole field of awareness-being, and our collusions with language, making experience (occurring) worth having. “Eyes-Lowered: Here, we’re cured.” [A.J.]

The book acts as a cluster of independent worlds with intersecting orbits. The worlds are all equally strange; there is neither remote, undeterminate Pluto (to call “other” from afar, or on high), nor comfortable, grounding Earth—everything has equal pull. Near the beginning, Scalapino writes: “My focus is on non-hierarchical structure in writing.” Time and logic (“time” and “logic,” always already conceptualized) are hierarchical, often conceived spatially (as in a time-line, or the arrows in logical proofs).

            Rejecting the distinction between an event’s occurrence in time and the “later” writing of/ about it means escaping the conventional view of writing from or about experience. (—Deer Night)”: The destruction of experiencing per se is in fashion and is shallow and violent.”)

            Experience returns to (on) itself when writing is not separated form its subject, temporally or otherwise. Scalapino, following Nagarjuna (a precursor of Zen Buddhism) revels in the un-ke(m)pt present, dethroning logic: “There’s no relation between events and events. Any.” Causality, then, is dismantled—the kindling of five minutes ago is unrelated to the present fire. Causality has no place in writing, either; seeing writing as related to events is a confusion, like the confusion of the “confessional” mode, which posits a self “as if that self were the cause (of events, of cognition).” Arguments for the denial or destruction of logic can invite objections of circularity (as can the objections themselves?), but Scalapino’s effort is sound: she blends in questioning along with compulsion, creating active, endless work. Wiping the casual slate clean and then discarding it, she frees writing from the false task of description and returns its rich endowment: “It’s the ‘same thing’ as life (syntactically)—it is life. It has to be or it is nothing.” Her writing hits the reader as life, in the active tense: it is something to read, not something to have read. That's not saying (writing) nothing. [A.M.]

Alystyre Julian and Anna Moschovakis

Long one of the most influential of the “left coast” language poets, Scalapino (New Time, Forecasts, Apr. 26) adds to her already considerable oeuvre with this, her third book of essays and hybrid poem-plays. While the book is divided into two sections—with eight “essays” in the first and three longer “works” in the second—this distinction is rendered highly permeable by Scalapino’s resolutely non-normative, or non-academic at least, prose style. An intricate weave of cross-references from text to text heightens the interconnectedness of the book, and allows the nomadic—a dedicated—reader to describe a sort of productive rebus throughout the book. The book is also surprisingly engaging, as Scalapino discusses the early foundations of Zen (Nagarjuna’s Seventy Stanzas) and the works of some of her peers, particularly Philip Whalen, Susan Howe and Robert Creeley. In their “demonstration of no-procedure” (“Deer Night” is a “total” rewriting” of The Tempest and King Lear), the essays indirectly suggest a comparison between the temporal indeterminacy of many Zen texts and Gertrude Stein’s notion (from William James) of the “continuous present,” and aim to resist easy cultural absorption. Agrammatical title and all, this is critical writing as restless as it is beautiful, in which poetry is boldly proclaimed as constituting “society’s secret interior.” Publishers Weekly (June 28, 1999)