New
Time, Leslie Scalapino. From Wesleyan University
Press $10.00 (96 pages) ISBN 0-8195-6356-0; $25 cloth –6355-2.
1999. Available from University Press of New England, Orders: 1-800-421-1561);
Also available from
Small Press Distribution.
“Real events,
occurring in real time, are transformed in the act of writing them as
perceived rather than interpreted. Phrases repeat, conjoin, break apart,
and return... moves toward a ‘new time’ wherein there is
no ‘inner’—one’s illusion that is ‘the
adamant social being/is inner’ and ‘the body is a new form.’”
“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
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The Public
World/Syntactically Impermanence,
Leslie Scalapino. Wesleyan University Press $10 (152 Pages) ISBN 0-8195-6379-X
“Scalapino’s
work is at the forefront of American poetry today. Each of her books
Challenges us to rethink habituated forms of perception, not in the
sense of her writing about this as a theory but through her composition
methods that bring us as readers to experience new modes of perception.”
—Charles Bernstein.
“Scalapino’s
work is sui generis, profoundly original. She synthesizes the various
aspects of her writing into a powerful and gripping combination of critical
writing and post-genre ‘creative’ writing. Her practice
of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking.”
— Pierre Joris
“Scalapino’s
claim ‘Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy—it
is writing which is conjecture,’ is startling in its boldness.
Her conjecture opens things up and moves us to places we may have been
but hadn’t seen before. Her ‘scrutiny’ is striking
and distinctive.”
—Paul
Rabinow
Review in Publishers
Weekly: Long one of the most influential of the “left coast”
language poets, Scalapino 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—and 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.”
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The Front
Matter, Dead Souls, Leslie Scalapino. Wesleyan University
Press $10.00 (96 pages) ISBN 0-8195-6295-5 1996.
“This extraordinary
new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, ‘a serial
novel for publication in the newspaper’ that collapses the distinction
between documentary and fiction. Loosely set in Los Angeles, the book
scrutinizes our image-making, producing extreme and vivid images—hyena,
Muscle Beach in Venice, the Supreme Court, subway rides—in order
for them to be real. Countering contemporary trends toward interiority,
Scalapino’s work constitutes a unique effort to ‘be’
objectively in the world. The writing is an action, a dynamic push to
make intimacy in the public realm. She does not distinguish between
poetry and ‘real events’: her writing is analogous to Buddhist
notions of dreaming one is a butterfly, and becoming aware that actually
being the butterfly is as real as dreaming it.”
“Only a very
few poets or writers of any disposition have such a formal enterprise
as is here evident. In that sense one might qualify this work as being
both the concept and demonstration in a way that would be akin to aspects
of contemporary philosophy, or the most forward of international poetries...
The formal brilliance of the construction is altogether dazzling. How
Leslie Scalapino manages to make a ‘virtual reality’ in
which reality itself becomes the determinant is an absolute wonder to
me.”
—Robert
Creeley
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The Return
of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion/A Trilogy, Leslie Scalapino.
Talisman House Publishers. $16.95 (230 pages) ISBN 1-883689-57-0; $37.95
cloth –59-9. 1997 reprint from North Point Press): Available from
Talisman, PO Box 3157, Jersey City, NJ O7303-3157, phone (201) 938-0698);
Also available from Small Press Distribution.
“ ‘Though
there is a relation to the retina. There is no way to live,’ Leslie
Scalapino writes in Orion. Scalapino generates meaning through relation—difference
in class, difference in age, difference in pleasure, difference in position
along a sight line. Like those other wayfarers, Piers Plowman with his
‘fair field full of folk’ and Bunyan’s Pilgrim who
walks ‘through the wilderness of this world,’ Scalapino
turns relation outward, and she travels ceaselessly through that network
in writing so ferocious it eats up the landscape. Put another way, Scalapino
ceaselessly arrives into the present, where we also continually arrive
for the first time, so we are foreign to each other and strangers to
every moment of our lives. There is no way to live, only living itself
in a present that is intolerable, dangerous, sexual, blunted, and ecstatic.”
— Robert Gluck
“There is
a hallucinatory exactitude in her presentation of sentences, an intense
encapsuling of the moment with no latitude for the illusions and comforts
of reflection and detachment ...The book’s great virtue is claritas,
... the intensity of the experience itself.”
—Multicultural Review
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Green
and Black, Selected Writings, Leslie Scalapino. Talisman House
Publishers. $11.95 (110 pages) ISBN 1-883689-37-6; cloth –36-8.
1996.
Available from Talisman,
PO Box 3157, Jersey City, NJ O7303-3157, phone (201) 938-0698); Also
available from Small Press Distribution.
Defoe, Leslie Scalapino.
From Sun & Moon Press. $14.95 (374 pages) ISBN 1-55713-163-5. 1994.
Available from Small Press Distribution.
“Poet’s
dreamlike novel explores subjectivity of perception. San Francisco
poet Leslie Scalapino’s first work of long fiction is fascinating
and challenging.
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“Defoe”,
Green Integer,
reprinted, ISBN 1-931243-44-1, 2002, $15.95. : ZITHER & AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
Wesleyan University Press, 2003, $14.95. ORCHID JETSAM, Tuumba Press,
ISBN 1-931157-00-6, 2001, $15.00.
"Defoe"is
part dream, nightmare or hallucination, part philosophical and social
commentary, part musing on perception and imagination. The book defies
categorization. Call it something as vague as “a prose narrative,”
and we’re already on slippery ground: The “prose”
reads like poetry; the “narrative” is disjointed, fragmentary,
dislodged from the flow of time. Call it “lyrical poem,”
and we’ve failed to account for the book’s polemic thrust.
Call it “an elegy on the world’s manifold cruelties,”
and we’ve missed much else.
The question of
what “Defoe” is touches on a major concern of the book’s.
One of Scalapino’s insights is that how we perceive—and
encode in language and narrative, what we perceive—is not merely
inherently different from the event in real time but removes us from
it in a pernicious manner. Among other things, her book is in itself
an attempt to challenge the encoding that we practice in our encounters
with “reality” and even in the writing of fiction.
This attempt takes
on many forms. It appears as the isolated image described in ways that
defamiliarize: A woman “is lying on the nude back under the fan
undulating distortedly on the ceiling”; a dog’s carcass,
gleaming phosphorescently, becomes “the illuminated dog.”
It appears as strands of narrative connected in odd ways. It appears
as cryptic ruminations on what seeing entails: “Seeing in an old
way overtly evident in this time as if the earlier construction of seeing
were naive though regarded by one as real and as consistent in this
time is silent reading.” The narrator concludes that our inability
to see makes us prone to being manipulated into brutality and callousness
by corporations, politicians and journalists, who use language to create
the “reality” of their choice.
Riddles engage
the mind. Unavoidably the reader tries to understand the occurrences
in the book—what character is looking for work, or being made
love to, or killed, and by whom—or to determine the references
to the world outside, examples being the Vietnam and Gulf wars, our
inner cities, Daniel Defoe, the homeless, comic books and the detective
story.
At the same time,
and this is one of the fascinating things about “Defoe,”
these mental processes are opposed by the visual and dreamlike aspects
of the text, which lend it a hypnotic quality. The desert, moon and
sun, bodies of water, flights of swans, figures in black robes with
eyeholes, are recurrent images lyrically rendered. “Read slowly,
without using the mind” is one of the book’s instructions,
and it is tempting to follow it. Take this section: “It is moving
backwards or turned around. The hennaed man alive for only an instant,
who’s never been alive is it. and not being myself riding up the
street a while ago, people coming out or standing. Crossing, and they’re
alive for an instant the same as the hennaed man. (as which is in this.)
and so it’s in them. who may see each other.”
Emphatically not
a book to be raced through, “Defoe” is well worth silent
hours of reading in which comfortable notions of what eye and mind reveal
to us about the world are put to the test and found wanting.”
—Evelin
Sullivan in the San Francisco Chronicle
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How
Phenomena Appear To Unfold, Leslie Scalapino. From Potes &
Poets Press. $9.00 (120 pages) ISBN 0-937013-30-7. 1989. Essays and
poem-plays. Available from Small Press Distribution.
“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
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Goya’s
L.A., A Play, Leslie Scalapino. From Potes & Poets
Press. $8.50 (80 pages) ISBN 0-937013-45-5. 1994. Available from Small
Press Distribution.
“The movement
induces a greyhound flying curled legless.”
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Objects
in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place, Leslie Scalapino.
Roof Books. $9.95 (82 pages) ISBN 0-937804-54-1. 1993. Available from
Small Press Distribution.
“Here is the
brilliance of a writer who acts on her knowledge that ‘we don’t
have words at all;’ but also that ‘the text is erotic not
simply by withholding,’ but in so far as it touches ‘the
rim of occurring.’ How can language with its dense etymologies
and indebtedness to institutional inertias do such a thing? Scalapino
achieves the shimmering moment of words as forms of life through a transmission
that does not attempt, or pretend, to pin anything down.”
—Joan Retallack
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