How Phenomena Appear to Unfold

by Leslie Scalapino

Literary Nonfiction. New & Expanded Edition. "In 'Eco-logic in Writing,' one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, 'Seeing the the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one's living make?' What more crucial question for those concered not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It's in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called 'the rim of occurring.' 'Writing on rim' is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino's Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one's times, 'altering oneself and altering negative social formation,' is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: 'The future creates the past'"—Joan Retallack.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction

119 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was a United States poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is way (North Point Press, 1988), a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.

Scalapino was born in Santa Barbara, California and raised in Berkeley. She traveled throughout her youth and adulthood to Asia, Africa and Europe and her writing was intensely influenced by these experiences. In childhood Scalapino traveled with her father Robert A. Scalapino (founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies), her mother, and her two sisters (Diane and Lynne). She attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966 before moving on to earn her M.A. at UC Berkeley. Scalapino published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976. During her lifetime, she published more than thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Other well-known works of hers include The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion : A Trilogy (North Point, 1991; Talisman, 1997), Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2), Sight (a collaboration with Lyn Hejinian; Edge Books), and Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press).

Scalapino's poetry has been widely anthologized, including appearances in the influential Postmodern American Poetry, From the Other Side of the Century, and Poems for the Millennium anthologies, as well as the popular Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize series anthologies. Her work was the subject of a special "critical feature" appearing in an issue of the online poetry journal How2.

From 1986 until 2010, Scalapino ran the Oakland small press she founded, O Books. Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College. Other schools she taught at over the years included Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and Naropa University.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie Scalapino was maybe never clearer about her own poetic practice than when writing about others’, and the responses here to poets from Beckett to Berssenbrugge, McClure to Murasaki, Silliman to Stein—and most especially, for me, the various engagements with Robert Duncan and Philip Whalen—give a hugely helpful context for entering into her own poems, fictions, and plays, which are skillfully worked into the weave of this expanded version of her 1989 collection of the same name.

Ever since I first found Scalapino’s work, I’ve admired the scope, seriousness, and almost frightening consistency of her approach to the poem and what it can do. I’ve also sometimes found some of the writing arid, even solipsistic: the transcript of a mind observing the intensity of its own meditations (“the impression of history created, created by oneself though it’s occurring outside”). Reading such a large company of other artists through Scalapino’s eyes helps me to recalibrate that earlier impression. The quarter-century’s worth of reviews, appreciations, notes, talks, introductions, artists’ collaborations, and poem-plays pulled into relationship here bring into focus other stars in the constellation of her insistences and concerns. I ended the book seeing her work as much a part of the Beat American Buddhist tradition as it is a product of the Language moment. In fact, the claims made in these pieces for the mind’s operations in a given interval of time, simultaneity, the mutually—somewhat mystically—constitutive relationships of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, and the capacity of language to simultaneously represent and create one’s transient instances of subjectivity seem to me to rely for their persuasiveness on some of the core axioms of Buddhist theology, if that’s not the contradiction in terms Google tells me it probably is.

But the red heart of any poetics is in the poetry, not the philosophy, and in its continuing ability to generate poems for others, and finding today this quote from Dorothea Lasky, 34 years her junior, I thought I heard something of Scalapino’s spirit moving forward in time:

“Because writing is, at least in part, about capturing human behaviors as completely as one can, it is important to me to train young writers to notice, understand, and represent the world through emergent themes versus simply placing linear constructs upon it and recording the words that represent these constructs. My imagined course would allow students to meditate upon the world seen through various lenses in order to notice universal themes of human experience. It would be important because, I believe, it would move the creative process of writers towards seeking more complex and novel forms of expression.”

(Dorothea Lasky, from Imaginary Syllabi)

Kick up the magnification a notch, till the world’s not just “seen through various lenses” but you’re actually “[using] a lens to examine a lens,” (Scalapino on Berssenbrugge) and you’re home, home on the Seamless Antilandscape, where the deer and the dihedrons gazelle-dihedrals zoom.

[Camille Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The following is an essay about the work of Leslie Scalapino, in which I discuss this and other books of hers:
Reading the Minds of Events: Leslie Scalapino’s Plural Time