Zither & Autobiography

by Leslie Scalapino

A reflective, eclectic mixture of poetry and prose.

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled "Zither." Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In Autobiography, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood―especially of years spent in Asia―experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion."

Zither opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

150 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2003

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’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve admired the seriousness and dedication apparent in her work for years, but my mind just doesn’t work like hers. Consequently, as often happens in these cases, I’ve tended to take her sui generis explorations of time, memory, and the experience of subjectivity as prescriptive, even admonishing, like I ought to be experiencing the world that way myself.

Somehow Zither & Autobiography helped get me over that hang-up. It couples a fairly accessible, straight-up narration written for Gale Research with a poetic “commentary” on the prose half that sort of writes through King Lear (“he hath ever but slenderly known himself”) to explore themes familiar from Scalapino’s other work: the slips and stutters of consciousness as it works to locate itself in the evanescent present. Together, the two contrasting texts make a diptych that highlights the strengths and limits of both approaches to narrating the story of one’s life, or even puzzling out which of the multiform pulses of consciousness count as “one’s” “life.”

The notes say that Gale rejected the prose section for being too weird, but if you’re familiar with Scalapino’s poetry, it helps to locate some of her philosophical and political commitments among her relationships within an exceptional academic family whose trips to East Asia inflect her heightened alertness to dislocation, the artifice of normative linguistic conventions, and Buddhistic insight. A great way in if you’re looking to get experienced with Scalapino’s work.

[Peter Bond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good poem. Good autobiography

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scalapino was one of our wildest idealists in poetry and prose. Whereas the other language or language-associated (Scalapino disavowed any strong sectarian affinities) poets sought to reinvent writing. she sought to reinvent reading, which I would argue is a much harder thing to do. You literally (and unliterally) have to teach yourself to read all over again, in a new way, to negotiate a (double) book like Zither & Autobiography or her novel Defoe. In the end, it feels worth it, as she makes you rethink the notion of what the present tense is, and her texts help the reader foreground consciousness in a way that is almost certainly great practice for an attunement to linguistic analysis on a daily basis. This particular book is interesting because it does contain a very condensed autobiography of Scalapino and twice, once as prose and once as poetry. This was full of surprises for me as I had had no idea she had lived such a cosmopolitan life. (Her mother and siblings were "stuck" being satellites orbiting a well-traveled diplomat/scholar father). Scalapino saw some gnarly things overseas at a very young age. She spent the rest of her life processing those early epiphanies of inequity, I believe. This book as much as her other works continues the thinking-through of what constitutes justice, in the realms of politics (or should I say, more inclusively and more exactly, "social being") and representation (which is ultimately more politics). Warning: If you read this book too quickly, you did not read this book.