Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows

by Leslie Scalapino

Fiction. Poetry. Cross-Genre. Slim, but with as many wildly disparate imaginative scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel--miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more--Leslie Scalapino's FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states--an alexia where unknown words create a future--and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's language. "This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey's Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger--and it blows with the elegance of a horse--or a wolf...Virginia Woolf!"--Michael McClure.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

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

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much better as an airplane book than a bathroom book. Reading this for 3 hours straight helped me see the buried narrative(s) and the repeating lyricisms (such as the repeated "chrysanthemums") which I had not noticed going a few pages at a time. Also, had a mini airplane-nap while reading and had one of those jerks that was kind of like a horse stomping its foot down! Not sure if I was dreaming of a Horse-float (ing) or Horse-flows, but maybe.

[Rock Point · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had to put money on a book that should be 'canonized' in fifty years' time...

This is a novel transecting a bestiary. In the opening chapters of the bestiary we learn about fractionators, cattle-née-dogs, dags, etc. and these species are smeared across the rest of the book, like the inky smear of horses galloping through a cave painting. We learn about Chrysanthemum, Demihunter, Grace Abe; at some point there is an entry that feels definitional, but everything appears both before and after it is introduced, in the same way that words are used in other entries of the dictionary before they are defined. Because of the bestiarial form, each of these entities is somewhere between species and individual, attribute-collection and character. If they undergo some linear sequence of events, then these events have the quality of repetition or timelessness, like the botanical description of the stages any flower at any time of a given species will likely go through. There were some things like mulier puisne or fontcuberta, and hundreds more that were only mentioned once, of which I had no clear image; but because Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows is such a conte I understand them as more substantial than just sound (whereas I am always content in a poem to take everything as just sound), and because Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows is such a bestiary I always have the feeling that I could look elsewhere for their definition. The existence of things in this book is mythic, and their activity is spread out spatially, seeding the length of the book. The galloping powder-monkey-bug-boy is the epitome of this, a narrow cloud of signifiers designating one force-species that comes galloping on stage left and off stage right at multiple times throughout the book.

The blurb and testimonials are correct in saying that Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows covers a lot of ground in buoyant, rapid, unexpected language. But it is exceptional for its narrative cohesion and dareIsay plainspokenness--it's impossible to really talk about plainspokenness because it's an obviously empty concept. But if it were possible, I would say: this book is plainspoken enough to convince me that it conceals nothing. Some readers may be turned off by the overt political era situators (e.g. "To have law the president of Iraq says Black Hawk will no longer be in Iraq ... Black Hawk sustains the US as usurpers will not remove them as the US is no law itself", 77) or the "Note" sections that explicitly state context that is not readily obvious from the poetic language itself (e.g. 85, 100, 120), but I see these as proving that Floats harbors nothing, conceals no cards--in entirely the same way as how much of the character introductions and narrative are entirely straightforward, such as "Detective Grace Abe sits back..." or the aside "(at Melbourne tennis Open)" (45, 65). I still haven't read my copy of John Bishop's study of the Wake, Joyce's Book of the Dark, but back when I was reading FW I remember reading about how Joyce continually re-revised the manuscript to be more obscure and encrypted. Among other ends, that book was written to keep scholars busy for a hundred years. Against this, Floats' builds UP the reader’s comprehension. Language does not obscure the things that happen.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's really 2 and a half stars to 3. Scalapino uses "alexia", word blindness, to form a poetical narrative. While the idea of using a disease to structure a poem or several poems is intriguing, it doesn't always work. In some of the narrative the word blindness dissappears and that is where it is successful. However in the other narratives it sticks out that words are missing and the narrative is incoherant to the degree that it doesn't seem as if it is done on purpose but by accident.

There are some poems, passages, lines, sections that are beautiful, but they don't weigh more than the negative aspects. It isn't until chapter 6 that the reader understands what the narrative is doing or what it has been trying to do for the 5 previous chapters, and I think that's too late in the story to let the reader in fully. As well as the narrative doesn't become coherant til about the 4th chapter, everything prior to that seems to be more rambalings, which wouldn't bother me if it were consistent.

Chapter 7 however is the most beautiful. By the end of the book, I want to like it more than I do, because that is beautiful is very lovely. But the things that don't work hold that back.

[J.A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book because it is doing something fascinating with language, but for me, the intention (along with the narrative thread) was too deeply buried. I found words I loved and phrases that were blistering hot with goodness, but as a book, as a whole, it just wasn't one I could wrap my head around.