Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010)

Leslie Scalapino, adscripta al variado y multi-generacional conjunto de los Language poets, falleció a fines de mayo de 2010. Incluimos la semblanza hecha en la página de Litmus Press, editorial en la que saldrán-o ya han salido-los últimos tres libros de la poeta.
Para una imagen más acotada de Leslie Scalapino, recomendamos el dossier de la revista virtual How2-http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/ de 2004- y el blog Chant de la Sirene ambos a cargo de Laura Hinton.
El dossier de How2 abre, justamente, con un ensayo de Laura Hinton que recomendamos leer por su exquisita conjunción de emotividad y lucidez.
(Remember,lisardófilos,que Chant de la Sirene figura en la sección links de Ser/afines y espero poder linkear How2 en breve)

La poesía de Scalapino tiene una disposición en el espacio de la página que no se puede respetar si se copia y pega sin más; prefiero remitir al Electronic Poetry Center-http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/scalapino/- o al archivo sonoro de la Universidad de Pennsilvania -http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Scalapino.php, donde se la podrá apreciar mejor.


“Scalapino makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once.” —Philip Whalen

"With the death of Leslie Scalapino on May 28, 2010, the world loses a writer whose visionary thinking provided her with a range of intensely experienced themes and images."
—Lyn Hejinian on poets.org

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino’s most recent publications include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It’s go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an instant’ – should not be,’ is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that’s to be ‘social act’ is it is without formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

Poemarios
O and Other Poems, Sand Dollar Press, 1976
The Woman who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, Sand Dollar Press, 1976
Instead of an Animal, Cloud Marauder Press, 1978
This eating and walking is associated all right, Tombouctou, 1979
Considering how exaggerated music is, North Point Press, 1982
that they were at the beach — aeolotropic series, North Point Press, 1985
way, North Point Press, 1988
Crowd and not evening or light, O Books, 1992
Sight (with Lyn Hejinian), Edge Books, 1999
New Time, Wesleyan University Press, 1999
The Tango, (with Marina Adams), Granary Press, 2001
Day Ocean State of Stars' Night: Poems & Writings 1989 & 1999-2006, Green Integer (E-L-E-PHANT Series), 2007
It's go in horizontal, Selected Poems 1974-2006, UC Press, Berkeley, 2008

Otros (lista incompleta)

The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence, Wesleyan University Press, 1999
How Phenomena Appear To Unfold , Potes & Poets Press, 1991
Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place, Roof Books, 1994
Green and Black, Selected Writings , Talisman Publishers, 1996
R-hu, Atelos Press, 2000
Zither and Autobiography, Wesleyan, 2003
Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, Starcherone Books, 2010

Scalapino por sí misma

My first knowledge of poetry, in junior high and high school, was Homer and Shakespeare; and Greek tragedies, which are also poetry. I went to Reed College, where I took a poetry course from Kenneth Hansen in which we read Williams, Moore, Eliot, Stevens and Pound. I remember loving the poems of Williams, Stevens, and Moore.

We were all required to write a twenty-page paper on Pound's Cantos. Reading the Cantos, beautiful, was for me also to feel the effect of Pound's fascist mind, not simply to connect with the information that he had in fact been a fascist.

Wrestling with this authoritarian perception of reality caused a chasm to open up, a maelstrom to occur. I couldn't write the paper; finally went to the dean to say that I had to drop out of school; was sent by the dean to speak to Professor Hansen who merely said, "Not everyone likes Pound. You can write on something else."

Yet this very young grappling with Pound's Cantos introduced me to poetry being thought or apprehension as interior conflict arising from or being the social. So I'd designate as "my first love" the first page of the Cantos (especially since it's also Homer).

(Fuente: http://www.poetrysociety.org)