Zither and Autobiography

by Leslie Scalapino

Overview

A reflective, eclectic mixture of poetry and prose.

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two parts: 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819564771
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2003
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

LESLIE SCALAPINO is the author of many books, including New Time (Wesleyan, 1999) and The Public World, Syntactically Impermanence (Wesleyan, 1999).

Read an Excerpt

Zither
In memory of Dan Davidson and Alma White

Making a fictional action 'on top of' one's life's actions.
Zither is here partly 'commentary' on the autobiography (though
Zither was written first). I had a project of rewriting some Shake-
speare's play:without using his characters, language, or plot. Zither is a
rewriting of King Lear.
It is commentary on phyche and real-time by being a 'comic strip'. I
saw a girl passing me in Golden Gate Park who had beautiful arched
eyebrows like archers' bows:

The poetry and the prose are separated pairs, strands 'looking at' each
other. The prose narrative is, in its splices of characters in actions, the
comic strip: the boa dove is one character-she's being harrased by
brownshirts, a are all citizens; the Mayfly, another character, is a
minion of brownshirts. There is a girl with beautiful arched eye-
browns who frees a horse which is being beaten by a crown by riding the
horse out of the crowd.
Note: his-such as, 'his'-quiet or 'his'-fan-is 'the fact,' is or means
'ther is someone else' (aware 'there is someone other').

What People are Saying About This

Pierre Joris

"Scalapino’s work stands out as one of the most serious, innovative, and challenging undertakings in contemporary poetry. Her practice of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking. These two texts together (from A to Z) perform a fascinating textual acrobatics."

From the Publisher

"This is a radically new work, a narrative blast."—Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems

""This is a radically new work, a narrative blast.""—Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems

""Scalapino's work stands out as one of the most serious, innovative, and challenging undertakings in contemporary poetry. Her practice of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking. These two texts together (from A to Z) perform a fascinating textual acrobatics.""—Pierre Joris, author of Poasis

Fanny Howe

"This is a radically new work, a narrative blast."

Editorial Reviews

"This is a radically new work, a narrative blast."—Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems

""This is a radically new work, a narrative blast.""—Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems

""Scalapino's work stands out as one of the most serious, innovative, and challenging undertakings in contemporary poetry. Her practice of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking. These two texts together (from A to Z) perform a fascinating textual acrobatics.""—Pierre Joris, author of Poasis

From the Publisher

With an idiom as instantly recognizable as it is deeply beautiful and challenging, Scalapino has forged a compelling synthesis of Zen thought and practice with anarchist politics, disjunctive history and radically investigative morpho-syntactic experimentation. Among her many books, the 1988 collection Way remains a classic of language writing, while 1999's The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence further extends the boundaries of critical prose as mapped by Susan Howe and others. This book comprises two distinct but related projects. "Autobiography," which begins the volume, was commissioned by biographical publisher Gale Research, but rejected, as Scalapino relates, by an editor who found it "not what our readers would expect." While that is certainly the case, Scalapino's episodic recounting of her poetic development is fascinating. Scalapino's father is political scientist Robert Scalapino, who established the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and has advised numerous administrations on Asian policy, and Scalapino traveled the world with her parents and two sisters, meeting students, activists, intellectuals, and workers everywhere along the way, and forming impressions on which she continues to draw. Punctuated by eight b&w photos of Scalapino (and husband Tom White), she explores these encounters as discrete moments that continue to radiate into the present ("experience is exactly `that' occurrence only as being one's impermanence") and explains how they play a role in structuring her books so far. "Zither," which follows, enacts the process by which "the space/time of a poem is its theory of the new" as it works to "demystify life-so one can do it." Tracking the movements of "Mayfly," a possible stand-in for Scalapino, the poem creates "a fictional action `on top of' one's life's actions," and ends up capacious enough for "who-anyone-dropping dusk-one." While Scalapino isn't into hierarchy, this is major work. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This is a radically new work, a narrative blast.

Poetry is always autobiography-especially the rich, cantilevered works of Scalapino. And this book includes a 50-page autobiography that is sheer poetry. A sparkling work that should not be ignored. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal