It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 / Edition 1

by Leslie Scalapino

Overview

Internationally recognized as one of the most innovative writers in America today, Leslie Scalapino persistently challenges the boundaries of many forms in which she works—poetry, prose, plays, and more. This outstanding volume includes work from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years. The poems demonstrate ideas and inventions in writing, and how one writing invention leads to the next. Three series are selected from the long poem way, about which Philip Whalen said, "She makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once." Recent poems, such as those from "DeLay Rose," appear to leave the page itself as a single infinite line in which the actions of individuals and occurrences in the outside world are synonymous, mysterious, and simultaneous. It's go in horizontal is a dazzling entryway into the oeuvre of a daring and powerful writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520254626
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/08/2008
Series:	New California Poetry , #22
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	257
Sales rank:	739,908
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Leslie Scalapino teaches at Mills College and is a former faculty member at Milton Avery Graduate Program of the Arts at Bard College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Among her many books are Day Ocean State of Star's Night: Poems and Writings 1989 and 1999-2006, Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction, and Zither and Autobiography.

Table of Contents

Collected in Considering how exaggerated music is
From hmmmm in The Woman Who Could Read the Minds of Dogs
Instead of an Animal
From This eating and walking at the same time are associated all right
Considering how exaggerated music is

How Phenomena Appear to Unfold: Note on My Writing

that they were at the beach
From that they were at the beach — aeolotropic series
A Sequence
From Chameleon Series

From The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion/A Trilogy

From the Five Series Poem way, 3 Series in Sequence
Bum Series
The Floating Series
Delay Series

How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
Fin de Siècle 1
Fin de Siècle 2
Fin de Siècle 3

From Crowd and not evening or light

From New Time

From The Front Matter, Dead Souls

The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence

From Resting lightning that’s night, Friendship

Zither & Autobiography
From Zither

From The Tango

From It’s go in / quiet illumined grass /land

Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night
From ‘Can’t’ is ‘Night’
From The Forest is in the Euphrates River —
From DeLay Rose

Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Scalapino is shown in this welcome overview to have developed a distinctive idiom."—Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Most often classified with the language poets, Scalapino is shown in this welcome overview to have developed a distinctive idiom, as fresh and powerful here as when first published in 14 mostly small press editions. Scalapino fuses a richly detached Buddhist mindfulness with an algorithmically precise disjunctive syntax to explore sex, gender and violence—their politics and their moment-to-moment embodiedness. The longish, serial form that she favors works well in the selected format when the poems are presented in full. Highlights include the title piece from Considering how exaggerated music is(1982), which relates a set of attitudes toward others shocking in its blank frankness, and "The Floating Series," from 1988's Way, which turns an act of intercourse into a stop-motion tour-de-force, as if filmed by Muybridge and analyzed by Lacan. Many other poems appear in excerpt, with results that can be frustrating—as with the poetically captioned photographs of Crowd or Not Evening or Light(1992) or " 'Can't' Is 'Night' " (from 2007's Day Ocean State of Stars' Night)—but only because one wants to see the works resolve. Readers of Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley or Ai who haven't discovered Scalapino should use this volume to do so. (Apr.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly