The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence

by Leslie Scalapino

Overview

A new collection of essays and poetry from the poet Library Journal called "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence is a brilliant consideration of the strategies of poetry, and the similarities between early Zen thought and some American avant-garde writings that counter the "language of determinateness," or conventions of perception. The theme of the essays is poetic language which critiques itself, recognizing its own conceptual formations of private and social, the form or syntax of the language being "syntactically impermanence."

Whether writing reflexively on her own poetry or looking closely at the writing of her peers, Leslie Scalapino makes us aware of the split between commentary (discourse and interpretation) and interior experience. The "poetry" in the collection is both commentary and interior experience at once. She argues that poetry is perhaps most deeply political when it is an expression that is not recognized or readily comprehensible as discourse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819563798
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	08/27/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

LESLIE SCALAPINO is author of numerous books of poetry, essays, ad plays, as well as the novel Defoe (Sun and Moon,1994). Among her books of poetry are way (1988), that they were at the beach-aeolotropic series (1985) and Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), all published with North Point Press. Wesleyan has published her most recent books: New Time (1999) and The Front Matter, Dead Souls (1996).

Table of Contents

Demonstration/Commentary I. The Radical Nature of Experience
The Cannon
Silence and Sound/ Text
Footnoting
thin-space
Experience/'On'Sight
'Thinking Serially' in For Love, Words, and Pieces
The Recovery of the Public World
As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen II. The Weatherman Turns Himself In
As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen-(Deer Night)
Friendship

What People are Saying About This

Charles Bernstein

"Scalapino's work is at the forefront of American poetry today. Each of her books challenges us to rethink habituated forms of perception, not in the sense of her writing about this as a theory but through her compositional methods that bring us as readers to experience new modes of perception."

From the Publisher

"Scalapino's work is at the forefront of American poetry today. Each of her books challenges us to rethink habituated forms of perception, not in the sense of her writing about this as a theory but through her compositional methods that bring us as readers to experience new modes of perception."—Charles Bernstein

""Scalapino's work is sui generis, profoundly original. She synthesizes the various aspects of her writing into a powerful and gripping combination of critical writing and post-genre 'creative' writing. Her practise of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking.""—Pierre Joris

Editorial Reviews

"Scalapino's work is at the forefront of American poetry today. Each of her books challenges us to rethink habituated forms of perception, not in the sense of her writing about this as a theory but through her compositional methods that bring us as readers to experience new modes of perception."—Charles Bernstein

""Scalapino's work is sui generis, profoundly original. She synthesizes the various aspects of her writing into a powerful and gripping combination of critical writing and post-genre 'creative' writing. Her practise of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking.""—Pierre Joris

From the Publisher

Long one of the most influential of the "left coast" language poets, Scalapino (New Time, Forecasts, Apr. 26) adds to her already considerable oeuvre with this, her third book of essays and hybrid poem-plays. While the book is divided into two sections--with eight "essays" in the first and three longer "works" in the second--this distinction is rendered highly permeable by Sccalapino's resolutely non-normative, or non-academic at least, prose style. An intricate weave of cross-references from text to text heightens the interconnectedness of the book, and allows the nomadic--and dedicated--reader to describe a sort of productive rebus throughout the book. The book is also surprisingly engaging, as Scalapino discusses the early foundations of Zen (Nagarjuna's Seventy Stanzas) and the works of some of her peers, particularly Philip Whalen, Susan Howe and Robert Creeley. In their "demonstration of no-procedure" ("Deer Night" is a "total rewriting" of The Tempest and King Lear), the essays indirectly suggest a comparison between the temporal indeterminacy of many Zen texts and Gertrude Stein's notion (from William James) of the "continuous present," and aim to resist easy cultural absorption. Agrammatical title and all, this is critical writing as restless as it is beautiful, in which poetry is boldly proclaimed as constituting "society's secret interior." (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly