Leslie Scalapino | |
|---|---|
 Scalapino in Speaking Portraits (c.2004) | |
| Born | (1944-07-25)July 25, 1944 |
| Died | May 28, 2010(2010-05-28) (aged 65) |
| Occupation | Poet,playwright,publisher |
| Education | B.A.Reed College; M.A.University of California at Berkeley |
| Period | Postmodern |
| Genre | Inter-genre |
| Subject | "Continual conceptual rebellion"[1] |
| Years active | 1974 – 2010 |
| Website | |
| lesliescalapino | |
Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was anAmerican poet, experimental prose writer,playwright,essayist, andeditor, sometimes grouped in with theLanguage poets, though she felt closely tied to theBeat poets.[1] A longtime resident ofCalifornia'sBay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from theUniversity of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works isWay (North Point Press, 1988), a long poem which won thePoetry Center Award, theLawrence Lipton Prize, and theAmerican Book Award.
Scalapino was born inSanta Barbara, California and raised inBerkeley. She traveled throughout her youth and adulthood to Asia, Africa and Europe and her writing was intensely influenced by these experiences.[2][3] In childhood Scalapino traveled with her fatherRobert A. Scalapino (founder of UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies), her mother, and her two sisters (Diane and Lynne).[4] She attendedReed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966 before moving on to earn her M.A. atUC Berkeley.[4]
Scalapino published her first bookO and Other Poems in 1976.[4] During her lifetime, she published more than thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations.[4] Other well-known works of hers includeThe 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 withLyn Hejinian; Edge Books), andZither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press).[4]
Scalapino's poetry has been widely anthologized, including appearances in the influentialPostmodern American Poetry,From the Other Side of the Century, andPoems for the Millennium anthologies, as well as the popularBest American Poetry andPushcart Prize series anthologies. Her work was the subject of a special "critical feature" appearing in an issue of the online poetry journalHow2.
From 1986 until 2010, Scalapino ran theOakland, California small press she founded, O Books. Through O Books, she published collections by Paolo Javier, Brenda Iijima, Judith Goldman, Elizabeth Treadwell, Alice Notley, Aaron Shurin, and many others, as well as four volumes of War & Peace anthologies. Scalapino was also a board member of Poets in Need, assisting poets experiencing crisis.
Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program atBard College. Other schools she taught at over the years includedMills College, theSan Francisco Art Institute,California College of the Arts,San Francisco State University,UC San Diego, andNaropa University.[4]
A solitary, an original. What other way could there be for someone with a mind so electric, independent and restless except out into the space-time conundrum? Because she is thoroughly modern, every moment of experience is interrupted and unstable, accompanied by introspection and sidelong glimpses at the social. The poet here is a horrified witness, a perpetual child, a sexually alert female who keeps looking back to believe what she has seen.
She had close ties to writers of the Beat movement, especially with those whose serious study of Buddhism influenced their writing and their vision of an ethical world. She also had numerous ties to the Language writers. But these were largely ties of community and friendship. In her writing, Leslie Scalapino's voice and vision were unprecedented, a product of her unique and rigorous intelligence and compassion. She belonged to no school; her engagement with continual conceptual rebellion would have prohibited that.
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom was written by leafing throughRandom House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary choosing words at random by process ofalexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition.
