Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010)

here is the announcement, sent out by Leslie Scalapino’s family:

“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

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.

Her play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed in New York at Poets House on June 19th at 7pm and June 20th at 2pm by the performance group The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost. Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud, and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production is co-sponsored by Belladonna* and the Poetry Project.

There will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st.

A Zen Buddhist funeral ceremony will be conducted by Abbott Norman Fisher in about a month with the arrangements in a subsequent announcement. Tom requests that in lieu of flowers, Leslie’s friends consider a charitable donation in her memory to: Poets in Need, PO Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705;  Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR 97202-8199;  The AYCO Charitable Foundation, PO Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie Scalapino-O Books Fund to support innovative works of poetry, prose and art; or to a charitable organization of their choice. Condolence cards may be sent to Tom & Leslie’s home address, 5744 Presley Way, Oakland, California 94618-1633.

to make my mind be actions outside only. which they are. that collapses in

grey-red bars. actions are life per se only without it.

(so) events are minute — even (voluptuous)

––Leslie Scalapino

From: “As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen — (Deer Night)”

A ringed horn has been broken off on the little ibex’s head. But there’s one left on it. Do they wait on tables?

Lying on the side, with the legs drawn up — (so) no wrestling — observation of the moon and the sun — occurs.
Is noticed that it occurred in one by some other — it’s there — and there is no opposing from outside in one.
Resting, which the mind getting ready out ahead can’t — as ‘can rest’ is separate. It is separate only — doesn’t occur. Because then it’s not resting.

Some other attacking one unknown there as being horrible, doing so is at the moment of that negatively regarded one not wrestling as that being observation of the moon and sun — one’s dawn(?) — as being only one’s observation. And so being there. ‘Only’ — as observation into dusk. Not after.
The element of emotion in dusk — indigo — is — ?

(A man reemerges as brown indigo butterfly)

‘Suffering emergence’ — in people, as a movement — seen, but not in that moment in the one, so separated in the moon and the sun’s crushing to the rim as observation — where it isn’t — : removes one from wrestling, the very characteristic regarded as ‘horrible’ (I guess) unnameably outside of society — and which the one didn’t have anyway at that moment.

(Dancer rolls falling on the left side on a table.)

‘Suffering emergence’ seen in the people burning tar on the road at dawn, occurred in one outside only in being hated.

Running across the dew, is “Life is nothing.”

There is no reason to live. Life is nothing. As they are burning the tar on gorges — laboring for the roads — as dawn’s there.
Dawn being, that life is nothing. As such.

‘One’ rallies having returned as one’s place, one’s culture, where it has to be some thing.
The reentry machine, one’s own rib cage even, isn’t working: ‘suffering emergence’ is in people physically.
Thorax in collection of people ‘here,’ gentle flaps in isolation that’s really others, not visible here, behaving in their (not one’s culture’s) harmony. The brown indigo butterfly flaps in isolation, from people
invisible narrative — as it moves at its center — not garden.

Thinking the mind can do anything. I thought the flesh to be fragile but didn’t consider the mind to be so, it was really one’s mind. As it.

Dancer: The way you say something is it.

What is spoken is utterly separate from that which is expressed.

Dancer: They are collapsing on themselves as the three parts of the dream which was known in advance by one in it.

Dancer: Yet everything is in sections. In parts, horizontal as not having relation to each other.
They just start.

The mind: not as the characteristic of fragile or the characteristic of being out in experience only — but being experience only.

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