This essay is taken from the recent collection, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone. (MIT Press, 2025) Reprinted here by kind permission of The MIT Press, the editors and Eileen Myles.
First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry, like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as “a weirdo,” a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection. For a while in the 1990s I used to trawl through the bookshelves of The Village Voice when they were on Cooper Square near me. I’d ride over on my bike and I think since they didn’t know what to do with all the poetry books they received, they kept them in one bookcase and were more than happy to let me peruse and pull down a few to review and I grabbed Leslie’s The Return of Painting, the Pearl, and Orion. I mainly remember noticing it was a fat book and thinking I would never read the whole of it and if I wrote about it I would and the Voice liked how I placed Leslie somewhere between Buddhism and language poetry, which I explained as poetry that engaged with theory, and altogether they liked the sound of that.
If I read what Leslie thought about her work well it’s not very valuable. I mean for me to use when writing about her. Most writers are busily dismissing words— I’m not that for instance Leslie and autobiography and next I’m countering that thought. So that’s not very productive. I engaged with her work more closely initially because I had the opportunity to write a piece about her work (and get paid) and we were friendly so I would enjoy the process I thought. I liked asking Leslie a question— we did an interview live, I can’t remember where though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was up at Bard, but she had a funny way of looking slightly shocked and offended by the question. It was like her whole nature would blink and momentarily go into silence and then she would offer a very serious answer so what I witnessed was the outer trappings of her thinking.
Leslie read at the Poetry Project once I think a few years before and I remember her sitting as she read and I was standing with John Godfrey and the complex seriousness of what she was saying and doing during the reading and the softness of her delivery and the pulse that just filled and took over the room like crickets on a summer night (sorry) created such an effect that John and I when it was over just looked at each other kind of wow. And I know in my depths that the overall impression was sexual. In her quiet way Leslie had seduced the whole room and sucked us into her thing. By the time I was reading her tome (The Return of Painting, the Pearl, and Orion), studded with photographs and containing descriptions of genitalia as stems and flowering growing things, I had been entirely sonically prepared for this mildly shocking configuration. Everybody does think about sex in a certain way filtering it probably through their entire system of eyes closed tight or landscape or fabric patterning or trauma. Maybe? Anything goes but with Leslie it’s both the gentility and the audacity of the meeting of her work that produces sex or allows how sex occurs in her world that has such a profound effect on me. She turns the world inside out.
The first time I understood that starfish do that to eat— they flip their organs out, then flip them back in and consume— or that Antonin Artaud encouraged we all do that— present our internal organs on the outside of our bodies like jewels1— I felt exalted by a new kind of emptiness and this kind of thinking. Leslie and Artaud are anticipatory of the kind of surveillance and matter-of-factness and immediacy that characterizes our life in media time now, and as well it retrospectively further endows Leslie’s strewn photographs and surprising genitals and rhythmic room-taking as definitively laying claim to a prescient form of world-taking within her not-so-long-ago-yet-finally-firmly-analog (trusty) approach to being or reality. She claimed it in poetry like filmmakers do. I mean Gesamtkunstwerk. That is what she is doing here in her always live writing, making reality.
I had a house in Pennsylvania for a few years I think around the time I wrote about Leslie and I was very close to my own sensations at that time in my life, maybe more aware of how I was in a microscopically aware way than in any other time in my life since high school when I was acutely self conscious and very alone. Now (or then) I had more analytical equipment, but still I was witnessing a lot the operation of my mind because I was alone in a house in the country. So I had a falling asleep experience one night (or many?) I can hardly describe except to say it was like the dentist, taking drugs there very young before I knew what drugs or consciousness were. And in that falling dream one night I forged a space I will never forget and yet I can never describe because I had a frankness with witnessing the operation of my own mind (is somebody doing this?) while shedding itself into dreams but not quite yet. It was a picture but it was almost the sound of it. I mention this impossible thing because the best way I can explain in the deepest way how I am drawn to Leslie’s work (and gained from it) is to say that Leslie exposes the very private machine of her consciousness and not only does she do that in a variety of ways in her writing but she lets it not stand in, but be the utility that the rest hangs on. Believing what she knows about how consciousness operates (and she explained to me in part how she got there— as a child she would accompany her parents, right-wing political scientists, on fact-finding missions in the so-called “third world” India for sure and what she saw as a child and how she saw she admitted to me she “mistakenly” thought of as reality— that everything was like this. The rest of us have taken a few decades to get there— how the utter lives, the conditions of the global poor are the actual basis for how we’re living here just like slavery gave America its “freedom” and so on), she simply built from there or with that construction simply in it— and that is the model she is stoically constructing of the world.
Whether it’s a play or a news report or a novel or a poem she lets her apparatus hang out. Whether it is all politics or all aesthetics I can’t say but I also think in her work those are not such helpful thoughts or questions. The endless gyrating relation of those spheres with the personal and the sexual and the daily confers a dignity and a privacy and a rich— well just weirdness to the very material of her work. First you think she’s inside out and then you think no she’s right. So the right to pause at any location in the writing and announce there is this machinery here I mean consciousness which is making this say Ferris wheel I am seeing in San Francisco in say 1989. That is the right claimed in her work. It is so valuable.
Gertrude Stein laughed at how repetitious detective novels were and Leslie informs us that their metonymic endeavor to always be finding bodies or corpses as she says is indeed simply the work of the culture2. We are all finding corpses, that’s what we’re doing here. The pictures in her book do not supply proof but more joke at that search and also of course provide windows. Her footnotes are aimless, are simply Leslie whispering at another level. So without thinking much about it, I writerly thought I’ll take that, and that and that. One wouldn’t leap at my work and say Scalapino but for twenty years at least she’s contributing in some of the ways I describe, the operations I describe happening in her work are in a more Eileen way simply occurring in mine. I also have a final thought (and a half) about which I’m certain Leslie would kill me but I think in another universe perhaps the one I occupy I think of hers as very metaphorical work because metaphor is frightening and she is writing where it would happen. Also now that I have finished writing this piece I want to act like we’re at a picnic so I will throw this blanket down on the grass and the blanket I am using is the word obscure. Do I think Leslie is obscure. No she’s frank as you can get but many readers would not be suspecting that that is what she is doing. Maybe something as simple as exposing the constant daily exposure we have to death and reality. The responsibility of it. I don’t know if that’s poetry or radical Buddhism but her work is all act and if you don’t get that you might think she’s odd and obscure. When she offered the columns that compose the book Defoe she chuckled. She was installing each piece into the world that needed it, but it didn’t know.
NOTES
- Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” Four Texts, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass (Los Angeles: Panjandrum Books, 1982).
- Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” Lectures in America (Beacon Hill: Beacon Press, 1957), 166. Originally published by Random House (New York) in 1935.
