With an idiom as instantly recognizable as it is deeply beautiful and challenging, Scalapino has forged a compelling synthesis of Zen thought and practice with anarchist politics, disjunctive history and radically investigative morpho-syntactic experimentation. Among her many books, the 1988 collection Way
remains a classic of language writing, while 1999's The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence
further extends the boundaries of critical prose as mapped by Susan Howe and others. This book comprises two distinct but related projects. "Autobiography," which begins the volume, was commissioned by biographical publisher Gale Research, but rejected, as Scalapino relates, by an editor who found it "not what our readers would expect." While that is certainly the case, Scalapino's episodic recounting of her poetic development is fascinating. Scalapino's father is political scientist Robert Scalapino, who established the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and has advised numerous administrations on Asian policy, and Scalapino traveled the world with her parents and two sisters, meeting students, activists, intellectuals, and workers everywhere along the way, and forming impressions on which she continues to draw. Punctuated by eight b&w photos of Scalapino (and husband Tom White), she explores these encounters as discrete moments that continue to radiate into the present ("experience is exactly 'that' occurrence only as being
one's impermanence") and explains how they play a role in structuring her books so far. "Zither," which follows, enacts the process by which "the space/time of a poem is its theory of the new" as it works to "demystify life—so one can do it." Tracking the movements of "Mayfly," a possible stand-in for Scalapino, the poem creates "a fictional action 'on top of' one's life's actions," and ends up capacious enough for "who—anyone—dropping dusk—one." While Scalapino isn't into hierarchy, this is major work. (July)
