Larry Sutin and Rebecca Weaver
AN INTERVIEW WITH LESLIE SCALAPINO
Leslie Scalapino’s work has been described as bold, original, brilliant, breathtaking, exacting, and relentless. She is concerned with, as one of her book titles puts it, “how phenomena appear to unfold.” Where does an event occur in time, for example, and what happens to the event itself when you write about it? For Scalapino, writing is itself an event, rather than an interpretation of events. She’s interested in the text’s ability to communicate synchronous experience, experience affected simultaneously by the inner world of the individual
– his or her past, memory, present – and the outer world – what’s happening on the street, in one’s community, in the nation. She explores the ways in which grammar and punctuation modulate the writer’s voice on the page. Form and genre are continuously disrupted in her work. “Read in a certain way,” writes Eric Lorberer, editor of Rain Taxi, “her work creates a philosophical Tractatus that rivals Wittgenstein’s attempt to delineate the world of language; in a different light, it serially presents moments of lyric luminosity that poke holes in the existential darkness, and is thus more akin to poets such as H.D. or Paul Celan.”
Leslie Scalapino is the author of eighteen books of poetry, fiction, plays, and essays.
They include The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, a trilogy; The Front Matter; Dead
Souls (a “serial novel for publication in the newspaper”); New Time; Defoe; R-Hu, a work of poetry-criticism, and The Tango (forthcoming from Granary in fall 2001). She currently teaches at Bard College in the Milton Avery Graduate Program of the Arts and at the San Francisco Art
Institute. She has received numerous awards, including the Lawrence Lipton Prize, the San
Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the American Book Award of the Before Columbus
Foundation, and two NEA fellowships. She is the publisher of O Books, in Oakland, California, where she lives.
This public dialogue with Leslie Scalapino was held in front of a live audience during her visit to the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Hamline University on October 24, 2000.
The two interviewers were Larry Sutin, a member of the faculty, whose most recent book is A
Postcard Memoir; and Rebecca Weaver, a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at Hamline.
Questions at the end were from members of the audience.
Weaver: I’ve noticed how people react when they first read something from you and the claim they make is that your work is so focused on language and so “intellectual” that it doesn’t allow for self-revelation or insight in the personal sense, that any sense of “pathos” or “passion” is subjugated. How would you counter that claim?
Scalapino: I have never heard that claim. (Laughter.)
Weaver: Good! Good! Right on!
Scalapino: Nor do I think it’s true. I wouldn’t say that my writing is focused on language, but rather that the writer and the reader are focusing on the vehicle of perception, so that you’re looking at your own perceptions, which doesn’t exclude passion, emotion, intellect, because that’s what you’re producing, and you’re seeing that producing, and you’re engaging readers in it, as if they were watching their own thought, watching themselves have a thought and participating in that. For example, I was just thinking, looking at Larry’s stack of my books, in The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, which was the first time I was writing a prose work, a novel – though I don’t know whether it’s a novel or not, not a traditional novel – but at some point in the mid part of that, I felt like I was trying to invent my own form of writing that would cause something to happen in your mind. That is, it’s one-line paragraphs that go on for quite a long time, and the paragraphs are movements of people running or motions. They may be thoughts or things they’re seeing. It’s like making a poem which has line breaks, but it’s also prose that’s just one-line paragraphs. This has an effect on the way you perceive, in that it’s only in the present time, being only in that line, the motion and the action and the perception that occur there. But that present time would then move quickly to the next line and there would be no time when you were in the present time. That present time would be either behind you or in front of you, but somewhere there’s an empty center where you are.
One would be dislocated from the state that would be a description of a present time, but that’s merely the way we are in present time. We’re not standing around describing ourselves in emotion or in a thought, or in movement. But in this way one is notating not being in the time we’re in because that time has passed. It’s also a future time, and one recognizes that and does that by the form one’s in.
I don’t know how people conceive of the word “intellect.” In the U.S., they seem to think of the word intellect as a bad word. I don’t in any way think of as a bad word, and I think we’re all using the intellect, imagination – the eyes seeing everything at the same time. So something being “intellectual,” if one uses that as a negative word, means simply that you’re outside what you’re seeing, and you intellectualize about something without engaging it, or something of that sort, but that’s not what I’m doing.
Weaver: In speaking of seeing or being outside of things, in your trilogy The Return of
Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, you engage Baudelaire. The specter of him haunts the book in obvious ways, and in other ways more subtly. His idea – I think what you’re engaging with specifically – is that writers are outside of experience, writers are peripheral yet universal observers who transform imaginatively what they see. I was curious about your aesthetic relationship to him.
Scalapino: In that book (the trilogy), a crossover of writing a novel/poem/essay, there’s a section on Walter Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin talking about Baudelaire speaking of the flaneur, the stroller, the modern person who’s strolling and looking at the city and other people as a spectacle. In fact, I happened to take that book with me on a trip to Russia just when the Berlin Wall came down. I was traveling with a dance group, and they were performing in different cities throughout Russia, and the situation in Russia was very difficult. People suffered from an economic deprivation that was very powerful, and sometimes the dancers weren’t able to have the proper equipment in order to do a performance, and the situation was quite wild. For example, in Moscow I’d go out by myself and walk around and try to visit Russian poets. I didn’t speak Russian, and I didn’t have anybody with me, so I couldn’t use the Metro, because I couldn’t read the language and was afraid of getting lost. Moscow is huge, so I tried to take taxis. At that point the money system had collapsed – you couldn’t get a taxi to take you anyplace because the money you gave them wasn’t useful for anything. So I was carrying packs of cigarettes to trade for taxi rides, things like this. And also myself getting lost.
So, I was in that book. I was actually writing that at the time I was there traveling, reading about Benjamin’s view of Baudelaire, and me walking through Moscow and encountering these incredible situations and thinking: what’s the public space now? And collapsing one idea of the public space onto another that I was actually experiencing; for example, feeling like I was absolutely starved and going into a little cafeteria in Gums, an incredible department store that is like a palace with glass windows everyplace. It is exactly like the crystal palace which Walter Benjamin was describing. There was a synchronicity. People forming lines to get goods that were very scarce, and one would be bumped out of any line one was in! I’d get to the front of the line, and people would simply knock me out of the line. Then
I’d get to the back of the line and go forward and try to get coffee. At any rate, I was putting all of this experience superimposed with talking about the flaneur, who is a leisurely stroller, looking at something outside of this and viewing the public as a spectacle, as opposed to being engaged in an incredible struggle. Later, some Russian poets who were choosing writing of mine to put in an anthology chose that section, even though I never say in it that I’m in Russia, and they didn’t know that it was about being in Moscow.
Weaver: Thank you. I’m still thinking about that, but I was really struck by the interrogation of that idea, with Baudelaire – the necessity of being “in” what you’re observing and not having the leisure that Baudelaire had, so to speak, to be outside of it and observant, but rather being inside of and part of that spectacle. Scalapino: Baudelaire’s also talking about a beginning sense of modernity, which is what Benjamin is talking about, and a sense of isolation from other people, so that’s why the flaneur is standing outside, looking at it as well. In that case, the flaneur has leisure but the public person, the modern person, usually doesn’t have that kind of leisure. He or she has a strong sense of isolation so may be standing outside of a mass public circumstance even when in the midst of it, a circumstance that has always fascinated me. That particular writing (in Orion) was dealing with the sense of being in isolation or in silence even though you’re right beside other people who are also in the same state of being (silence), or the same state of mind, and are dealing with that at the same time, so that is a public experience of everybody looking at everybody else. They’re not in a state of leisure and they are in a state of isolation, even though they may be in a very combustible, frantic state.
Weaver: I’m going to switch gears. We were talking about French feminism. You’ve said that you consider your work to be feminist in that you’re trying to unravel how something’s packaged and mirrored back to you. I was struck by the similarity of this idea to what French feminists were talking about when they were speaking about language and writing, especially as a patriarchal system and structure that must be dismantled, and that the language of women is necessarily different. I was wondering if you could comment further on that.
Scalapino: Well, as I mentioned to you, I haven’t done much reading of French feminism because I rebelled from it. I didn’t want some aspects of it. So I can’t speak to that directly. I think one has to be a feminist, if you’re a woman writing. I address that in a simple way – that you’re unpeeling how things are built up, or how they’re described, and how you are described by people. Especially at a younger age, in any conversation, you’re constantly being defined.
You’re constantly having to unravel that and undefine yourself to yourself in order to function, and in order to get at what you actually are. This was at an earlier time. I don’t feel that way anymore, don’t deal with things in that way. But when I first started to write, I was in a circumstance in which poets would get together in San Francisco and they’d really go at it. This was rigorous and it was important to me – I learned a lot – but it was also a circumstance in which people would simply tell you, “You’re doing this wrong. This is the way it should be done. Everybody should be doing such and such and it should look alike. It should not be looking like what this is.” They’d say “That is a private thought,” (it’s emotional, personal – different from social) and I’d be saying, “And what thought is not a private thought?” If I have to engage this constant embattlement, that is, everywhere determining how you see, then I must engage it and I better be interested in this. I should actually relax and enjoy it, in order to peel back interior and outside definitions.
In relation to that redefining on every level, I had an extremely optimistic view that we could reform the world – that we were all going to do that, and everything would change in small exchange. Then I found that engaging this would cause people to really go after me! It would produce response, rather than quiet it. Finally, on one occasion a woman kindly decided to help me out. She said, “Don’t respond!” I said, “Don’t respond to what?” She said, “To this, to this that’s coming to you – don’t respond.” And I thought, I want to, because it’s an act of being constantly interpreted, in terms of your mind shapes, your thoughts, what you are writing, the form, the syntax that forms you.
Weaver: So it’s – I’m just trying to clarify here – a sense that the more you engaged it, the more it seemed to happen, but if you left it alone, it didn’t seem to be as present.
Scalapino: Yes. The more you notice motions, the more they become prominent and occur, and you change them by observing. Which became what I was writing. You’re creating an engagement which changes what happens. That entered into my sense that we could change what was happening, that there’s this vast, interior landscape that is just as realistic and real, just as important as any actions or movements, or any events in the outside world that people call political. I became fascinated by the relation between interior landscape that everybody’s thinking and feeling, and what’s going on in this individual, isolated circumstance that’s kind of like Baudelaire’s observer, or Walter Benjamin’s observer, or me being the observer in Moscow, in public places and states and mass experiences that are what people call political experiences where something changes as a revolution or a movement. For example, being in Russia at a time when it was changing tremendously, all in a very short time, and one’s a gnat on the horizon.
Weaver: I’d like to talk about the intersection with landscape, specifically outside landscape, such as geography and city-scape. It seems to me that while you’re asking questions about the working of the mind and perception and the idea of perception changing what we are moving in, the physical environment is a very important part of that to you, in terms of spatial terrain of events, but also the events interacting with beaches or mountains, etc.
Scalapino: One book of Gertrude Stein’s that was always important to me (in fact, my favorite of her works for a long time) was The Geographical History of America. In that, she’s writing a conception of space, and she’s also thinking about how space changes people, changes how they are or become in certain spaces, and in certain geographies changes how they see things, and how they see in terms of land. Stein makes a dichotomy between human mind and human nature, which is not a dichotomy that I make. My book, R-Hu, was written on a commission from ATELOS Press. They invite an author to give them a book especially for them
– not written beforehand. I knew that I was going on a trip to Mongolia, and I decided to begin the book in Oakland, so I would be warmed up and ready and could continue it in Mongolia as a writing project, to see what would happen. I decided that would be the work I would give to
ATELOS when it was finished.
Engagements with space – I’ve decided that maybe all of my work is related to that. In
Mongolia, we were riding through a huge landscape. There weren’t any trees. We were riding in jeeps across the Gobi desert, this incredibly gold land with very dark indigo blue skies during the day. The sky would sometimes be illuminated but a very dark indigo blue, appearing as if it were being illuminated from the gold ground, so that you didn’t know where the light was coming from. It was as if you were in paradise, walking there where we would hear birds singing, but there were no trees anyplace. The birds were invisible and were on the ground where we couldn’t see them, but we heard them sing. At the same time, I was looking at the wall paintings or wall hangings, huge tankas that were in the monasteries where we would stop and visit. I saw that the land, the space, was being duplicated in these wall tankas. But with a conceptual difference; wall tankas have to do with meditation. They frequently had figures, the figure of Buddha, for example, reproduced over and over in one huge wall tanka, one I saw that was magenta – the entire piece was uniform throughout. The only way in which the figure of the
Buddha, reproduced over and over in squares, could be seen was the outline in gold of that figure. The figure is the same and does not change. It’s not a narration in that case, though some of these tankas were narrations where you’d have figures on a landscape, and it would be different narrations in different parts of it.
I may not know and didn’t know necessarily what the story was, histories. I was seeing as an outsider. The figure of the Buddha reproduced over and over reminded me of Andy
Warhol’s figures, portraits of people reproduced in squares over and over. It also reminded me of Laura Dean’s dances. Her dance form was always dancers whirling in a formation. She took that from whirling dervish motifs. I went to Bhutan once, and the dancers doing the Buddhist dances were doing a whirling motion continually, literally leaping up into the air whirling. In a
Laura Dean performance, the dancers were in a formation in front of the audience, moving towards us and moving back and moving towards us and moving back, all of them whirling in place, but an incredibly wild and detailed and energetic movement. The space of those tankas was like that. Also, if you superimposed the conceptual space of those tankas onto the actual landscape, we were moving through this landscape that is incredibly free and open because there are very few people, and we were constantly getting lost.
We had two Mongolian guides, but there were frequently no roads. They would take off across the gold land, and in order to get where we were going, they would stop and ask nomads along the way and say, “where’s such and such town?” The person would say, “that way,” and then awhile later we’d stop and ask another nomad, and the person would say, “that way.” So we were going around in circles sometimes. My husband brought a compass with him. The person would indicate “no”; we realized they didn’t use compasses, they didn’t want to, and the way of doing this was to find your way. So this got into the book, as did the phrase, “there is no way to be lost.” You are where you are, in other words. The guide at one point said to us, “Don’t worry. If we don’t get there and it gets dark, and we can’t find where we’re going, we can stay in the 10,000 star motel.” (Laughter.) It was a different way of looking at things; there wasn’t any worry about where you are. In the course of writing this book, I wanted to superimpose this way of looking at things, and this procedure as writing. There’s no way to go back. Also, there’s no such thing as objectivity, no such thing as subjectivity; the two are the same thing, and so you make puns on the idea of objectivity – anything that’s objective is merely an objective that you have. I was superimposing that sense of landscape onto a U.S. sense of landscape, coming back and being in an urban setting, and things being very controlled, but having the propaganda that it’s free, that it’s democratic, and our having a completely different meaning about that, which is a totally conceptual space that we impose on landscape here.
Weaver: That line – I was thinking about as you read last night, “It’s not possible to get lost.” I remember saying to myself, “Well, yes, you could pretty much say that about anything she’s written.” But it seemed to me to speak directly to R-hu. That’s how you say it, right?
Scalapino: Right. I asked a Chinese woman what these instruments were (that were being played at the time), and she wrote the letters R, hyphen, hu, and said it that way to me.
Later, I found out, it said “er-hu.” She was probably saying that and I heard her say “R-hu.” It is not spelled R - hu, she was trying to get me to visualize the sound. So I kept that as being what you hear and what you see, and things not being translated, or being translated as sounds.
Weaver: There’s an idea in Shakespeare – speaking again about R-hu – about the “green world” versus the “inner world,” the inner world being the courtly, socially structured world, and the green world being the world outside: the chaotic, the unstructured, the un-ruled. I know you said in R-hu that it was in some ways a rewriting of As You Like It, where characters do go out into the wilderness and discover certain things and end up coming back changed.
Scalapino: I had the idea of rewriting some of Shakespeare’s plays, and my notion of that would be that they would be rewritten completely. There would not be any of his language, characters, or plot. (Laughter.) And this is one such. It was rewriting completely As You Like It, but in the Mongolian sense. I wanted to get at that sense that you are, that there is no such thing as the original place where you started out. Nor could you reproduce that or go back to that. So it’s not a diatribe against Shakespeare, rather, a strong appreciation, but also it’s the notion that you only go forward into things you don’t know. And so I brought in that idea of the forest of
Arden, particularly the notion of wanting to escape, that is, not wanting to go home. (Laughter.)
Or the sense of the confinement of court life would be here at home, where you have the strictures of what you have to do, and of customs put on you, and so being someplace else has the image of freedom. In another work, I rewrote The Tempest in a work that’s called “As all occurrence in structure unseen – deer night.” It’s a rewriting of The Tempest – it arose from my traveling to Bhutan. Therefore, these two experiences actually sparked a kind of explosion because of the conflict and the difference between here and there.
Sutin: When I first read your work, back in 1982, Considering How Exaggerated Music
Is, the main reason it hit me so hard is that it wasn’t a description of a new, possible reality that one might find if one was lucky or smart, but an actual, new reality on the page that I experienced as I read it. I think Robert Creeley is saying the same thing in his comment on The Front Matter, Dead Souls. I’ll read a part of it. He says, “The formal brilliance of the construction is altogether dazzling. How Leslie Scalapino manages to make a virtual reality in which reality itself becomes the determinate, is an absolute wonder to me.” It’s an absolute wonder to me, too! So how do you do it?
Scalapino: (Laughter.) I don’t know. Is there some way that I could break that question down into a simpler way?
Sutin: However you want to respond.
Scalapino: I’ll bite off a crumb. I was reminded when you were speaking, of an experience, in terms of undergoing a reality and making one’s own reality in writing. A really formative experience I had was going to New York and being able to see a production of The
Trojan Women at La Mama Theater. It was done in Greek, performed without any seats. The audience had to be the crowd and had to mingle with the actors. They were speaking in Greek, and wild situations were happening. It was the burning of Troy, and women were falling off slides that were the walls. They did this incredible dance performance where they would fall from high walls which seemed to be burning. They were sliding down huge slides; also, a woman was carted through the streets in which we were the milling crowd. The audience had no place to go, except to be in the situation. A woman with a shaved head who was covered with mud that was supposedly shit – or it seemed to have that appearance – was being carried in this cart, presumably to her execution. Anyway, I, in the midst of this, completely freaked out. I thought that I was going to start weeping. Something about this had sparked an intense reaction, very chaotic and frightening.
Beside me, by chance, were several elderly New Yorkers dressed in tennis shoes who were keeping pace with the actors and making comments in a relaxed and humorous manner.
One phrase that I remember was, “Do you know a lot about Greek tragedy?” (Laughter.) This said to the air! That struck me as intensely funny. Riight afterward, I wrote a play that’s called
Leg (in Crowd and not evening or light), that’s a poem play, and I put the experience of the other play in it. This tends to be how I write, to put what I’m seeing and what’s happening on an interior field into what’s happening in a social arena where I may actually be. The manner in which it’s written is the unfolding of what transpired and how you think and speak about it later.
Sometimes my syntax is the catching of a time lag and a time difference and a difference in perception of one time and another; also it’s the proximity of something being incredibly funny and being terrorizing at the same time, and that being compatible but also explosive.
Sutin: You have obviously been influenced deeply by Buddhism. What is the difference, for you, between Dharma and good writing?
Scalapino: At the Minnesota Institute of Arts, they had a Zen exhibit. They had a film in which they were showing the training of monks at the Heiheiji Temple in Japan. In one part –
I didn’t watch the whole film – where I entered he was speaking, or it was only written, I can’t remember. I think he was speaking and it was also written, so there were subtitles. You’re seeing text and hearing, and seeing monks being filmed meditating. The speaker said they were trying not to have any concept. To let go of having any concept, or to dismantle any concept, not to conceptualize. A woman who was sitting beside you (to Sutin) in the chair said, “I wondered what they were thinking!” (Laughter.)
I think that writing is only having a concept. You cannot write without concept, because that’s what language is. I mean, we are intellectual animals and so writing is a concept. My version of that is not forming something in advance, not forming it at all, allowing something to come forward in its unformed state. I once was talking to a painter who said, “I want to paint something before it reaches its form, before it’s formed.” And I thought, Yes, I want to write something before it reaches its form. So that it has no imposition one imposes on it, no social manipulation or distortion. One can get to that place before it is acted upon by oneself and all of society. This is perhaps impossible in language. I think that’s probably as akin as language can get to that Zen training or Zen practice. But it’s not the same thing.
In Crowd and not evening or light, I used photographs (which I took) and wrote on them.
What was interesting to me was the medium which has nothing to do with language. The two mediums have nothing to do with each other; what you see as a photograph, what the camera sees, is not a human thing. I had the sense in taking those photographs, while I was sitting on
Waikiki Beach, sitting in one spot and taking the photos quickly, getting whatever passed into the frame (people standing in the ocean). I wasn’t focusing on someone, or deciding to move around and take a picture of something. The camera was a machine. That’s different from your eyes seeing something, and different from language, although your eyes seeing something is connected to language. Studies in the brain show that we make sites, spelled “sites” as well as
“sights,” and we make these sites in the brain pan, as if to take pictures inside of things we haven’t seen before, not only locations, but knowledge. We make visual pictures of things that we’re learning, make a visual site in the brain for things that we’re learning for the first time.
So there’s a connection of seeing to language, and in a way, in taking these photographs of people standing in the ocean, I wanted the camera to be a machine that simply took these pictures before I had formed it as a preconception, before I got there and thought about this.
Language with these photographs would be the place where language meets the outside in some way, but it’s something else that’s its own terrain. Because language and seeing are different from each other, one could come to that place that is somewhere in the center, the place where something isn’t formed, like a middle ground. The photographs I found, when they were developed, were flat things, as if there were no space, and it was this fascinating place of flat ground that seems infinite but also doesn’t have a space, because everything is moved into the foreground. When I took the film to be developed, the woman said to me, “I don’t know what happened, what went wrong in this situation, maybe if you just concentrated on something and focused!” (Laughter.) Whereas I had the sensation that I was photographing something mysterious. Susan Howe wrote a comment on this book, which fascinated me as exactly the sensation I had when I was photographing the people. She said, “Poised on an edge between space and claustrophobia, this poet bears stark witness to the broken narratives of thousands dead or offshore. Crowd and not evening or light scatters literary criticism, drama, and photographic index across a wilderness of everyday language, like love.” When I was photographing this, I had the sensation that they were doing something that had to do with love.
Sutin: One of the senses I have from your work – I could read all sorts of quotes, but I won’t – is that you are a fierce defender of freedom of consciousness, to put it as briefly as I can, that any kind of oppression that limits mind is not to your liking. Then I noticed a quote of your own in How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, a note on your writing, on that they were at the beach, where you say, “I intended this work to be the repetition of historically real events, the writing of which punches a hole in reality, as if to void them, but actively.” Why did you want to punch a hole in reality?
Scalapino: I had the sense that we make events, and I wanted to be able to get rid of some of them. There are things that bother you and haunt you. You’re entwined. It’s as if everything were on a board or paper where you could punch through, and you’d have holes in the board, to remove those events from time and space. In that they were at the beach – aeolotropic series, an aeolotropic series means that one event, if you’re standing in one place, will appear one way, and then if you move, and you stand over there, the same thing will look completely different. This was a piece that I wrote in a month’s time or so. It had a certain language shape that’s recurring sound pattern, which I didn’t plan in any way, it just kept coming up like that, so
I became interested in, why does it sound like that? Why am I giving this a particular two- paragraph form – each part commenting on the other – events that are real things, that I happened to come up with, giving them a particular shape? It fascinated me that one could change the past, in the present, actively.
Sutin: Let me rephrase the question this way: Does doing the writing in the way that you do it give you a greater sense of freedom, or of carving out space for yourself, if I can put it that way?
Scalapino: Yes. I would say that one changes, one voids actions so that there’s a free terrain for something else to be created, but it’s hard to articulate this. Sutin: About R-hu, you’ve mentioned the travels, but we were talking today, and not to get maudlin about your health, but you’ve had some back difficulties and traveling across the
Gobi desert in a jeep was a very painful experience among other things, but that is not in R-hu. It seems that travel is very important to you in terms of achieving the kind of state of mind where you feel you can do good writing. Is that so? Why?
Scalapino: When I was a kid, I traveled with my family a lot, and both of my parents still do, continually, though my mother’s 80 and my father’s 81. We were bitten by this bug – we had to keep moving. I get very restive if I stay in the same place for very long, though I grew up in Berkeley and I live in Oakland about six or ten blocks away from where I grew up. I always had the sense of returning there, and wanting to return there, and liking it very much, but also the sense that movement through space and going to different countries is necessary to my being, as well as to my writing, and that I would get depressed if I stayed home. Not because of the place, but because I have to do that movement, have to travel.
In regard to the back problems, I had a cervical disc fusion some years ago – that actually got into some of my writing, because it was interesting, seeing things about your body being so fragile and so forth, and also the effect of your spinal cord on your mind, that your spinal cord is your mind. It remembers things, and after the disc was removed and fused, and was no longer pressing on the spinal cord, the spinal cord remembered that pain, because it’s thought. So it remembers pain, and it reproduces the actual physical pain which you feel, even though the source of the pain has been removed. This is what’s your mind. Then I recently had a lower back operation that wasn’t quite so interesting, and I’m glad it’s over. (Laughter.) Sutin: I’ll ask a question a bit like Becky’s first question: When I’ve taught your works, a frequent response I get from students is: “she’s hard.” If someone says, “gosh, your writing is hard,” do you have a response you’re tempted to make?
Scalapino: I know that lots of people have that response. I can see why it’s hard, but I think of my writing as being . . . for example, I’ve always been interested in dance, as I’ve indicated, and I know that it’s affected the way I write. I think of the writing as being strands that are gestures, movements. Watching the way dancers would be trained to do a particular choreographic set of movements, I was fascinated by the fact that they could remember these movements, that their bodies memorize things the way people who aren’t dancers remember thoughts and ideas and will memorize something that they speak. My writing is like that. It’s as if you could be put through a movement, and your body would remember that movement. So the syntax is a torquing that is an actual going through a thought and having a thought, or actually remembering a physical movement, or the combination of these. An artist, for example, told me when he saw one of my plays (called The Present), “If you gave me that to read, I couldn’t read it, because I’d think I don’t know how to read that. And yet when I saw it being spoken and being performed, I found it completely comprehensible.”
Sutin: Just as feedback, the way I recommend people read your books is not to demand to understand at the outset, but to keep reading, and a great deal of understanding occurs as you keep reading, of a very subtle kind.
Scalapino: A student at Bard once said to me, “When I listened to your work, at first I resisted it because I thought I have to figure this out. Then I realized that it’s a sound; I could just relax and listen to it. I’m not figuring something out, and as I’m listening, I actually understand it perfectly well.” She had just asked me the question, “what is your ideal reader?” and I said, “that’s my ideal reader,” or my ideal listener as well as reader.
Sutin: I’ll have two more questions, and then we’ll take a break. I’ve prepared about 250 questions, so we’ll have the midnight session in which we continue. (Laughter.) I’m not ever proposing to do a biography of you, but since I’ve done two biographies, I’m curious. In your opinion, would a well done biography of you be of any earthly use to your readers?
Scalapino: Well, I don’t know, because I don’t know what my readers would want to know. I wrote my autobiography, actually, which is going to be published by Wesleyan in 2002.
So there’s that! (Laughter.)
Sutin: But I’m guessing your autobiography is not a linear series of “this happened to me, then this happened to me,” or is it? Is it a chronological personal account of your life?
Scalapino: Yes. Gale Research has a project of inviting writers to write their autobiographies. They said it could be whatever you came up with, in your own form of writing.
You would be paid a thousand dollars. And so I decided I’m going to do this for the thousand dollars. (Laughter.)
Sutin: All right! So this is a tell-all, then? Scalapino: Yes. So I sent it to them and they accepted it, and six months later, they rejected it, saying: “this is not what our readers would expect, and furthermore, this is going to be in libraries!” The woman said this to me on the telephone. I thought, Oh! (Laughter.) Well, okay. So that was the end of that.
Sutin: So what did you do? What was so shocking that it would be in libraries?
Scalapino: It wasn’t that it was shocking, it was that it would not be what people would expect. In other words, it’s the way it’s written. But this is the way I perceive things. So that’s my autobiography. (Laughter.)
Sutin: I can’t wait to read it. One last question: what’s light reading for you? If there is such a thing. You’ve mentioned comic books and detective books in your works. Do you read comic books and detective books?
Scalapino: I don’t read comic books anymore, but I did as a kid. I had a comic book collection, classic comic books and romance comics, which my uncle destroyed because he thought it was rotting our minds, but which was this incredible collection that my sisters and I managed to get in used bookstores. They weren’t being published anymore, so it was horrifying that it disappeared. Anyway, the conceptual idea of comic books and bubbles of writing and so forth had an effect on my writing.
As light reading, I do read detective novels. I love detective novels. I’ve been set on to different series that I’ve thought were excellent. Lyn Heijinian also likes detective novels, and she let me know about this one series that’s a Swedish couple who wrote together as a collaboration. They wrote ten novels until finally the man passed away, then his wife stopped writing the series. It’s the Detective Martin Beck series. The couple are Per Waloo. I like the form of the detective novel where you don’t know what’s going to happen. When you’re writing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. R-hu has a detective novel superimposed in it, which I would drop and pick up as a kind of knitting force that would keep things together or expand something, and where suddenly you’ve got characters doing something in rapid motion and in situations where people are being killed, which is the way the public space seems to me to be. Also The Front Matter, Dead Souls has the idea of a detective novel throughout. So does
Defoe.
Sutin: Thank you.
Scalapino: Thank you very much.
Sutin: We’ll now open it up to questions from the audience.
Question: One critic called the experience of reading you “psychedelic.” Since you come from Berkeley, what kind of influence did that whole psychedelic movement have on how you may or may not have experienced and observed that experience from the psychedelic layers, because I just feel like I’ve been on a good trip! Scalapino: You mean, did I inhale? Actually, the psychedelic movement didn’t have any effect on me, because I had lots of friends who took LSD, but I was always too afraid to do that, so I never did. I had a funny experience in regard to that: when a play of mine (The Present) was performed in San Francisco, it was reviewed. The reviewer was very hostile and said, “This is a drug trip and you would have to be a drug aficionado in order to understand it.” This is someone who’s never taken a drug in her life.
Question: In the Master Class you spoke about having some question or problem that bothers you and you write as a way to circle around that, and then you come to a resolution. Do you ever feel that words fail to express that something you’re after – in an immediate, visceral way – or do you find that words will always do it for you?
Scalapino: Another way to say that would be: there’s something urgent that’s moving you which would be the reason why you would start writing. I would have the sense that I didn’t know exactly what that is. I don’t understand it. You’re in the process of uncovering something, and what I would write would not be directly that thing, but it would reveal that to me. In other words, you can’t write that thing, because it’s something that isn’t in language, and wouldn’t be able to be expressed by language. The example I gave of being at the performance at La Mama – of The Trojan Women – is similar to my writing experience, which is the reason why I use that example. Something gets triggered, and you enter a space where everything comes loose, everything comes apart. What occurs is not a subject; it’s more a visceral experience and a subliminal experience that isn’t in language, or not solely. The language enables it to bust apart. Almost like creating locations that are where something else gets released in the location itself, and the location in this case is the text. So that you could enter into this in an expansive way, and I would have a sense of relief, but it’s not located in a particular thing.
Question: The way you deal with the subject of simultaneity reminds me very much of the Cubist painters. I wonder if you could respond in any way to that, whether Delaunay or
Picasso or Braque or any of the original analytical Cubists had anything to do with influencing your particular style.
Scalapino: I don’t know, because of course, I grew up seeing them, seeing all the paintings, as we all have, and so it may have influenced me. I liked and was interested in that, but I don’t know whether it has a direct bearing on what I write. But surrealism has had a direct influence on me. Not early on, because I came to read that later after I’d already been writing for some time. In teaching, I’ve always used surrealist practices and talked about surrealism just so the students would read about it and read some of the text. I was very interested in the surrealists’ notion of taking a time period and writing whatever comes up. I found this useful and interesting as a suggestion to students, in terms of watching your mind phenomena. A poet like Bernadette Mayer, for example, uses experiments in which she writes, having a frame of
“this is an hour” writing, or “this is a 24-hour period.” She wrote the book Midwinter’s Day in
24 hours, and used the time frame as a cue for the writing. Similarly, I use traveling as a cue for writing. It’s movement through space, as if I have to get on a plane in order to begin.
Question: What is your rewriting process like? Do you have one? Scalapino: I usually write a prose work rapidly, generate more than what it will be later.
The writing tends to come in spurts. For example, Defoe took a long time to write; when I finally edited it, I cut out big sections. I go over a work and then keep it around for a long time, then go back and look at it.
Question: I’m interested in the editing process also, and I’m wondering how you approach line breaks – if you find that the line breaks are coming as you write, or if you have to go back in there, because sometimes, you write very long lines and sometimes very short lines.
Scalapino: In writing poetry I work intuitively with what a work seems to need at the time. If I write a line break, it usually remains. Because it has a sound shape – the line break is trying to get at that sound, which would be heard if you read it aloud, and would be heard on the page (you can’t look at language and read it silently without it having a sound). Even if you’re not actually saying it in your mind, it’s only associated with sound, and so the formation of the line break would be in the process of creating this motion, usually a sense of a physical, spatial motion that would be that syntax.
Question: Do you feel as though you’re always “on” as a writer? Since so much of your writing comes from your experiences and the practice of integrating everything?
Scalapino: Yes, I’d say I’m always on. It’s like a voice that’s going in your head – if I wasn’t doing that, it would be very strange. It’s been years since I wasn’t doing that. I don’t remember not doing it.
Question: You mentioned that before going on your trip, you were going to start writing.
Scalapino: Oh, well that’s a different thing. It’s kind of like (I meant that kind of as a joke) warming up, that you’d already be working on something, so that you would be in practice and you’d know how to do it. Or you’d be in the middle of something, you’d already have it going and it would go on its own momentum. It’s like finding its movement, so then when you get to the place where it begins to “kick in,” you’d be there already.
Question: In Sight, which you co-authored with Lyn Heijinian, you created this elaborate dialectic where images and ideas seem to slide from you to her and back. It was very interesting, and I was wondering if you could talk about that.
Scalapino: She’s done many collaborations, and I have never done any. This was my first collaboration and I told her, “I don’t know how to collaborate. I don’t know how to do this.” But she really loves doing that, so I thought it would be fun because I like her tremendously. We used the fax machine. I love the fax, because it’s immediate and physical –
I’m scared of e-mail and don’t like e-mail – I don’t like the screen. But to have a poem coming through the fax machine is terrific. We took to using them constantly. We did this collaboration over a four-year period. It had two rules: since it was going to be on the subject of sight, it had to be something we were seeing which was rooted in physicality. The form we chose was simply that it would be in doubles, because there were two of us in collaboration. We chose doubles that could be two paragraphs, two stanzas, two words. There was no theme except “sight.”
Also, I have a feeling that we were sliding into each other in the sense that we would try to change each other in a way. We’d be transforming what the other person was saying, carrying on a discourse about it.
Question: I’m interested in your focus on landscape in your work, and how you perceive the horizon. Could you comment on that?
Scalapino: I think of landscape as being everything out there, people, everything outside the single individual. Larry said he was going to ask me about the use of the word “rim.” It was a word I invented to try to talk about the horizon line as a factor of concentration. It’s a changing line, and it’s amorphous. For example, dawn is in a sense a horizon line, except that it disappears, and the moment of something transpiring from blackness to day isn’t just one moment, and it isn’t just a line. This has something to do with attention and concentration as a focus of the mind, but you’re trying to make the writing be attention itself, as well as it being the physicality of landscape and the dawn line and the horizon line, all of this at the same time as if one’s mind and attention were that thing that one’s seeing.