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.