It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (New California Poetry) [Paperback]

Leslie Scalapino (Author)

Book Description

Series: New California Poetry | Publication Date: April 8, 2008

Internationally recognized as one of the most innovative writers in America today, Leslie Scalapino persistently challenges the boundaries of many forms in which she works--poetry, prose, plays, and more. This outstanding volume includes work from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years. The poems demonstrate ideas and inventions in writing, and how one writing invention leads to the next. Three series are selected from the long poem way, about which Philip Whalen said, "She makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once." Recent poems, such as those from "DeLay Rose," appear to leave the page itself as a single infinite line in which the actions of individuals and occurrences in the outside world are synonymous, mysterious, and simultaneous. It's go in horizontal is a dazzling entryway into the oeuvre of a daring and powerful writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Most often classified with the language poets, Scalapino is shown in this welcome overview to have developed a distinctive idiom, as fresh and powerful here as when first published in 14 mostly small press editions. Scalapino fuses a richly detached Buddhist mindfulness with an algorithmically precise disjunctive syntax to explore sex, gender and violence—their politics and their moment-to-moment embodiedness. The longish, serial form that she favors works well in the selected format when the poems are presented in full. Highlights include the title piece from Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), which relates a set of attitudes toward others shocking in its blank frankness, and The Floating Series, from 1988's Way, which turns an act of intercourse into a stop-motion tour-de-force, as if filmed by Muybridge and analyzed by Lacan. Many other poems appear in excerpt, with results that can be frustrating—as with the poetically captioned photographs of Crowd or Not Evening or Light (1992) or 'Can't' Is 'Night' (from 2007's Day Ocean State of Stars' Night)—but only because one wants to see the works resolve. Readers of Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley or Ai who haven't discovered Scalapino should use this volume to do so. (Apr.)
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Review

"Scalapino is shown in this welcome overview to have developed a distinctive idiom."--Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Paperback: 257 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520254627
• ISBN-13: 978-0520254626
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,133,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poetry of starting over again and again after that, August 25, 2008

By 

Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (New California Poetry) (Paperback)

Laying out a poem like it were a trail of bread crumbs a reader would to the bigger feast of The Point Being Made is not how writer Leslie Scalapino writes. As we find ourselves in a time when the popular idea of the poet and their work they compose seems slanted toward the lightly likable Billy Collins and others witing poems that can be grasped, shared, written out in a fine hand on perfumed paper and preserved between the leaves of a dictionary of quotations. Scalapino requires not the casual gaze but the harder view, the more inquisitive eye. Scalapino brings a refreshing complexity to her work, a sanguine yet inquisitive intelligence that is restless and dissatisfied with the seemingly authorized narrative styles poets are expected to frame their ideas with. The framing, so to speak, is as much the subject in her poems and prose, and the attending effort to interrogate the methods one codifies perception to the exclusion of details not fitting a convenient structure, Leslie Scalapino has produced a body of work of rare and admirable discipline; the writing is a test of the limits of generic representation.Her work as well is an inquiry in how we might exist without them.

In as series of over nineteen books over published since the seventies, she has been one of the most interesting poets working , an earnest inquisitor of consciousness and form blurring and distorting the boundaries that keep poetry, prose, fiction and auto biography apart.It's Go in Horizontal is a cogent selection from three decades of writing. The distinction blurring is not a project originating with her, but there is in Scalapino's work the sense of a single voice rather than expected "car radio effect", the audio equivalent of Burrough's cut up method that would make a piece resemble an AM dial being moved up and down a distorted, static-laden frequency. Leslie Scalapino's writing is one voice at different pitches responding to an intelligence aware of how it codes and decodes an object of perception. The work is fascinating , interrogations that wrestle with the act of witnessing.

In the best sense of the comparison , her writing has traces of Gertrude Stein at her most concentrated, when she had considered the Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Leger and sought an equivalent in writing of the effects they achieved in their painting and sculpture; a disassembling of the usual way that orders visual experience the effect of which reveals each perspective at the same time. This simultaneity of witness presents problems at first--head scratching isn't an unusual response to first timers even these days--but the beauty of the project is that the abstraction it produces in the work of the Cubists and with sympathetic experimental writers like Stein is that it allows for things that are normally hidden or ignored in favor of more flattering, svelte detail to be brought to the forefront. The world is less smooth and elegant as the former restraints are removed, and it becomes a huge space filled with objects of infinite shape.

Stein, though, was principally intrigued with the visual,and Scalapino's writing concerns itself with an investigation of one's own perception. There is a fracturing of narrative flow, a rephrasing of what was formally said, a studied trek through a temporal sequence of events full of incidental images, smells and sounds, any of which trigger associations linking the speaker, the witness to phenomenon, to a personal history and future one speculates about in limitless wondering. Scalapino's writing is a study of the mind conducting it's habit as a device that forces order on an infinitely complex rush of details that would other wise overwhelm the senses.
Her poetry examins the canvas on which one draws their conceptualizations, a worried presence on the margins of consolidated personality ever aware of the filters one applies over phenomenon.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Come and See, July 31, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: It's go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (New California Poetry) (Paperback)

Though she has had volumes of selected work before ( I remember the Talisman House "Green and Black" with especial fondness), Leslie Scalapino's new book from University of California Press is very much a new starting out for the poet, a point of departure in which she seems to take delight in finding a pathway back--into the past, all the way through to the early 70s, and simultaneously writing her way into the future with samples of new sequences not even finished yet. This is not the book of someone complacent nor braggy about what anyone else would consider a magnificent accomplishment. To me she has always had the attitude of (in this one way) a child, a child at the ocean who comes to you with her hands filled with seaweed dripping with shells and starfish, whispering, see all I have gathered for you! And thus it is with "It's go in horizontal," even the epigraph of which speaks of her work in poetry as both "minute" (a la Dickinson) and "voluptuous" (like Klimt or Marsden Hartley, or like Petah Coyne, whose voluptuous photos of flowers adorn the cover here). The blurbs speak of Scalapino as an original, well, that is an understatement, and yet what makes her work so valuable is the beautiful way she has of connecting with her audience, she is totally empathic, like the donkey in Bresson, we identify with her process completely, that of a human being struggling to stay true to consciousness in a century that wants to squash it flat for the sake of convenience.

And though she has left right out of the running some of my favorite books by her, including "Goya's L.A,.," "Defoe," "The Pearl," "R-hu," what remains is a startlingly new and wonderfully realized voyage into the real, as well as a demonstration of just how many modes she has successfully worked in. If you have been lucky enough to hear her read her work, the excitement of being there as she seems to be writing it all on the spot, you don't have the chance to curl up with it as did, perhaps, the monks of medieval days, who illuminated the manuscripts as they read, work of remarkable slowness and attention. Here we have the serial poem, wedged up against the play, groove against groove; next up, some of her work with visual images, often her own, and experimenting with the effect of handwriting, like her great predecessor Philip Whalen. We see also, spinning backwards from the present, how her great prophetic voice, aligned with a sharply political jeremiad of shame and rebuke to present US government policies, is not a new development in the work, that she has always been a poet of the social, of the political, of the word trembling in the hell of late capitalism. The selections seem ideally picked out to give the new reader a taste of the work in general, and to give the old hand--someone like me, who remembers the composition of many of these pieces--an exuberant sense of a life thoroughly lived in poetry, a fourth dimension (that of time) animating further the three dimensions I have always admired about her work and being.