Customer Reviews

New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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This book is hard to read, but there are intense moments of absolute pure Poetry. Is Leslie Scalapino a genius? Does she know what she is doing? If this book is so hard to read, why have I read it at least ten times already? With what insights am I rewarded for fighting my way through the jungle of what it takes to arrive at the moments of bliss?

This book is sort of like John Ashbery's (now famous) 1962 THE TENNIS COURT OATH, and her writing reminds me most of Gertrude Stein's STANZAS FOR MEDITATION. except Scalapino's NEW TIME is more fragmented or disjointed, but also far more lyrical, and far more stunning (and simple) in its revelations.

This book will not go away, and hopefully Scalapino will continue to forge ahead into new, unplowed terrain, sharing with her fans the layers of the pitch-black strata of her genius wherein sparkling diamonds can be unearthed, but only with a lot of work and patience.

"This is despair" is one of the recurring fragments in New Time, and "being depressed is enhanced-- by the rim?" is another. Some find this book full of sublime poetry, but this reader found it full of elegant, smug, and fragmentary babble; the effect is like one of seeing Kyoto on valium, but the impact is more fractured and disturbing than that. I urge this poet to work out more, to see more, to connect to other people and the world beyond her own intense solipsism in love with its own twists and terms. The cold war of the US Scalapino hothouse is over, and despair and preciosity are not enough to engage this fallen fallen world. Go back to Go on this book, or listen to Basho or Dionne Warwick for some beauty that knows more than its own same-old language gaming. "New Time" is not new, just repetition of the same strategies times 94 pages.