(photograph by Carol Szymanski)

The first time I heard LS read was at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. I know that the date of the reading was October 11, 1988, because it says so on the copyright page of the booklet Dia published on the occasion of the reading. The booklet is called The Return of Painting—appropriately enough for a publication by an art organization, although the fact that the phrase is ascribed to Julian Schnabel is curious since his work, received at the time under the rubric of Neo-Expressionism, is so distant from the Minimalist aesthetic associated with Dia. I don’t normally think of LS in terms of irony but I can’t help feeling some kind of unstable irony in her choice of this title on this occasion.

In my mind, the text of the booklet corresponds, at least in part, with what LS read that evening in October. But was it really so? I don’t know. In this I depend on a vague recollection, a confused recollection, an untrustworthy recollection.

That’s to be expected. The reading was more than twenty-one years ago—you might call it a recollection that’s reached drinking age. The impression the reading made at the time—it seemed so strong—has been overlaid with impressions subsequently made on me by my own subsequent silent, private readings of the text as well as impressions of other readings of other texts in other places by LS herself (including the one I organized at Parasol Unit in London, October 10, 2006—almost the anniversary, by chance, of that one in New York).

The substance of that reading has disappeared from my mind and yet something like the shape of it remains with me—like a fossil in the earth, the original matter having been replaced by sediment: diagenesis, what Shakespeare called a sea-change.

The form that has been deposited in my memory by that reading and those since—readings of LS as well as readings by LS—is one that I would characterize by a sense of single-mindedness. I remember that when I first became aware of her work around 1982, on the publication of considering how exaggerated music is, it was this that seemed most clearly to distinguish her work from that of the language poets whose work I had encountered toward the end of the previous decade: A work like Ron Silliman’s Ketjak was like a mosaic pieced together from a range of sources; one sensed a single consciousness behind the choices and their ordering but one aspect of the “signature” of that consciousness was precisely its lack of interest in displaying itself directly. With LS, by contrast, what seemed to count was precisely the way a consciousness was fixed on its contents. The characteristic stop-start rhythm of her writing, patently Steinian in inspiration, was never about affixing one piece of matter to the next, but rather about repeated attempts (essays) at grasping the same phenomena. This grasping toward things was implicitly an effort against the strong force of their forgetting, like pushing step by step against a big wind.

My choice of the word “phenomena” recalls, of course, another early book by LS, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. What was always striking was how close, how doggedly attentive to the unfolding of phenomena her writing appeared to be. Those phenomena were of the social landscape through which we all seemed to wander as strangers, even compassion out of work. I remember or imagine I remember the shock, the discomfort I felt at some of the phenomena registered in her text; for instance:

Beggars of people starving lying in garbage, fruit rotting rinds a foot deep in the street, though that was not happening now. A starving man lying holding out his cup to her though he did not care. (The Return of Painting, p. 11)

I wonder now what LS meant by the phrase “that was not happening now.” This description of life at street level in Ronald Reagan’s America seemed to encapsulate one urgent sense of “now”—and then, in her writing, everything always seems to be happening now. Even not-happening-now is, in this writing, a form of present occurrence, a moment in the unfolding of phenomena.

There is a neutrality to how phenomena are registered in writing like that of The Return of Painting that in retrospect seems to me both a stylistic propensity of LS’s generation—it reminds me of the blank tone of the voiceovers in works by video artists of her time, say Gary Hill—and absolutely essential to the mechanism of a poetry so intent on a never-entirely-to-be finished task of registering, of capture. But the strange thing is, I don’t remember any neutrality in the voice I heard for the first time in that reading in 1988. I remember passion; fervor. I think of a photo my wife Carol took with her mobile phone at another reading in London, one whose date I can’t fix and that took place upstairs in a pub whose name I’ve forgotten: What I see in it is the way LS is leaning into her text, pressing it on—not toward the listeners particularly, but just on, further into itself. It’s true that LS didn’t write her passion; she wrote phenomena. But in writing phenomena, I learned in hearing her, she voiced passion.

Her voice gone, will others who never heard it hear the passion in her writing? Or is it what Eric Dolphy said: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again”? Actually I don’t think that’s quite right. If a music has been heard then its vibration lingers somewhere. What I heard when I heard LS reading is somehow still there to be heard by those who never had a chance to hear her. Her voice is still among us.

Barry Schwabsky