Instead of an Animal . . . would be what ?
A ‘what’ (then) . . . ? A (apparently) ‘Human’ (in this day & age, w/ Tarquin’s ravaging stride scarifying earth, as she documents . . .) ?
A (flat) beast, made out of letters, over many years, doggedly pursuing its ‘career in letters’ during sleep & equally while eating . . . early on, in the late 70’s, almost-always there, at every reading & lecture, willing herself onto the scene . . . ?
Or madcap commentator . . . on life’s ills/miracles . . . which the wind blows up ?
Rather, a voluble (enthusiastic &) silent person (apparently ‘beyond talk’), with a developing ‘Idea’ in her head . . . who lived within a skull from which two eyes glowed & shone from within an ‘internal delay’ (of wch she speaks in her “Delay Rose”) . . . from which a thinking/perception ventured forth w/ words, to make happen what these words make happen . . .
A slow-developing smile with which she ‘bathes the whole world’, completely . . .
A delightful, disarming uproar/guffaw !
A thing for Sumo wrestling/wrestlers !
A pain in the neck, again !
A wonderful writer, whose command of syntax & ability to summon Visions of ‘transcendental’/‘everyday’ landscapes & persons w/ thought processes & perceptions running around in the minds of her actual readers . . . are (more than commonplace) almost-unmatched !
The author of Defoe & her adventures . . . as carried on in the ‘crime novels’ (as in the being of Detective Grace Abe), where sleepwalking/hyperactive ‘comic book’ characters determine & meet their fates in the lurid color/cityscapes of ancient American radio drama . . .
The author (w/ Lyn Hejinian) of Sight (wch I’m honored to say included a very generous touch-of-the-hat to me!) . . .
The author & photographer of The Tango, with Marina Adams (wch I raved about in my preface!) . . . who wrote a spirited introduction incorporated into the inside covers of my ‘black box’ (the first O Books ‘book’) in which she asserted I drew letters “as if from the other side of the paper”(?) . . .
(Extravagant/muscle-musculature-type exploratory syntax . . . mixed with/+ maddening/maddeningly ‘non-referential’ pronouns (like “that”—I compiled a whole long list of ‘uses of that’ (a really interesting, ‘bottomless’ word!) after/during learning to read Leslie’s Defoe, as a ‘work’, but nothing came of it) . . .)
(All this (‘exploding’) vigor of dreamy-real dream figures/thinking abounding . . . held in place by a strange rigor of (‘controlled’) ongoing formal/structural invention . . .)
(And what was her ‘system’ for the recurrences (how did she ‘know’ where they went/when they were to occur) . . . & what did they ‘mean’ (that there are these recurrences, & what are they up to, in the ongoing presentation of the text) . . . ?)
(Some of the sexiest writing yr likely to come across in ‘poetry’ (compounding her characteristic ‘delay’ w/ tuned recurrences/phrases for rhythms of extended copulation) . . . e.g., incorporating her invention of the word “stem” for the male sex organ (integrating human biology w/ that of the plant kingdom & wider/reverberating life on earth) during the ‘act of love’ . . .)
A stern foe, I’m sure (not for me, ordinarily, cause we were almost-always friends—‘differentiated cousins’?), for those lambasted sorts who were her foes—so that heinous public figures (& sometimes personal associates, writers & critics, subtly altered) would find themselves ‘skewered in public’ in her next book for their (perceived) misdeeds . . .
(We went on one ‘date’, way back when—I talked a lot, as I drove, & Leslie said less & less, & then nothing, as I talked the more—there was all the way back—we drove home in silence, & parted completely amicably.)
A dollar bill, like they used to make them . . .
A buffalo-head nickel (shines) . . .
A very-American/inscrutable patented ‘system’ for making the whole thing go round . . .
(Sometime toward the Millennium one could sense (as with Creeley dancing to Crosby, Stills & Nash in front of the fireplace in that stone house in Annisquam in the summer of 1969, was it?) the relentless/engendering agency of (physical) language process itself (entered into as blood beckoning entrance into inner-imagination/‘bloodstream’), such that (in awe of what I could feel her doing/becoming) I wrote immediately warning Leslie to REST, at times, so that she not be devoured by the powers of poetry she was ‘tapping into’ (in the process transforming herself into a ‘character’ in her own ongoing melodrama . . . ?) . . .
And then she was devoured, later, by the (‘external’?) cancer that ate her alive . . .)
Another Jeanne d’Arc . . . an Angel, of sorts, acting out her Passion out there on the macadam . . . who took a stand in public, by organizing & participating in readings & publishing anthologies championing just causes !
The publisher (w/ Tom White) over many years of O Books, w/ its mission of making books (in the beginning, Leslie did much of the production work) celebrating especially the developing work of younger/‘experimental’ (‘unknown’) writers (boy, did she whop me that one time I managed to say “O Press” !) . . .
(Sitting on their front steps after our ‘deferred’ appointment this past May, while Leslie (upstairs?) rested, slept . . . I had never been to the new house on Presley Way (& Leslie was a ‘crooner’, too—she certainly did develop a ‘forceful reading style’!) . . . when does one begin the ‘sleep of death’ . . . or a baby the ‘dream of life’ . . . ?)
(But so much ‘suffering’ (“my back,” etc.) . . . as Creeley would say (& did say, often), each one is one (consummatum est)—each life assumes its ‘form’, each shape its ‘shape’—that’s it, it is (it’s over)—that says it all (that “that,” that’s Leslie, for me, ‘always’ . . .))
My ‘same-one’/cousin in the practice of poetry (my ‘successor’, as I used to embarrassingly fondly/grandly claim her to be, to myself—knew everything I knew & was already carrying on ahead/‘otherwise’) . . . (I wrote her in February, after the diagnosis & at the beginning of her chemo, “You’re the One !” . . . she wrote back that she’d dreamt of me drawing blue & green letters in the ocean . . .)
Instead of an Animal . . . Leslie Scalapino ! !
Robert Grenier
1 INSTEAD OF AN ANIMAL, by Leslie Scalapino, with drawings by Diane Sophia (Berkeley, CA: Cloud Marauder Press, 1978).