Still Listening to (Leslie Scalapino) Reading

Now that Leslie Scalapino’s physical presence in the world has too soon disappeared, we have only her words to remember her by -- those written words that she left on the page (which we can still read, and will read for a long time to come) and those she left us in the air (which we can still hear in recordings of her reading her own work, many of which are now at PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Scalapino.php). 

To listen to the sound of Leslie reading her own work is an experience that one will not soon forget.  At least that’s been my own experience for years now, ever since I first heard her read.  I remember one such occasion as if it were yesterday, perhaps because I wrote something as I was sitting there in the room at Small Press Traffic (long before it moved to its present location at the California College of the Arts campus) out there on 18th Street (was that it?), the room of a bookstore lined with books, the noise of cars and busses passing in the street, the sound of Leslie’s voice reading from her latest book.  But not only the sound of her reading voice, also the sight of her speaking/reading presence, how she looked when she read, what she did with her hands -- the right (was it?) holding the book (or was it on the podium?), the left with fingers extended but somehow also clenched, gesturing from one exact moment to the next as if to make the intensity of the words she was reading even more startling, more literally gripping.  So it was both the sound of her speaking voice and the picture of her speaking those words of her poem that I’m thinking about now -- which takes me back to thinking of the Latin poet Horace (was it?), who called poetry a speaking picture, ut pictura poesis.  Probably not exactly what Horace meant by that, I know, since he was making a connection between poetry and painting, but there it is in any case, and useful perhaps here too since it brings up that poem-with-photographs in Crowd and not evening or light (Talisman, 2002, just reissued in 2010 by her own O Books) which Leslie must have also been reading from that night at Small Press Traffic, judging from the references in the piece I wrote there, which was the third part of an essay on Leslie’s work called “Listening to Reading,” which I later used for the title of Listening to Reading (no doubt in homage to her).  Here then, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is an ear/eyewitness account of one person’s experience of seeing and listening to Leslie Scalapino reading her work (‘in person’): 

The person who is reading (Leslie Scalapino) stands at the end of a room in which other people have gathered to listen.  There are cars going by in the street outside, and sometimes a bus (louder) pulling away from the curb.  She is reading and they are listening to the bus stopping for them to get down -- and the car is behind it and the hand that is not holding the book is clenched but open, a representation of the violence of The couple crushing the steer's head.  Slitting its throat, with the blood coming from the light red throat.

And the flesh is attention, muscles at the back of her neck and shoulders knotted in spite of what the drug might do to relax them -- dope in the ravines wrinkled rivulets like cotton tufts in the sides of the ravines.  Her voice as it goes on faster, up a notch in pitch in the exact moment of it, as the words that make the novel build.

The ones who are the audience are hearing the enactment -- and the cars coursing on the overpass by the café to it.  The writing makes what is seen or known about (through hearing or reading) that much more present, as thinking makes it so On her part.  And theirs.

Geared to this -- writing an act one does as complement to being.  Completely involved at the place the mind sets in motion, that is.  The one who is reading In the very hot weather -- here in late November (when it is cold) coming to where another cab on the sidewalk had been left -- cracked up with a bus that's left, beside it, on the walk -- in the moonlight, though some of the people who are listening have removed their coats.

If there is violence one will notice, more and more in what occurs, the beauty of it (as fear).  The man sitting over the corpse as a vigil, is arising from -- him not having money, though it is done with care for someone passing away.  The sound of this is a register the reader's voice approaches.  When the page turns or she shifts the book from one hand to the other, the other one then becoming clenched, the pauses -- interruptions of breath, as a dash -- are as much a part of what is said as the words between them. 

Silence, that is, is a moment between the words.  This is when the words think -- as what's being communicated -- and that of possessing a thing, which isn't so -- nor is there being communicating.  The mind in fact the difference

when that -- nature
is open in it

writing as the picture of what happens.

What she calls the comic book may be this, seeing this or remembering as it is real.  The section for instance she is reading of postcards with black and white photographs, captions written by hand.  Instead of turning the page when it is done she places the card on the chair, as if to put one's thought out of mind -- which then occurs in the frames of the comic book afterward.  Photographs of people standing or sitting (squatting) in water, though grass is mentioned it is not present.

Some of the people one imagines as plants, parts of the body. The man had put his stem in to her -- on her swimming around.  They are in the water she is writing as a picture of

him coming in her -- swimming on her flat on her.
her flat. on the stem.

This is not in the photograph but in the mind, one that knows by means of what it thinks to write.

The photograph becomes the trigger, whether it stands on the page as the picture when the feeling occurs or cards (piling up on the chair) whose photographs have been cropped.  The picture as this frame, and so the frame is ahead of what's there.  It is not the same as looking at the event but being in it.  The writing she is reading being the event -- only the view -- or that being -- fragile.

The book (or cards) she is reading in her head is the voice inside experience and therefore rebelling.  The other hand clenched, its fingers extended, because it doesn't hold the book, and so experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.  The book can be seen and its words can be heard (in the air) in place.  So this is what she thinks to say of the unfolding of phenomena . . . .  and we would stop it have it come back in if we were not that.

Passages in italics are from The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (North Point Press, 1991).

Stephen Ratcliffe