Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, Hearing

 

            There’s a hole in the wall, but for this to be the case, the wall had to exist before the hole – as hearing. Hearing occurs at the beginning – rowing at the wall. But (again) rowing is ahead of the wall. And so on. I want to say it (rowing hearing wall) is ‘saved for the beginning,’ but that would be a future beginning and thus not correspond to what I intuit as ‘bliss,’ which is real incipience, of an entirely new thing, something unanticipated. In the realm of hearing, anticipation does, of course, occur – there is a ‘waiting to hear,’ for example, of a report which is to be given to a person in doubt. But at the moment of actually hearing it, whether the report is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ the hearing itself, as hearing, occurs in a moment of absolute freedom, utter deracination, floating – ‘rowing wall.’

(LH)

The second in a planned but unrealized quintuplet of poetry titles is Lyn Hejinian and the late Leslie Scalapino’s (1947-2010) poetry collaboration, Hearing (Litmus Press, 2021). Following the collaborative Sight (Washington DC: Edge Books, 1999), this current volume had aimed to be part of a series of volumes the two poets had hoped to complete, with each volume centred around another of the senses. Hearing includes an introduction by Hejinian, and afterwards by both Judith Goldman and Michael Cross. It was poet, editor and critic Cross [see my review of his recently-published chapbook-length interview with Scalapino here] who originally discovered and salvaged the manuscript from Scalapino’s archive at the University of California San Diego, subsequently working through and comparing the literary archives of both poets to determine what might be the “final” version of the collection, allowing the collection to shift from a potential footnote into finished, published form.

Given this is one of the final, if not the final, possible volume of new work by the late beloved Bay Area poet Leslie Scalapino, seeing three pieces included that discuss the work within seems both a gift and a rarity. As Buffalo, New York poet and critic Judith Goldman writes as part of her critical afterword, “Hearing Hearing”: “As title and work, Hearing invites us to think of hearing as the most capacious rubric for all our encounters with sound (whether by turns more or less conscious, overcoded, embodied), and as a stripped-down, minor term opposed to its more attentive partner “listening”—hearing as sound catching us prior to cognizance, sound as ground versus figure. Indeed, Hearing asks us to consider the many ways this distinction is embedded in our culture: hearing is involuntary, listening is intentional and voluntary; hearing registers ambient sound, listening sonic events; hearing identifies sound as index, listening is hermeneutic, discerning meaning, vouloir-dire; hearing involves affect, listening concepts.”

As Hejinian writes in her introduction: “Leslie used the term ‘continual conceptual rebellion’ to characterize what she called ‘wrecking your mind.’ I think that the latter phrase was something that Leslie’s friend the poet Philip Whalen spoke of aspiring to in his writing. He was, apparently, speaking not of Leslie’s mind but of the mind of his readers and, more important, of his own. I have written about this elsewhere and won’t belabor the idea here. My point is that the notion of ‘continual conceptual rebellion’ (a notion that became something of a north star for me) and the practice of ‘outrunning’ ideologies (including one’s own)—i.e. ‘wrecking your mind’—was vey much implicit in the ways that Leslie and I responded to each other’s additions to Hearing (and to Sight before it).”

            The brief time, which is one’ s own lifetime, and the expanded moment of the falconer tramping through the red-rust fields – is in the middle for a long time of someone else’s ‘experience’ within one’s own very brief time (of being alive at all) – both – in which everything is heard, such as birds, separately from when it is being seen. While there? So the falconer is heard walking but since it's a memory that it occurred, one’s hearing is separate from seeing the place. Even in the falcon’s gliding’s long present-time. One’s long moment in the middle gives one the sense of hearing and seeing as if together – that’s why it’s so long. The gliding’s separate from oneself as if it’s a middle by being a motion that’s silent. But it isn’ t really silent, then. getting old – memory of hearing – that’s the only time there.

(LS)

Theirs is a fascinating kind of call-and-response through the poems in Hearing, each short single-stanza lyric burst including author initials, so one doesn’t lose track of who composed which, from two poets deeply engaged with language, listening and experimentation. The crediting of each individual author is something I find interesting, suggesting the collection less a collaboration-per-se than a conversation in poetic form. This is a lyric through which each poet is responding to the other, akin to what Canadian poets and married couple Kim Maltman and Roo Borson did in their own conversation through lyric, the poetry title The Transparence of November / Snow (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1985). In Hearing, there is something lovely about a collection that exists as such a conversation, especially between two highly accomplished poets who happen to also be close friends, as though we are being allowed to listen in on, or even overhear, a conversation that might otherwise have been privately spoken. As Michael Cross’ afterword, “Ruminations on the Provenance of a (Nearly) Lost Collaboration” ends:

            From our conversations, there is no question that Leslie wanted to see this manuscript in print and that she was proud of her collaborative work with Hejinian (a writer and friend she greatly admired). Had she lived, the two collaborators might have found occasion to continue and would have, at the very least, revised the project together in person; however, given the circumstances, this publication captures this collaboration at its aphelion, the denouement of one of its possible afterlives. In order to allay our loss, I tend to imagine some placatory parallel universe, some peaceable pocket of time in which Leslie dodged the terrible pancreatic cancer that took her life: in this version of reality, perhaps readers will enjoy the privilege of witnessing these poets ruminate on all five senses; for our part, however, in which we mourn the loss of one of our true masters, sight and sound must suffice.

Leslie Scalapino w Michael Cross: Last Interview & “Poetics”

Cross: Let’s start with your first full-length trade edition, Considering how exaggerated music is (a book that collects many of your early chapbooks). You claim, in Autobiography, that “It was the first time [you were] writing.” In what ways is this writing different from other experiments you were involved with at the time—for instance, your chapbook O and Other Poems—and can you elaborate on your claim that this work is “a light extremity?” [20 June 2007]

Scalapino: I regarded myself as writing ‘for the first time’ with “hmmmm,” because I had the sense of that work being unlike the other poets I’d read, of being my own; whereas O and Other Poems, my very first poems, were similar, as I discovered while in the midst of writing them, to Frances Ponge, a discovery which cut short that writing and prevented me from beginning anything else for a year. The poems in O were as if doing the inside of objects, passionate elucidation of objects, somewhat similar to Ponge (at least that was my intention recognizing the similarity when I read him).

As for why I described “hmmmm” as a “light extremity”: emerging from a violent conjunction of circumstances, I was in a state of shock and “hmmmm” arose from being in that state and waking up in that state. The subject matter of “hmmmm” was not the source, was after what I’m describing as a violent conjunction of circumstances, the sense of the individual’s (my) private context and a violent outside, public context (in that case the Vietnam War) entering or being the same space. Perhaps the vernacular expression “blown away” is similar to “light extremity” and realistic conveying having lost or no longer having your self. Having been dismantled, no longer there, there’s a sense of being curiously free, so even painful circumstances personal-social happening to or in front of oneself (not war) seem very funny. This is not unlike the theme of sensation of objects (as in O and Other Poems) but more wildly felt.

The late American poet Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) is a name I’ve known for some time as a writer well-respected, well-read and well-loved, and one I know I myself haven’t read nearly enough work by, so I was pleased to recently receive a copy of the small book Leslie Scalapino w Michael Cross: Last Interview & “Poetics” (Further Other Book Works, 2019). The interview, which takes up the bulk of the small book, was conducted occasionally over email from 2007 to 2010, just up to Scalapino’s death; an interview that moved in and out of attention as other matters emerged. As Cross writes to open his introduction:

I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets.

An experimental writer that blurred the distinctions between poetry and prose, Scalapino was the author of, according to an online bio, the author or editor of “thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays, including a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books, 2010); It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (University of California Press at Berkeley, 2008); Day Ocean State of Stars' Night (Green Integer, 2007); Zither and Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); It's Go In/ Quiet illumined Grass/ Lands (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002); a collaboration with the artist Marina Adams, The Tango (Granary Books, 2001); ORCHID JETSUM (Tuumba, 2001); and SIGHT (Edge Books, 1999), a collaboration with the poet Lyn Hejinian. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.” Even as it moves through time, pausing for weeks and even months at a time, Cross’ interview attempts the range and breadth of Scalapino’s creative work, a work clearly dear to his attention.

The interview is thick, and her responses can often go on for pages, moving through theory, language and influence, and Scalapino is clearly game to engage with such an open-structure as a multiple-year interview. As she responds: “You give a multitude of possibilities—I like all of them to be in operation at once. Even if they are conflicting they are questions in the mind and the response of the reader, not needing to cancel each other but jostling.” As well, almost included as “bonus material” at the back are two essays on poetics by Scalapino, adding to the heft of this small but enlightening and, dare I say, essential collection.