My Hands Stopped Over the Keyboard

I just learned that Leslie Scalapino died.

My hands just hovered over the keyboard and I stared at them.

Thought maybe if I looked down and then looked back up it wouldn't be so.

I had seen everybody discussing her work recently and I was very happy.

How naive I can be.

I thought people just realized what a great writer she is.

I should have known better. The only time a poet gets that kind of attention is when he or she wins a major award or dies.

She's one of my favorite writers.

I said so on my blog many times.

I put her on my American genius list, with I think like only seven other writers.

She was an unusual case for me. Usually I know if it's going to be love with a poet's work right away.

She was the exception to that rule. It took Defoe to open up the rest of her body of work to me.

I've always told everyone to read Defoe because I thought that was a landmark work. And so underrated.

It's a novel in poetry.

And the ethical dimension to her work is what really remains with me.

She studied every little detail of our culture and created configurations of words like holograms. Fractals. Words were seen to be cultural fractals; everywhere the constituent matter and particles were seen to contain the image of the whole.

There was cultural radium in all these images, and she was a scientist who was going to extract it.

And she did. Like a Curie of poetry.

She was so keenly sensitive to power and inequalities.

I'm guessing her work and poetics was initially nurtured by the new processual models the sixties offered in the nouveau roman.

I think it's easier to understand Leslie Scalapino's writing if you understand writers like Robbe-Grillet first.

And I suppose reading the master works of the phenomenological thinkers (Husserl,Merleau-Ponty, the outre Bachelard) would probably help too.

Because Leslie Scalapino studied consciousness with about that much rigor and fortitude.

Her work remains strong, honest, forgetive, surprising, precise, ethical and, strangely enough, transcendent.

She has crafted some of the most memorable images--often I think of these as complements to the weird beauty we get in the best anime--we've seen in this language in the past few decades.

She was such a quiet, forceful presence.

Her absence is already like a bell struck.

I can hear the afterimage of the sound.

I believe she will remain a Muse of the discontinuous and discrete.

And her striking diassemblages will continue to enlighten.

She really had the Mirage by its tail.

And it was a beautiful thing to watch.