Crowd and Not Evening or Light

"Leslie Scalapino is a stunningly original writer. Poised on an edge between space and claustrophobia, this poet bears stark witness to the broken narratives of thousands dead or off shore. CROWD AND NOT EVENING OR LIGHT scatters literary criticism, drama and the photographic index across a wilderness of everyday language like love." --Susan Howe

About the Author :
Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author 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.

Review :
"CROWD AND NOT EVENING OR LIGHT is a participation that partakes of experience, a watching listening in thinking, only they're not separated(d). Leslie Scalapino's writing practice is a close and worldly work, 'the explanation of the explanation, ' the unfolding implications of the intimate world of clauses and images, their orders: charged orders of the phenomenal world, the visual and verbal language becoming them." --Norma Cole "The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky long ago pointed out that the familiar, in its familiarity, becomes invisible--automatized, as he put it--and that it is the role of art to make the world visible again. It is Leslie Scalapino's discovery that anything seen, in being seen, becomes unfamiliar. The resulting disorientation is not distance from living but involvement with it. The works in this collection reflect on a living among awful funny things which are by convention flatly accepted. Scalapino leaves the milieu of acceptance in place (because it is there), but disconcerts it by unflattening the 'things' within it. In part this is achieved through a tension and release of observation (and its equivalent thought) which is erotic--or rather, eroticism is analogous to daily experience, in the sense that one can see that one's lover is terrifyingly unlike oneself everyday. The book ends with the title poem, Crowd and not evening or light, a work in phrases and photographs (also by Scalapino), in which the stasis (formulation) and movement (extension) of thought as reflection (hence the aptness of the photographs) is beautifully displayed. This entire collection makes a remarkable and wonderful book from a poet whose work I myself deeply admire--something I am happy to have had a chance to say in public." --Lyn Hejinian