Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California.
An experimental writer associated with the West Coast Language poets, Leslie Scalapino attended Reed College and received an MA in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Scalapino’s writing often blurs the distinctions between poetry, prose, and even the visual arts—her book Crowd and not evening or light (1992) includes photographs with handwritten notes. Her collections include Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), that they were at the beach-aeolotropic series (1985), and the trilogy The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1991). (From PoetryFoundation.org)
————
Nikki Reimer is the author of [sic].


7 comments
Lemon Hound says:
May 31, 2010
Thanks Nikki. Very sad.
m says:
May 31, 2010
Thanks for posting about her. I'm ashamed to say that I'm not familiar with her work at all, so I followed the link the KSW archive and unfortunately the first set cuts out during her first poem and the second set isn't available. I don't know if it's my lousy connection or if something is wrong on the KSW side, but hearing just the first bit of her first poem, I *really* want to hear more.
I'm going to track down some of her books. Any suggestion which would be a good one to start with?
rodney k says:
May 31, 2010
Hi m,
FWIW, I just tracked down “It's go in the horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006″ at the public library.
“Zither & Autobiography” is also a good point of entry. It mixes clear autobiographical detail with the totally unique way she handles subjectivity (reader's and writer's) in her poetry.
m says:
May 31, 2010
Thanks, Rodney! Will look for both.
drakealley says:
May 31, 2010
The Poetry Foundation also has a few poems by her in their online archive of poems. Another good place to start.
Lemon Hound says:
Jun 1, 2010
Nice blog, Drakealley…you make me miss Vancouver even more than I usually do.
drakealley says:
Jun 1, 2010
Thanks, Sina. By the way, I just read Expressway last week — a really good book for oil spill melancholia. I like that it's not just a critique, but also a vision and challenge. Here's to doing as undoing, doing as soothing. Maia