Something from Nothing: The Disontological Poetics of Leslie Scalapino

Abstract

Leslie Scalapino's writings require of their reader a tremendous amount of concentration, discipline, and patience. The sentences that Scalapino uses within her poems are often spare, affectless, and radically discontinuous, and because these sentences are frequently bereft of a stable or easily identifiable context, her poems can alternately produce a hypnotic allure or a jarring, disoriented sensation. Like novices in some esoteric tradition, the readers of Scalapino's texts must engage in a careful practice of focused attention due to the complex and abstruse nature of the poet's writings. That Scalapino's work demands a level of nearly meditative concentration is not altogether surprising: Scalapino develops her poetics in part from Buddhist principles and can point to her own early introduction to Buddhism as formative. Elisabeth Frost argues persuasively that Scalapino is indebted to Gertrude Stein and to Stein's development of an epistemology of composition, yet Scalapino has also remarked upon the prior and substantial influence of Buddhist philosophy and, more specifically, the teachings of Nagarjuna on her