reared with pious zeal the massy pile

Here, still sequestered, Penmon's sacred dome
Recalls to mind the inmates of the tomb
Who reared with pious zeal the massy pile
And filled with notes of praise the echoing aisle;
When Idwal, born of Cambria's regal race,
Beheld with guardian eye the happy place.
Alas! what is it now? the damp abode
Of slimy snails, the spider and the toad,
Where waking owls in screaming concert call
Their prowling mates when evening's shadows fall.

(Richard Llwyd, Beaumaris Bay, 1800)



If one is not in one's motions (drops out of these, separated) – by not attending, these motions don't even occur (in one) – one has the sense of not living in that instant or at all. Terror at night of not living at that instant at that night.

(Leslie Scalapino, Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography + Fiction, 2003)

disbelief is the action of not

Reading Scalapino's New Time, 1999, which is a straightforward poem compared to the hybrid poetry-prose of Dahlia's Iris or Defoe, I think how cleanly it accomplishes her idea of immediacy or rupture in comparison to the other two books (because poetry more naturally allows for it, see Ashbery, Trakl, etc), and then I reason that the awkwardness of the hybrids may even be a disruptive point – in fact, is, or so I assume when I hear of her affirming the importance of a "physical alteration being literal" in hmmmm, 1976, a piece of writing in which a man is imagined as a seal.* Not compared to a seal, she says: but is a seal, an impossibility that is supposed to produce "disbelief." "[D]isbelief is the action of not being duped ‘inside’ any kind of seeing either optical or conceptual." So, Brechtishly, if you are disbelieving then you are not duped, you are looking at what is going on 'outside' the words, not only taking a casual pleasure in them, and you are aware that the form here in front of you is not the only form that form can take.

(Regarding Scalapino's automatic writing – the seal/man idea coming up spontaneously, she says – I want to say something about the way that visual artists around the '60s and '70s were developing a trust in the worthiness of poured liquids, e.g., Benglis, Hesse – and I wonder if the connection that her blurb writer at Green Integer made with Breton could be directed there as well, at this faith in spewing something --)

I disbelieve more when I read the hybrids, especially when she reaches the detective-novel inserts. Meanwhile, in a normal detective novel (I am remembering Peter Temple and calling him normal, but is he?), the immediacy moves along with a personality I understand, descending inevitably into misery. Compare to Trakl. The misery is part of the Temple story's continuity. The immediate shocks are always marks on his path into that swamp pit. A Peter Temple detective story maintains this non-chaotic sense of hierarchy that Scalapino saw herself acting against.

But her kind of disruption itself is not, I think, understood (or in other words, felt) immediately, in the way that a disruption inside the hierarchy would be – David Jones, for example, pointing out that his Ancient Romans speak like Cockneys in The Anathemata, 1951, which I want to read as a riposte against T.S. Eliot's assumption that Cockneys are harbingers perhaps of degradation. Here they are at the beginning of things, a group of originators. But since Jones made a point of saying it, I think he envisioned some readers reacting to his Cockney Romans as if he was trying to make them disbelieve - in the Scalapino sense – as if he had given them the equivalent of a seal/man.


*described here.

looks calm because it is serial,

There is a sentence in the middle of Leslie Scalapino's Defoe, 1994, that is probably trying to explain to you why she has written it the way she has: "A book looks calm because it is serial, which is a form unrelated to suffering." That sentence comes just after one about detective novels; "Why the form of the detective novel as if it were a certain thing known which is about finding corpses." And then on the next line like this:

it is out before.
Seeing (our) actual in reality dying in that the (other) finds the corpses after they're dead.

Later when she mentions detective novels again it becomes evident that by "suffering" she also means "the present." You can only suffer in the present. In this book she wants the immediacy of a certain kind of detective fiction – she wants to be the sort of author who can write, "I walk into the room. Bang," to indicate a shooting, so that the reader feels as if they are encountering the sentences just as they are being made, as if the writing and the reading were being performed at the same time. The blurb on the back compares her somewhat freeform association of ideas to the automatic writing of the surrealists. Her ideal sentence would not be one that is "dying" and leaving the reader to "find the corpse" but one which comes to life when they reach it.

She is not thinking of the kind of detective novel (or rather not considering the aspect of the detective novel) that Fredric Jameson was writing about in the essay* on William Carlos Williams's Paterson, 1946 – 1958, when he says that Williams's doctor making house calls fills the same narrative role as the detective who has a reason to visit every different class of society, enabling the author to voice broad-ranging opinions about recent events, scandals, political corruption, the behaviour of people in mansions compared to the ones in slums, and so on. Scalapino is not interested in that calm overview technique, but she wants to comment on the state of society nonetheless, especially when it comes to abuse meted out by the rich and powerful. Her abuse is not planted inside a network of cultural specifics, however (or not one that she describes, although the reader can see that she is drawing on some definite things, like the American experience in Vietnam); and in this she is, again, not like the detective novels that Jameson is thinking of, though he refers to the genre as if it comes in only one flavour: I think? Dozens of people were shot up the road from us a little over a month ago and the sheer ruthlessness with which the city has responded to "the abject" is taking all our breaths away, as it is supposed to; we are caught inside an ad campaign, a muscular effort of will.



*The Poetics of Totality, published in The Modernist Papers, 2007.