How Phenomena
Appear to Unfold

Leslie Scalapino

2011 • 312 pp. • $24.00 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-12-2
Cover sculpture by Petah Coyne.

• Galatea Resurrects review. December 22, 2011.
• New Pages review by Alyse Bensel. September 1, 2011.
• Rob Mclennan review. August 30, 2011.
• Jacket2 review by Charles Bernstein. July 3, 2011.
• Small Press Distribution Non-Fiction Best-Seller. April - June 2011.

The present edition is thirty-one essays and twelve poetic pieces. Expanded from the first edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Potes & Poets, 1989), this version includes twenty-three new essays (only three of which have been published in previous collections) and seven additional poetic pieces.

In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It’s in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called “the rim of occurring.” “Writing on rim” is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: “The future creates the past.”

—Joan Retallack

As always, Scalapino pushes beyond any easy sense of essay. What unfolds here is the startling unexpectedness of thought, articulated in visual and verbal forms that confound genre categories. In this book, Scalapino creates fields for thinking-as-perception, in which the poem emerges from the essay as counterpoint and newly forming foundation. The complex of disparate parts creates working models for a social formalism.

—Charles Bernstein review for Jacket2, July 3, 2011

The expansive nature of the project, which could have broadened further over years, is only one of many regrets such a volume can't help but contain, as well as an awe in the kind of work she'd been able to accomplish, adding further to the conversation of a number of writers and their works. When any writer dies, there is always the question of what we didn't know about, what works might not have yet appeared in print, a natural impulse against the fear of never seeing new work by that writer ever again. Throughout these essays, explorations, poems and prose-works, Scalapino unfolds, appears to unfold, and perhaps unfolds, one layer at a slowly time.

— Rob Mclennan review. August 30, 2011.

Praise for the 1989 edition:

Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference between form and content, so now they would separate “theory” from “practice,” and thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a thinking about thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and practice as irrelevant as that of form and content, mentality and physicality, art and reality.
        Leslie Scalapino is one of a certain number of contemporary poets who have engaged in the struggle, not against distinctions but against the reification of false oppositions. Her work, in her volumes of poetry and in the collection here, is a thinking and a thinking about that, including small details and larger continua; these essays (works) are an essential testament to poetry and to its embodiment, and the book is an important contribution to the singularity and wholeness of her project.

—Lyn Hejinian

Everything conceives of what Leslie does. It’s one of the functions of literature to take us in and out of time. She writes directly at the subject from inside it. Remembering forgets even itself when taken out of time.

—Alan Davies

Leslie Scalapino’s writing is grounded in a singular and acute critical intelligence. It is work which challenges the conventional limits of genre and subject, even as it interrogates the surfaces and spaces of everyday life, revealing the simultaneity of the “floating”—or hidden—world beneath. The essays and plays collected here represent a richly imaginative extension of that exploratory project.

—Michael Palmer

About the Cover Art:

Untitled # 1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu), 2009–2010
by Petah Coyne
Apple tree, taxidermy Black Melinistic Pheasants, taxidermy Blue India Peacocks, taxidermy Black-Shouldered Peacocks, taxidermy Spaulding Peacocks, black sand from pig iron casting, Acrylex 234, black paint, cement, chicken wire fencing, wood, gravel, sisal, staging rope, cotton rope, insulated foam sealant, pipe, epoxy, threaded rod, wire, screws, jaw-to-jaw swivels
158 x 264 x 288 inches (401.3 x 670.6 x 731.5 cm)
Collection: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
© Petah Coyne
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
Photo © Elisabeth Bernstein

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art has aquired Petah Coyne’s “Untitled # 1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu)” (2009-2010) as the centerpiece of “The Big Reveal,” an exhibit of more than two dozen new acquisitions. It opens September 23, 2011.
Click here to read more.

The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by support from: