In Memoriam, Leslie Scalapino

I was on an intentionally unplugged week's vacation this past week and so could not respond to the terribly sad news that one of the most significant poets of the late 20th century, Leslie Scalapino, had died. Leslie's most recently published book, FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS, is just out from Starcherone, but this note is about much more than this. Leslie had in recent years done significant work in bridging the gulf between the avant-gardes of poetry and fiction. She had also given us a writing that was so absolutely distinctive and her own for some thirty years that even her passing from this world will not diminish the sound of her voice, the voice of her words, in our ears as we go forward. I first saw Leslie read in Boulder in 1986, already at that time familiar with her work from her astonishing That They Were at the Beach. In the same way that you know a location exists on the map even when you are not there for several years, I knew Leslie and her work existed and would be consistent and undeniable from that time forward. It is as Lydia Davis has said of Leslie's work, "a new book by Leslie Scalapino is - always! - a cause for celebration." We will have one more that I know of; the sequel to Floats Horse-Floats will be published I believe in the coming year by Post-Apollo. But she has left us much, even as we grieve her loss. I say this without fawning or exaggeration of her importance: Leslie's way of using words was one whose echoes were among the most undeniable of any writer of the last 50 years in the American English language, and I will hear them in my own and in others forever.