How can you think or talk about Leslie Scalapino’s work without confronting the problem of genre? Her piece in Kiosk, as is so often the case with her writing, invokes two in its title, Dahlia’s Iris – Secret Autobiography and fiction. Genre has, as much as anything, to do with the reader’s expectation & the writer’s social responsibility to recognize that dynamic. Nobody does more to explore & confound an easy boundaries of reactive presumption than Scalapino. But I would love to be able to articulately explain what I think is going on here. I’m nowhere near being able to do so today.

 

Secondly, in order to adequately discuss her work, you (I) would have to also understand the function of syntax in Scalapino’s writing. There are so many sentences like this one:

 

Verbally savagely assaulting but as the means of now indicating one is a servant only (inherently) yet the same person one has been, when how had this come to be?

 

I don’t know that I’ve ever come across the construction “when how” before & yet my mind adapts to it instantly. Reading sentences like this, I sense my self coming into focus – into a sense of my own presence – repeatedly during the evolution of the syntax. In any sentence like the one above, there can be no word more stark than only.

 

I really like how Pat Durgin approaches Hannah Weiner’s work in his essay on her piece – and that Kiosk also prints Hannah’s proto-essay “Awareness and Communication” as part of Durgin’s project here.

 

Finally there is a series of pieces in memory of Leslie Fiedler who passed away last year, written by Robert Creeley, Raymond Federman & Bill Sylvester, all colleagues at Buffalo. I only met Fiedler once, when I was invited to his house for a Fourth of July party in 1970. He reminded me instantly of Yosemite Sam & my one other memory of that occasion, beyond the tie-dye flag that towered over the neighborhood from Fiedler’s rooftop, was seeing John Barth wearing, I swear, a dashiki. Fiedler’s own critical writing isn’t read as much as it should be these days. For all of his cantankerousness, Fiedler proved to be an important critical balance especially within the academy during the 1950s & ‘60s, demonstrating a possible critical vision for writing outside of the one proffered by the “specialized readers” of New Criticism.