Unlike the New Sentence, the characteristic Scalapino sentence shifts direction two, three, many times before coming (occasionally) to a period.

 

So that any gap or distance that might be felt between sentences — which might also be paragraphs — is not felt, or is hardly felt, precisely because the referential frame of the sentence functions as if an irresistible gravitational force, sucking attention back in to an unstable & sometimes altogether absent center.

 

One senses — & sensing would appear to be the primary mode of comprehension in reading any work by Scalapino — that she objects on principle to syntax, to anything that takes our attention away literally from the present (word, always word) & that this objection, resistance, is precisely what animates, illuminates this most syntactic of poets (not unlike, say, the ways in which Robert Grenier's objections to speech illuminate his own engagement with the spoken).

 

Scalapino's resistance comes across often (always?) as emotion — exactly. It reinforces the tenor of her text — she is often angry — Autobiography is for all its marvels also an accounting of every slight, each humiliation, especially in/of childhood.

 

This emotive core is at the heart of Scalapino's integrity as a poet. Hers is a commitment to telling it true quite apart from any distractions of that mask, clarity. It is this integrity, I think, that has given Scalapino such a deeply loyal group of readers. That commitment to truth telling may be the rarest of all human virtues, but is one that Scalapino has in spades.