This falls under the “There are other Buddhist poets in the world besides Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Basho” category. Leslie Scalapino is a writer and a Buddhist; you may find her work interesting and challenging.
Many Buddhists, especially in the West, have a collection of dharma books, and keep up to date on the latest readings and dharma studies, to support their meditation practice. What can we learn from Buddhist poets? Perhaps there is nothing to learn. But often, one may open such a book, and follow the movement of dharma as it sits, flows, runs, trembles, and explodes across the page. These books are worth reading, and the poets are worth supporting. Scalapino is respected within poetry circles, but I notice that she, and many other Buddhist poets (aside from Ginsberg, Snyder, Basho, and a handful of haiku poets) are rarely mentioned among Buddhists. She has been called a “language poet” and an “experimental” poet. But why should that keep her from being read by Buddhists? Meditation is after all, an experimental process, too, requiring patience and attention, even to phenomena that might be experienced as difficult.
I am concerned in my own work with the sense that phenomena appear to unfold. (What is it or) how is it that the viewer sees the impression of history created, created by oneself though it’s occurring outside?
Multiple perspective (in these works), in which the viewer and speaker are ‘within’ (being its inside) the work, allows reality to leak from many holes all around. As (spatially) infinity is all around one, it creates a perspective that is socially democratic, individual (in the sense of specific) and limitless.
–Leslie Scalapino
Here’s some info on Scalapino’s latest book, Floats Horse-Horse or Horse-Flows:
Miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping across the desert in Toyota pick-ups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams’s deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more – Leslie Scalapino’s Floats Horse-Floats of Horse-Flows is a dazzling, startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states – an alexia where unknown words create a future – and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino’s language. Leslie Scalapino’s writing reveals how language – and therefore thought itself – can go beyond what we are accustomed to, and the forms in which she writes delightfully defy our expectations. Yet her work is infused with a seriousness, a passion, a timeliness, and an intelligence with which we profoundly identify – Lydia Davis, author of Samuel Johnson is Indignant.
About the Author
LESLIE SCALAPINO has previously won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Poetry Center Award from San Francisco State University, and the Lawrence Lipton Prize. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and in both the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize series. She has long been associated with the poetry of the Language School, but in recent years has branched out into fiction, autobiography, and inter-genre work. This is her 4th full-length work of fiction and her first publication with Starcherone Books.
