Leslie Scalapino 1944-2010

It is with great sadness that I share this news:

Leslie Scalapino
1944-2010

“Scalapino makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once.”
— Philip Whalen

"A solitary, an original. What other way could there be for someone with a mind so electric, independent and restless except out into the space-time conundrum? Because she is thoroughly modern, every moment of experience is interrupted and unstable, accompanied by introspection and sidelong glimpses at the social. The poet here is a horrified witness, a perpetual child, a sexually alert female who keeps looking back to believe what she has seen. This is a superb and important contribution to philosophy, theology, psychology, and the science of knowing."

--Fanny Howe, on Leslie Scalapino's It's go in horizontal, selected poems 1974-2006.

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

The entire announcement, compiled by Leslie's family, can be found here

Click here to read an excerpt from that they were at the beach

There will be a memorial event for Leslie Scalapino at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st.