Capturing Gerunds

On two occasions I gave a talk when Leslie Scalapino was in the audience. Both times she asked me a challenging question that was difficult to answer, and both times her intense sceptical yet affirming resistance went to the heart of the matter. From reading her marvellous writings I imagine she approached the world this way, questioning, wondering, inquiring, whether about behaviour in public places, the activities of the eye, the poetics of reflection, or the writings of her contemporaries. These verbal nouns are especially apposite; the continuous present was her time zone. Her preoccupation with the unfolding moment makes me think of one of the classics of English humour, a book belonging to my parents whose pictures and captions I was captivated by long before I could understand them. One drawing stood out. A knobbly-kneed white explorer in shorts and a pith helmet leads a creature by its long snout, and the caption explains: ‘Kennedy discovers the gerund and leads it back into captivity’. As a child I thought that Ronald Searle’s drawing of the crestfallen, tapir-like gerund was an illustration to another story of the old British empire and its exciting jungles, not understanding that this was a reference to what for earlier generations of children was a burdensome Latin textbook. Leslie Scalapino hunted gerunds not to put them in the artifical cages of a poem but to observe them in their wild habitats of thought and affect, where they traced out narrative paths that few writers have observed with such acuity. She might perhaps be called a narrative poet if this did not sound so Victorian, because no contemporary poet has done as much to explore how we compose our responses to the events around us in the pre-languages of thinking. Perhaps we could call her a poet of the birth of narrative, incipience in action, the initial foldings and recursions of narrative, its first dithering temporalities. The portions of the universe she let happen in her writing will not be irretrievably lost, considering what she leaves us.

Peter Middleton