Scalapino on the Body

Jacket magazine has posted a talk by the late great Leslie Scalapino, originally given at a panel entitled "Language Poetry and the Body." It's an interesting talk not only for Scalapino's elliptical theorizing about the body's relation to writing and history, but for the way she makes that history very personal. Near the beginning of the talk, she writes:

As writing, one can’t conceive of a future without changing the past and present. Corporal body and the future are separated, detached, though the body must be there for there to be an individual’s future; maybe there can’t be sense of body without sense of future? The body must happen simultaneous in order to invent the future.

But this sort of abstraction is turned on its head as the piece goes on, and she refers directly to the experience of losing her job after battling a male poet regarding his sexist comments:

The effect on my body...was a sense of no distinction between body and mind in their utter cessation of my having been blasted; body-mind suspended in a sensation of obliteration. (The poem thus corresponded with — as suppression/shock — and then altered that physical state.)