Our Newest eBook: It’s go in/ Quiet illumined grass/ Land by Leslie Scalapino.
We’re thrilled to be launching our third eBook, It’s go in/ Quiet illumined grass/ Land by Leslie Scalapino – out now! This publication is part of Open Poetics Series 1: our series of free, digital-critical editions designed for readers, scholars, students and teachers.
It’s go in/ Quiet illumined grass/ Land is a book-length poem, first published by The Post-Apollo Press in 2002. Scalapino first presented the poem at the opening of Petah Coyne’s exhibition White Rain (Galerie Lelong, NYC, 2001). The work of visual artist and sculptor Petah Coyne serves as a kind of visual metaphor for Scalapino’s writing: Coyne’s installations suspend liminal temporality through silk flowers and taxidermy, congealed into angles, lines and relation. Similarly, Scalapino invites the reader into a contemplative space that is outside of linearity and inside a rhythm of spacious and exacting encounter-ing. What does it mean to “Always stay in / the quiet illumined grass/ land—” ? Where and what and how is this place and what are the possibilities there?
From Petah Coyne’s installation White Rains (2001) as printed in It’s Go In/ Quiet Illumined Grass/ Land (2002) by Leslie Scalapino.
This digital-critical edition offers insights into the lines of Leslie Scalapino and Petah Coyne’s convergence, featuring Coyne’s work on Scalapino’s books, essays and talks. A selection of adjacent artist-poet dialogues is situating Scalapino’s work within a wider network of peers and collaborators, such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith.
The edition also includes readings from and inspired by It’s go in / Quiet illumined grass / Land, as well as writings on the larger poetic project of Scalapino.
Open Poetics Series 1 on CUNY’s Manifold
Open Poetics is created in partnership with CUNY’s Manifold Scholarship, an open-access, collaborative, digital platform for scholarly publishing. Signing up for an account is easy, free and gives access to hundreds of project libraries such as ours. The platform includes a group annotation feature, which facilitates dynamic line-by-line conversation, allowing readers to puzzle out the text via their own marginalia, or in discussion and collaboration within private reading groups.
Open Poetics publications are divided into Series 1 and Series 2, with the former devoted to critical editions of out-of-print titles by O Books and The Post-Apollo Press, and the latter consisting of select Litmus works that are especially suited to the multimedia possibilities of online publishing.
Previous editions in the series include From A to Z by Etel Adnan and Memnoir by Joan Retallack.
We hope that you will use this resource for your classroom, book club and/or scholarship and would love to hear from you with any feedback.