one is in space / one is in time: an online Reading and generative Writing Workshop
We’re thrilled to invite you to “one is in space and/ one is in time:” an online Launch of the digital-critical Edition of Leslie Scalapino’s It’s go in/ quiet illumined grass/ land in collaboration with CUNY Manifold, Litmus Press and guest editor Małgorzata Myk.
This launch will be accompanied by writing prompts and discussion questions, offering entrance points for readers, writers and teachers, who might be interested to incorporate the work of experimental poet Leslie Scalapino into syllabi, reading groups or their own work. We invite you to sign up for an account with CUNY Manifold prior to the event in order to access the eBook and allow for easeful participation. Signing up for an account is very quick (you only need an email) and entirely free. The best part is that it also gives access to hundreds of project libraries such as the Litmus Open Poetics project.
Known for her many collaborations with contemporary fellow artists and poets, Scalapino wrote It’s go in/ quiet illumined grass/ land in conversation with the work of her close friends: the sculptor and photographer Petah Coyne, to whom the book is dedicated, and the poet Philip Whalen (1923-2002). Scalapino first read the poem at the opening of Coyne’s exhibition White Rain in Galerie Lelong, NYC, in 2001. Included in 2005 Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry and compared by its editor Andrew Schelling to the Tibetan prayer wheel, the poem is a meditative exploration of durations drawn out through recursive motions of poetic language. The poet investigates its incremental movements and observes its action on the horizon where outside events as well as the speaker’s interior states are co-constituted. The title phrase recurs throughout the poem, resonating differently each time and urging the reader to attend to it anew every time it reappears. Enacting repetition as potential for change, Scalapino’s poem witnesses the public world as a space where one repeatedly confronts suffering and oppression, yet where through writing one can simultaneously encounter possibilities of illumination.
Originally published by The Post-Apollo Press in 2002, It’s go in/ quiet illumined grass/ land is now available at CUNY’s open-access e-book platform with links to images, videos, and other resources that contextualize the poem, allowing readers to explore the text’s collaborative features and engage in its collective reading. Create an account with CUNY Manifold and start exploring the edition right away.
About the workshop’s participants:
Małgorzata Myk works in the Department of North American Literature and Culture, Lodz University, Poland. She is the author of the monograph Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino (2019). In the past, she studied English at the University of Orono, Maine, where she also worked for the National Poetry Foundation and the journal Paideuma. She was the Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship recipient in 2017/18 and conducted her research in the Archive for New Poetry (UCSD). Her new book project is devoted to the concept of duration in the 21 st -century North American experimental poetry, focusing on the work of poets who are interested in the archive figure and foreground the sonic dimension of poetry. She is also a translator of poetry and has translated into Polish the work of Leslie Scalapino, Lisa Robertson, Kevin Davies, E. Tracy Grinnell, and Divya Victor, among others, as well as the work of Polish avant-garde poet Maria Cyranowicz into English. Her translations of Cyranowicz’s poems are forthcoming from Litmus Press in the 2024 anthology Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland, edited by Mark Tardi.