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Considering How Exaggerated Music Is. LESLIE SCALAPINO. North Point. 1982.
by CRAIG WATSON
Leslie Scalapino writes serial poems made up of short, inter-related texts, unified by narrative tensions and imagetic continuities. Considering How Exaggerated Music Is collects three published chapbooks with three new works and explores the poet's vision of dislocation and confluence between her public and personal selves. The sense of alienation and displacement which run through Scalapino's poems does not describe existential resignation, though there is a dream-like sense of mystery in which subjectivity is as fluid, frightening and uncontrolled as the world of external events. Through a compositional technique which relies on association rather than story-telling to maintain narrative interest, Scalapino's poems maintain a surface tension between the source of events and the writer's response to them. Aware of her presence as a participant rather than simply an observerrecorder, she struggles between the need to enter a public world with...