I didn't know much about Whalen's poetry until he died this year, but the terrific memorial reading for him here in San Francisco drove me to "Overtime" and man, what a find. The Beats were more learned than the 'first thought, best thought' aesthetic suggests, and Whalen's poems balance religion, philosophy and cranky Zen insight with a casual, conversational Americanese in a way few of his more famous contemporaries could touch. His poems draw from a deep past that embraces everything from ancient Chinese verse to classical music, but insist that it walk down the street in T-shirt and jeans. Whalen spent the last three decades of his life at the San Francisco Zen Center--his particular brand of Buddhism, so generous to human failings (starting always, comically, with his own) and never, ever doctrinaire, has to be one of the most attractive spins on Eastern religion I've read. Whalen was in it and of it, never above it. He gives the moment plenty of wiggle room in his writing, so that cats, friends and silly thoughts can all stray into the poems without being shoo'd out for art. Whatever Beat meant, Whalen shows it in about its best light. Poetry's a little thinner and more straight-laced with him gone.

This isn't some crumbling, dry keeper of the hallowed institution that is sometimes "poetry." It is sad that Whalen's works are so hard to come by these days.

Why aren't you reading this?

Philip Whalen is a national treasure, one of our most important living poets. This collection, masterfully assembled by Michael Rothenberg, is a great place to start if you're not familiar with Whalen's work, and a glorious visiting ground for those of us who have already discovered him. Don't let the word POETRY dissuade you. You will not be bored for a minute.

Whether or not you will "like" this book is really quite irrelevant ... if pick it up, make no sense of it, and put it down in disgust then you have missed the point. This "novel" is an experiment in what literature of the future might look like, how far we can get from narrative and still "mean" something to a reader, and so on.

Read this book if you are turned on by surrealist literature (like stuff published by Atlas Press), John Ashbery's poetry, the films of Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, or Derrida's epistolary novel "The Post Card." The Brakhage connection is particularly apt here -- his films are often viewed with incomprehension themselves, but their influence has subtly permeated our culture by impacting the vision of many filmmakers. You can't look at TV for ten minutes these days without seeing Brakhage's influence in a commercial or TV program. I can imagine Scalapino and other writers like her having a similar, subtle effect on writing of the future.

Scalapino's work is extremely exciting and intelligent, even if the investigations of language on such delicate display here now seem a bit familiar, given the profusion of poets inspired by the so-called language school.

This issue is a collection of poet, prose writers responses to the relation of music to poetry. Visual artists also contributed. Never academic or obscurred by the personal, never a simple expression of personality, this book is for anyone interested in what is going on in innovative and expermental writing today.

Surfing through Amazon I noted with surprise that neither of the existing reviews mentions the explicit influence of Buddhism in this book, especially the work of the ancient Indian teacher Nagarjuna. Aside from its (very high) value of delineating the poetics of a major American poet, the book is an excellent introduction to Nagarjuna's thought, and to the issues of language/mind/world that underlie both much of contemporary (and, admittedly, but perhaps not as explicitly, other than contemporary) poetics and millenia of religious philosophy, especially (but, again, not exclusively) in Asia.

I like this book because it presents criticism of it's own work (criticism and work, as one various work) in a single volume. By doing so, Scalapino beats any critic to the page, thereby forcing a new kind of criticism, an exponential eye.

"This is despair" is one of the recurring fragments in New Time, and "being depressed is enhanced-- by the rim?" is another. Some find this book full of sublime poetry, but this reader found it full of elegant, smug, and fragmentary babble; the effect is like one of seeing Kyoto on valium, but the impact is more fractured and disturbing than that. I urge this poet to work out more, to see more, to connect to other people and the world beyond her own intense solipsism in love with its own twists and terms. The cold war of the US Scalapino hothouse is over, and despair and preciosity are not enough to engage this fallen fallen world. Go back to Go on this book, or listen to Basho or Dionne Warwick for some beauty that knows more than its own same-old language gaming. "New Time" is not new, just repetition of the same strategies times 94 pages.

This book is hard to read, but there are intense moments of absolute pure Poetry. Is Leslie Scalapino a genius? Does she know what she is doing? If this book is so hard to read, why have I read it at least ten times already? With what insights am I rewarded for fighting my way through the jungle of what it takes to arrive at the moments of bliss?

This book is sort of like John Ashbery's (now famous) 1962 THE TENNIS COURT OATH, and her writing reminds me most of Gertrude Stein's STANZAS FOR MEDITATION. except Scalapino's NEW TIME is more fragmented or disjointed, but also far more lyrical, and far more stunning (and simple) in its revelations.

This book will not go away, and hopefully Scalapino will continue to forge ahead into new, unplowed terrain, sharing with her fans the layers of the pitch-black strata of her genius wherein sparkling diamonds can be unearthed, but only with a lot of work and patience.

if you like funky, messed up poetry, scalipino is the poet for you. probably one of the strangest and hardest to understand pieces of literature since Calvino's If on winter's night traveler, Scalipino has taken the abstract form of poetry and destroyed it.