CALIFORNIA  POETS

Photo by Eddy Pay

Adelle Joan Foley

August 15, 1940 - June 27, 2016

Resident of Oakland

ADELLE JOAN FOLEY (August 15, 1940-June 27, 2016) was a poet, a social, neighborhood and arts activist, and, for the past twenty years, a member of the administration of AC Transit. She was, in addition, a devoted and loving mother to her son, Sean Foley, and a deep friend to her daughter-in-law, Kerry. She married poet Jack Foley on December 21, 1961 (the longest night of the year), and their marriage was a long and happy one. The Foleys were familiar and much-loved figures in the local poetry scene, performing duets of Jack's unique choral pieces and Adelle's haiku. Beat poet Michael McClure wrote, "Adelle Foley's haikus show us humanity. Their vitality and imagination shine from her compassion; from seeing things as they truly are." Jack writes of "Your presence next to me as we read poetry together…your voice rising to mine."

Adelle was born in New York City to a dentist father and a mother who was both a housewife and a social activist, believing in liberal causes and active in The New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, an organization that provides free summer vacations in the country to New York City children from low-income families. Adelle continued her mother's activism in Oakland as a member of many local organizations, assisting in neighborhood clean ups, neighborhood watch programs, and in revitalizing the Melrose Branch of the Oakland Library in East Oakland. "Could they ever guess / that we'd be celebrating / in 2016?" she wrote for the Melrose Branch's centennial. For these activities she was designated a "Local Hero." She was also a founding member of PEN Oakland and a member of the Board of the long-standing poetry organization, Poetry Flash.

Adelle graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Goucher College in 1961 and earned an MA in Economics from Cornell University in 1962. In 1963, she and Jack crossed the country in their 1956 Oldsmobile to Northern California, where they lived for the rest of their lives, settling for the first year in Berkeley and then in Oakland. Jack entered the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student in English literature, and Adelle found employment at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She left the Fed in the early 1990s to work for the City of San Francisco and then, after a period of uncertainty, transitioned to AC Transit, first as a temp employee in 1993 and then full time in 1995. She enjoyed her work there, spending her final years with the company as Retirement Administrator.

In 1989, she began to write poetry. Her chosen form was haiku, which she wrote in the traditional 5-7-5 syllables. One of her most memorable, "Learning to Shave: Father Teaching Son," concerned her son, Sean, born in 1974: "A nick on the jaw / The razor's edge of manhood / Along the bloodline." Her book, "Along the Bloodline," appeared in 2003. In it she declared, "It's not that I write / Because of what I see. I / See because I write." A second book, "Fennel in the Rain"—a collaboration with Jack—appeared in 2007. A final collection, edited by Jack, is forthcoming in 2016. The 2007 anthology, "For New Orleans," featured Adelle's contribution on its cover, and her long-running column in "The MacArthur Metro" always concluded with a haiku.

Adelle Foley is remembered for her great intelligence, her quick wit, her sudden lyricism, her social conscience, and her flashing smile. She wrote in a "selfie" haiku:

"An infectious smile /

Tapping out daily Haiku /

Pretty good figure."

In 1960 she sang an ancient French song, "A la Claire Fontaine," to Jack. The refrain of the song is "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime / Jamais je ne t'oublierai" ("I have loved you for a long time / I will never forget you"). Over the years they often sang the song together. In 2016 Jack sang the song to Adelle as she lay dying in the hospital: "I have loved you for a long time / I will never forget you."

Jack and Adelle Foley can be seen in many clips on YouTube.

The funeral was held at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611. Family and friends were invited to speak at the service. A second memorial tribute to Adelle will be held later in the year, when her new book appears.

View the online memorial for Adelle Joan Foley

Published in East Bay Times on July 14, 2016



 

Mary Rudge (Alameda)

1928-2014

Mary Rudge, beloved Alameda Island's poet laureate, dies at 85

By Nanette Deetz (Alameda), Correspondent

Mary Rudge, Alameda's beloved first poet laureate, died Sunday, January 19, from cancer in her home with her daughter Diana Rudge by her side. She was 85.

On Saturday, Rudge participated in a celebration of poetry, art and dance entitled, "Collaboration and Inspiration," at the Alameda Historical Museum. She read her poem, "Irish Girls," with her daughter, accompanied by dance and music.

Rudge also presented her new book, "Jack London's Neighborhood, A Guide to History and Inspiration in Alameda."

Rudge was born in 1928 in Los Angeles, and grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. Even as a child, she loved art, and spent hours drawing, writing poetry and dreaming of traveling throughout the world with her poetry.

Rudge raised seven children as a single parent while overcoming tremendous obstacles in her own life. Throughout her life, she was an advocate for the homeless, artists, poets and social change.

Through her poetry, she encouraged multicultural understanding and acceptance of diversity. "We Who Are Luminous" was her signature poem, presented at the World Congress of Poets in San Francisco in 1985.

Rudge was named the poet laureate of Alameda in 2002. That same year, she began the Alameda Island Poets, a chapter of the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. She raised awareness about the importance of poetry by holding poetry contests in the high schools, and establishing poet laureates.

She encouraged youth poetry in her children's poetry contests at the Alameda Multicultural Center. And she held poetry readings at several events, including the Peanut Butter Festival on Webster Street, Art in the Park, Earth Day, cafes, and at Books Inc. on Park Street.

Rudge has published more than 20 books of poetry, and many of her poems have been translated into other languages.

"Mary traveled the world with Richard (Angilly) and I, spreading her message of art and peace everywhere she went and to everyone she met," said Natica Angilly of Artists Embassy International, referring to her husband and Rudge.

On May 11, 2013, the City of Berkeley honored Mary Rudge with a lifetime achievement award at the Berkeley Poetry Festival.

Among the organizations Rudge was involved with were the Ina Coolbrith Circle; Bay Area Poets Coalition; United Poets Laureates International; Jack London Society; Association of California Poet Laureates; PEN Oakland; California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc.; Dancing Poetry Festival; and Poets in the Schools.

Rudge also was a member of the Saint Albert's Chapter of Lay Dominicans since 1962.

She is survived by five children, Robin Davidson, Mary Star Rudge, Alice Mobarry, Glen Rudge and Diana Rudge; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by a son, Louis Jordan Rudge, and a daughter, Caroline Rudge.

FYI Services for Mary Rudge were held Wednesday with a Mass at St. Barnabas Church, 1427 6th St., Alameda. Interment was at St. Dominic's Cemetery in Benicia.

FOR MARY RUDGE (1928-2014): IN MEMORIAM

- Jack Foley (Oakland)

Mary—can scarcely believe it.

Just back from LA—would have liked to have told you about it.

I lost my Catholicism so many years back,

will never regain it

but I would have gone to church with you.

If anyone had power to bless…

But you would not receive such praise

We who are luminous

I loved the hum of your voice

the sweetness of your consciousness

that found good in everyone

are radiant

And you were Irish

Oh, Mary,

named for the mother of heaven

Stella maris, star of the sea,

are 90 % light,

how you loved ritual, color, dance

how your words

moved to the movement

in homage to spirit inhabiting everything

(as Pagan a thing as Christian)

Flames loop and leap the arteries

There is a core of ember in the womb

—Can scarcely believe your vanishing

beyond our brightness

beyond anything I can know

I remember your sweetness

your love of art

your passion for justice

in the bodies of strong women

reality and dream and memory

with hard and thudding rhythms   of our love

my love for you remains

here, on this earth,

under the deep sky of california

passionate and lasting as the redwoods

(like the one planted in 1980 by William Everson!)

and wishing that I am terribly wrong

about heaven

about the afterlife

so that you

might live

in all your dearness

in a house

that is on no corner

of any earthly city—

that you might have

the mansion

denied you

in life

       [lines in italics from Mary Rudge’s book, Water Planet]

SHE IS LUMINOUS

For Mary Rudge

 - Mary-Marcia Casoly

Now Mary steps out into the great adventure

radiant with passport

passing into the universes’ total imagination

Pattern dance of fireflies

Lines on the transit map of conversation

She is the poet

dropping her crust of seasons

she used to wear around her spirited antique frame

assured that her poetry brought about safety

and joy, curiosity and potions

from writing rich spices and riding camels so far—

a goddess watering the flowers of the world

one spout at a time. O there she goes sashaying,

her eyes wide behind her glasses, the world is imagination!

She is glad to have squeezed your hand,

glad she could be of help. She must be going,

poet of peace in a fiery fusion, traveling beyond creation.

 _________________________________________

FOR MARY RUDGE

— Adelle Foley

Came out of Texas

Scars of the great depression

Made you strong and sweet

You taught children art

Marched for peace and for justice

Traveled round the world

You published our poems

Taught us to work the camera

And roll the credits

At last we were stars.

Our 1990 feature

Is there on YouTube

We’ll miss those evenings

Driving from San Francisco

To Alameda

Trading bits of news,

Plans, shared memories, gossip

Rolling through the fog

Dancing in our dreams

You are forever our

Poet Laureate

  _________________________________________

MARY RUDGE

  — Clara Hsu

    Mistress Mary

    child of verse

    how did the curtain fall?

    With laurel crown

    on haloed hair

    and loving faces gathered around.

    Gentle Mary

    long endured

    brittle bones and heart.

    Mother Hubbard

    with a problem shoe

    fed her kids and filled the cupboard.

    Hail Mary

    full of grace

    the Lord is with thee.

    A lullaby

    from earth to heaven

    for the wee lamb blithe and spry.

   

RUTH DAIGON

February 17, 2010

Ruth Daigon was a much admired Canadian-American poet, who hailed from Winnipeg, spent many years in Connecticut, and gave her last decades to the San Francisco Bay Area and a poetry community that she loved, and that equally loved and embraced her. She passed away on February 17^th 2010.

At one account, Daigon published over 900 poems in literary journals and anthologies, and accomplished seven books of poetry in her lifetime. Her most recent collection, Handfuls of Time, was published in 2002 by David Alpaugh‘s Small Poetry Press. Alpaugh is one of the organizers of Sunday’s event.

Daigon received the Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize in 2001 and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (1997) among other awards. Aside from gaining a reputation for her poetry, Daigon was a valued member of the Bay Area poetry community, and helped to promote other poets by critiquing their work, writing book blurbs, hosting poetry events, and publishing them. She helped to organize the “Marin Poets Evening” featuring eight poets at Fort Mason's National Poetry Association, coordinated monthly readings featuring Marin poets, and was involved with the Marin Poetry Center and its Traveling Poetry show early on. For several decades, Ruth and her “Artie” (her husband Arthur) published Poets On, a literary zine that solicited work on a particular topic and then presented it in 40 issues for two decades.

Daigon’s creative career began in music. As a concert soprano, she toured with the New York Pro Musica group and performed with the Hartford Symphony. She had the honor of singing at Dylan Thomas’ funeral and she collaborated with W.H. Auden on a recording for Columbia Records. She described working with Auden, who came to rehearsals in “an unraveled sweater and old carpet slippers” as every inch a professional when she was interviewed for Lily, an online literary review.

Music was an integral part of her poetry writing and performing, and she was known to sing while giving a reading of her work. She said that “the sound and flow of my poetry, the rhythm, the cadence, lyric quality was given direction by my allegiance to music.” She advised others to “write to please yourself and not to impress others” and valued honesty, conviction, aliveness, and writing that was “fearless yet controlled” and “unselfconscious.”

Invocation

by Ruth Daigon

Let there be cool linen

and lovers resting between sheets

humming a small heaven between them

Let there be a settlement of snow

long green veils of rain

and radiant squalors

Let the pulse beat within us

rich as salt, hot as sun

giving time its edge

Let us steep tansy, coriander

and cloves in wine

drinking deep its magic cures

Let us bring the knower to the known

for there are no second comings

and what waits is just a breath away

(from Handfuls of Time)



REMEMBERING

Mark Baldridge

(1948-2014)

Mark Baldridge and Joyce Jenkins

On December 27, 2014, Calfifornia poetry and environmental communities lost an important leader and organizer, Mark Baldridge.  Baldridge directed the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival held in Berkeley and was also President of the Poetry Flash board of directors. A memorial gathering will be held on January 11; email editor @ poetryflash.org for details.

For Mark Baldridge (Berkeley)

 —Adelle Foley (Oakland)

We will remember

He pulled off Watershed

Despite the strong winds

How he organized

An Army of volunteers

For the Book Awards

Chairman of our Board

Mainstay of Poetry Flash

There at Joyce's side

Although Galway Kinnell was not born and did not live in California, he contributed greatly to the educations of many California poets, read frequently in the state, and was a mainstay at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in the Sierra Nevada for many summers.

Galway Kinnell

1927–2014

From Poetry Foundation.

Galway Kinnell was an award-winning poet best known for poetry that connects the experiences of daily life to much larger poetic, spiritual, and cultural forces. Often focusing on the claims of nature and society on the individual, Kinnell’s poems explore psychological states in precise and sonorous free verse. Critic Morris Dickstein called Kinnell “one of the true master poets of his generation.” Dickstein added, “there are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence.” Robert Langbaum observed in the American Poetry Review that “at a time when so many poets are content to be skillful and trivial, [Kinnell] speaks with a big voice about the whole of life.” Marked by his early experiences as a Civil Rights and anti-war activist, Kinnell’s socially-engaged verse broadened in his later years to seek the essential in human nature, often by engaging the natural and animal worlds. With a remarkable career spanning many decades, Kinnell’s Selected Poems (1980) won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in Pawtucket. A self-described introvert as a child, he grew up reading reclusive American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. After two years of service in the U.S. Navy, he earned a BA with highest honors from Princeton University—where he was classmates with poet W.S. Merwin—in 1948. He earned an MA from the University of Rochester a year later. Kinnell then spent many years abroad, including a Fulbright Fellowship in Paris and extended stays in Europe and the Middle East. Returning to the United States in the 1960s, Kinnell joined the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), registering African American voters in the South. Many of his experiences—world travel, city life, harassment as a member of CORE and an anti-Vietnam war demonstrator—eventually found expression in his poetry. One of the first voices to mark the change in American poetry from the cerebral wit of the 1950s to the more liberated, political work of the ‘60s, Kinnell “is a poet of the landscape, a poet of soliloquy, a poet of the city’s underside and a poet who speaks for thieves, pushcart vendors and lumberjacks with an unforced simulation of the vernacular,” noted the Hudson Review contributor Vernon Young.

Of his first books, What a Kingdom it Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964) and Body Rags (1968), Body Rags contains the bulk of Kinnell’s most praised and anthologized poems. Using animal experiences to explore human consciousness, Kinnell poems such as “The Bear” feature frank and often unlovely images. Kinnell’s embrace of the ugly is well-considered, though. As the author told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.” Though his poetry is rife with earthy images like animals, fire, blood, stars and insects, Kinnell does not consider himself to be a “nature poet.” In an interview with Daniela Gioseffi for Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kinnell noted, “I don’t recognize the distinction between nature poetry and, what would be the other thing? Human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth who build our elaborate cities and beavers are creatures of the earth who build their elaborate lodges and canal operations and dams, just as we do … Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us.”

Though obsessed with a personal set of concerns and mythologies, Kinnell does draw on the tradition of both his contemporaries and predecessors. Studying the work of Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, Kinnell’s innovations have “avoided studied ambiguity, and he has risked directness of address, precision of imagery, and experiments with surrealistic situations and images” according to a contributor for Contemporary Poetry. Critics most often compare Kinnell’s work to that of Walt Whitman, however, because of its transcendental philosophy and personal intensity; Kinnell himself edited The Essential Whitman (1987). As Robert Langbaum observed in American Poetry Review, “like the romantic poets to whose tradition he belongs, Kinnell tries to pull an immortality out of our mortality.”

Other well-known Kinnell works include The Book of Nightmares (1971) and The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-1964 (1974). The latter’s eponymous poem explores life on Avenue C in New York City’s Lower East Side, drawing inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” A book-length poem that draws heavily on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the ten parts of The Book of Nightmares revolve around two autobiographical moments—the births of Kinnell’s daughter and son—while examining the relationship between society and community through a symbolic system that draws on cosmic metaphors. The book is one of Kinnell’s most highly praised. Rilke was a particularly important poet for Kinnell and among his many acts as a translator, he would later co-translate The Essential Rilke (1999), with Hannah Liebmann.

Selected Poems (1982), for which Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize and was co-winner of the National Book Award in 1983, contains works from every period in the poet’s career and was released just shortly before he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. Almost twenty years after his Selected Poems, Kinnell released the retrospective collection, A New Selected Poems (2001), focusing on Kinnell’s poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. His poetry from this period features a fierce surrealism that also grapples with large questions of the human, the social and the natural. In the Boston Review, Richard Tillinghast commented that Kinnell’s work “is proof that poems can still be written, and written movingly and convincingly, on those subjects that in any age fascinate, quicken, disturb, confound, and sadden the hearts of men and women: eros, the family, mortality, the life of the spirit, war, the life of nations … [Kinnell] always meets existence head-on, without evasion or wishful thinking. When Kinnell is at the top of his form, there is no better poet writing in America.”

Kinnell’s last book, Strong is Your Hold (2006) was released the year before his 80th birthday. The book, which continues the more genial, meditative stance Kinnell has developed over the years, also includes the long poem “When the Towers Fell,” written about September 11, 2001. In an interview with Elizabeth Lund for the Christian Science Monitor Online, Kinnell declared, “It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.” Lund noted that “Kinnell never seems to lose his center, or his compassion. He can make almost any situation, any loss, resonate. Indeed, much of his work leaves the reader with a delicious ache, a sense of wanting to look once more at whatever scene is passing.”

Kinnell lived in Vermont for many years, and he died in 2014 at the age of 87.

Those who know Angelou's work, know she spent a fair amount of time in California. Here's an interesting anecdote that made it into the English Guardian newspaper.

"I came to know Maya Angelou in the early 1980s through Decca (Jessica) Mitford, the most leftwing Mitford sister, who was then living in California. This white aristocratic woman and the African American Maya proceeded, in the days of segregation, to drive together through the bitterly racially divided state of Arkansas. Upon being stopped and questioned by the police about their relationship, Decca would exclaim that Maya was her daughter. It was not really possible in age terms – Decca was 11 years older – and in racial terms? Decca simply said in her haughty voice: “These things just happened, my good man.” -- Jon Snow, The Guardian, 12/21/2014

Maya Angelou

1928-2014 , St. Louis , MO

From poets.org

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She was an author, poet, historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She was best known for her autobiographical books: Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013); Letter to My Daughter (2008); All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986); The Heart of a Woman (1981); Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976); Gather Together in My Name (1974); and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Among her volumes of poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (Random House, 1995); The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994); Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993); Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987); I Shall Not Be Moved (1990); Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983); Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975); and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diie (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the United States in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1982 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, “On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request. In 2000, she received the National Medal of Arts, and in 2010 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou wrote, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries “Three Way Choice.” She also wrote and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including “Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977).

Angelou died on May 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had served as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University since 1982. She was eighty-six.

 

Wanda Coleman

1946-2013 (Los Angeles)

from Poets.org

Born on November 13, 1946, Wanda Coleman grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her poetry collection Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

A former medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist, and Emmy-winning scriptwriter, Coleman received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books of poetry include Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (1996); Hand Dance (1993); African Sleeping Sickness (1990); A War of Eyes & Other Stories (1988); Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986 (1988); and Imagoes (1983). She also wrote Mambo Hips & Make Believe: A Novel (Black Sparrow Press, 1999) and Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales: New Stories (2008).

In an essay about Coleman’s Marshall-winning Bathwater Wine, the poet Marilyn Hacker wrote that Coleman’s poems display, “a verbal virtuosity and stylistic range that explodes/expands the merely linear, the simply narrative, the straightforwardly lyric, into a verbal mandala whose colors and textures spin off the page. Coleman is a poet who excels in public presentations, one whose work moves freely between the academy and the popular renaissance of poetry-as-performance in bars and coffeehouses— but her poems do not require an audible voice or physical presence: They perform themselves.”

The poet [and California State Poet Laureate] Juan Felipe Herrera called Coleman the “word-caster of live coals of Watts & LA.” She was regarded as a central figure in Los Angeles literary life. The Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin noted that Coleman, “helped transform the city’s literature.”

Coleman lived in Los Angeles until her death on November 22, 2013.

Leslie Scalapino (Santa Barbara/Berkeley)

1944-2010

Leslie Scalapino

Born on July 25, 1944, in Santa Barbara, California, Leslie Scalapino received a Bachelor’s degree from Reed College and an M.A. in English from UC Berkeley.

Her numerous collections of poetry include It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems 1974-2006 (University of California Press, 2008); Zither & Autobiography (2003); The Tango (2001); New Time (1999); Sight (1999), a collaboration with Lyn Hejinian; way (1988), which was the recipient of the American Book Award; that they were at the beach (1985); Considering how exaggerated music is (1982); and O and Other Poems (1976).

She is also the author of many plays and works of prose, such as The Weatherman Turns Himself (1999), Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction (2003), The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence (1999), Green and Black, Selected Writings (1996), and the trilogy The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1991).

As publisher, she was the founder of O Books. She also edited numerous books, including The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (2007).

Of her work, the poet John Ashbery writes:

    Leslie Scalapino’s language is often of the disenfranchised kind that rubs elbows with us every day—from graffiti, computer terminals, and cereal boxes. Sometimes this language corresponds with life... Most often it seems to be standing in for life when it has to absent itself for a few minutes, which happens so often.

Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego, where her papers are held in the Mandeville Special Collections Library.

She died on May 28, 2010, in Berkeley, California.