Leslie Scalapino opens her essay,

Leslie Scalapino opens her essay, "The Radical Nature of Experience," as collected in her book, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence, "Activity is the only community. The conservative gesture, always a constant (any ordering, institutional and societal) is to view both activity and time per se as a condition of tradition. As such, both time and activity are a 'lost mass' at any time," adding that her "focus is on non-hierarchical structure in writing...the implications of time as activity - the future being in the past and present, these times separate and going on simultaneously, equally active... - suggest a non-hierarchical structure in which all times exist at once. And occur as activity without excluding each other."

One might get a sense here (if one hasn't had it already) not only of how a life collects into a singular occurrence which one experiences (the "lost mass" giving the false impression of moments broken loose from overall being), but also of how the entire human spectrum of being collects into an instant to feed into (or regurgitate) what one might categorize (since people like categories so much) as tradition. This has everything to do with how and why a poem might be constructed as well as what function a poem might assume beyond serving to establish a career, for instance, or being something equivalent to a crossword puzzle, as another, and I bring it up as intrinsic to what I found and continue to find in Rothenberg's anthologizing, reminded as I was upon hearing and reading news reports about Idaltu, and whether or not we are a deviant species, and as if brain size and brow ridges might warrant such a conclusion.

In any event, what we think of as poetry is much more vast than what is usually presented in school settings, college or otherwise, and I'm deeply curious about Idaltu's intrinsic and energenetic vocal capabilities, I might guess, as specifically voltaic in regard to those articulations we might today refer to as poems, and ultimately capable of transforming entirely the world "as we know it."

* * * *

WHEN I SING THIS SET OF FOUR SONGS
LOOK WHAT HAPPENS!

hey when I sing
hey it can help her
yeah it can yeah it's so strong
hey when I sing
hey it can raise her
yeah it can yeah it's so strong
hey when I sing
hey her arms get straighter
yeah it can yeah it's so strong
hey when I sing
hey her body gets straighter
yeah it can yeah it's so strong


from Shaking the Pumpkin
"Songs and Other Circumstances
from the Society of the Mystic Animals"
Seneca

English version by
Jerome Rothenberg & Richard Johnny John