Zither and Autobiography (Magill’s Literary Annual 2004)
At a glance:
- Author: Leslie Scalapino
- First Published: 2003
- Type of Work: Poetry and autobiography
- Time of Work: From the late 1950’s to the early twenty-first century
- Setting: Largely the West Coast of the United States
- Principal Characters: Leslie Scalapino, Robert Scalapino, Tom White
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography, Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Language or languages, United States or Americans, Traveling or travelers, Philosophy or philosophers, Twentieth century, Twenty-first century, West, U.S., Asia or Asians, Fathers, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism
- Locales: West (U.S.)
It is rather typical for critics hyperbolically to describe books as being unlike any other. Leslie Scalapino’s poetic and prose meditation deserves this description if anything does. The first part of the book, “Autobiography,” is a narrative, if hardly expository, account of the first fifty years of Scalapino’s life. The second, “Zither,” is an experimental poem which expands on hints dropped in the autobiography but cannot really be said to be derived from it.
There is a prefatory—but crucial—quote from Paul de Man on how the genre of autobiography often...
[The entire page is 1853 words long]
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