A grand essay on perception
Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's sight
pp. 95-124
in: , Phenomenology and the late twentieth-century american long poem, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstrakt
This chapter offers the first major reading of Sight (1999), a collaborative long poem written by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino in the form of an exchange of letters, postcards and emails. Its title, Sight, indicates the overwhelming thematic concern of the work: vision and its role in perception. The epistolary form of composition is a constitutive aspect of the final text, establishing a back-and-forth which is constitutively intersubjective. Carbery frames the compositional process with reference to the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In considering the two poets together, the chapter necessarily devotes space to the differences as well as the similarities in their poetic methods, and in doing so offers an account of the other long poems which Hejinian and Scalapino were writing alongside Sight.