Over the last few days, two very different poets, both important to the Bay Area, have died. One hailed from Berkeley, one from the Beats. Both helped shaped the direction of the form – that is, they questioned and cajoled and pushed against the notion of "form" itself.

Born in Santa Barbara in 1944, Leslie Scalapino grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of Dee Scalapino and Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley's Institute for Asian Studies. She had two sisters, Diane and Lynne, and the family traveled often: this would prove to be a lifelong passion. 

After attending Berkeley High, and then graduating from Reed College in 1966, Scalapino returned to Berkeley to get her master's degree in English. Poetry, at this time, came to the fore. She published her first book, "O and Other Poems," in 1976, followed by 30 other highly experimental books, including works of prose, fiction, plays, essays and collaborations. She recieved the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed on both coasts. Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, the Naropa Institute and 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College. She was married to Tom White, and they shared a home in Oakland for 35 years.

Pinning Scalapino down to a particular school or genre is an inherently dubious task, but she is broadly thought of as a key figure in the West Coast Language poetry movement. The loosely formed group took the name originally from the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which published work that wasn't so much interested in self-expression through language as in the wordplay itself. San Francisco-based "This" magazine, also published in the late '70s, was another important outlet for this work. 

In fellow Bay Area poet and collaborator Kevin Killian's estimation, Scalapino was a "great goddess of poetry" who was more of a spiritual writer than Language poet, more in the vein of Gary Snyder than other Language peers. She was a Buddhist. But Killian also remembers her as a woman with a beautiful voice and a great sense of humor. When they worked together on the play "Stone Marmalade" in 1996, a rewriting of the Orpheus myth that had Eurydice living in hell to own a duty-free shop, Killian wrote a scene portraying Julia Roberts. 

"When Leslie got that scene, she called me up, and said, 'Something about the way you wrote that makes me think that Julie Roberts is a real person," Killian said, noting that at the time, Roberts was the number one movie star in the world. Pop culture was clearly not Scalapino's bailiwick.

"But she was super game. She went down to video store with Tom and rented like nine Julia Roberts movies over the weekend and then wrote beautiful speeches for her." It turned out that Scalapino was already unwittingly familiar with the Roberts oeuvre; "Flatliners," with its exploration of near-death experiences, was one of her favorite movies.

Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley. A note written by White about her career, including her publishing house (O Books), can be found here. 

Also, over Memorial Day weekend, in addition to sculptor Louise Bourgeois passing (her show at Gallery Paule Anglim is open until June 12), poet Peter Orlovsky died in Vermont, after an extended bout with lung cancer. Orlovsky was Allen Ginsberg's husband for more than three decades. They met in San Francisco in 1954, where Orlovsky worked as a medic during the Korean War. 

Prior to meeting Ginsberg, Orlovsky hadn't written poetry, but he became a poet in his own right. He worked as an activist, supporting a variety of causes, and taught at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. His voice as a poet was "pure Americana," according to fellow Beat Gregory Corso. Waldman's accounting of Orlovsky's final moments can be found here.