Howard F. Stein / Seth Allcorn
Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
I had the pleasure of reading WHITEBOARDINGS, co-authored poetry by Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn, over the course of two days, in small bites, letting the poems digest as I entered into a third space between the writers and the words. The last line still rings: 'what is real?' What seems real to me now, as the book still settles, is the depth of this third space, what [Donald] Winnicott once called 'potential space'- which, unlike anything I’ve encountered, resounds with both wonder and longing in Stein and Allcorn’s co-authored poems. Indeed, what seems little acknowledged, perhaps unconsciously avoided even, in the mountains of clinical writing on potential space, is just how creative a process of mourning can become when shared, through the free association of words, on a socalled 'whiteboard.' A process where the tragic can be at once refused, revisited, reimagined, and ultimately worked with, instead of merely 'worked through.' I’m also with a palpable feeling - like something 'gone awry' after a summer’s day of tubing down a river (see opening poem, 'River of Snow'). The authors’ words become my own as I ponder whether I can know the river’s mysteries. Does it, can it, 'flow upward' - an 'upward spiral' away from all the 'slaughter on the ground’ - or is it all an 'endless falling without a bottom'? I’m not sure of an answer - nor sure I want one - but I do recognize that the 'casket was open' as I read (see 'Life of Files'), and I saw what the authors saw there, unflinchingly, and I creatively mourned. But I also touched a strange and perhaps timeless beauty, if only for a brief moment, before the casket was closed and the corpse buried, burned, turned to ash. I had borne witness to the culmination of a sustained potential space, forged from a 30-year friendship between the two authors, that offered not just memories but promises back to us, its readers, in an enduring presence: a true gift. -Nathan Gerard, Ph.D.
