Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space

Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space

Stein, Howard F.
Allcorn, Seth

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $20.99

ISBN13: 9798888381502
Publisher: Finishing Line Pr
Published: Mar 10 2023
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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.

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