Dale Going prints letterpress editions of innovative poetry by women at EM Press in Mill Valley, California and teaches a workshop, "Chapbooks for Poets," at the San Francisco Center for the Book. A chapbook, &O, will be published this fall in the Em Press Poetry Pamphlet Series. Her collection, The View They Arrange (Kelsey Street Press), was a finalist for the Poets' Prize.
(Photo by Nancy Lee Russell)
Working Notes
Henry James' Gertrude, Gertrude's Alice's Gertrude, my (inner) Alice and Gertrude. Written under the influence of vacation novel reading (in the Caribbean) and the mysterious processes of novelists (at an artists' colony) the luxurious necessity of such concentrated time. I've been musing on the sensuous pleasures of writing acts and how they alter/altar time. The postcard I found of a 19th century penmanship study: "Each moment spend to some good end," written over and over, Steinian (each moment/writing/reading inherently different) and Alician (the scribal repetition of someone else's words—a pleasure and accretion even in that—a reading.) Each moment spent writing, "Each moment spend to some good end," is. Encoded in this paean to product is a paean to process (the pleasures of process). The concrescent threads in Gertrude/Alice of concentrative art work (cubist rigors of exactitude, a density and compression) and meditative art work (repetitive as domestic chores, "to some good end," allowing the mind to wander, flow, and flower).
"Then She Rose, Without Even Keeping Her Finger in the Book"
"They are not real reasons -- good reasons," said Gertrude, looking at the pink and yellow gleams in the water. She talked and talked and talked. She has a very nice way of doing it. "Compared to Paris, all the airs are fluid." (All the airs, the latitudinous airs, she means.) (Carrying things the way they are carried here.) The book itself would remain blank, but she would be able to read it. Would I know what was on each page? Would I see it there? (Delete and beside the brook lay the trunk of a fallen tree. Or, delete lay the trunk of a fallen tree.) "A little crepe de Chine here is all I need. Alice, what are you doing, by the way. Speaking of which, what are you doing, Alice?" A freeze is lifting. The phrasing of the day. "By processional I think I must mean liturgical. By processional I think I must mean shelter and fear in the usual way. It is astonishing how there is only one first time." From time to time things deviated into profound sense. All the numbed women listened, silent as tooth shells, some in shins, some iridescent, all with mollusk-calm minds. With their natant legs, their mouth parts, their vivid volumes. "Nacreous," she kept murmuring. Nacreous pink, also found in dark-veined tissue petals. Dampened paper petals. The bowl of hibiscus and next to it a whorl of quills pedalling the opaque centre of a porcelain inkwell, mirroring the bowl -- its Narcissus, hard Echo. Concrescence of sense and sex and the colour sky gets after sunset. Its pink making the yellow tell. The pear forming. It comes from not watching a clock. To stay in one place long enough to open, like the hibiscus flowers in the bowl which at night fold creamily into greenish leaf-packets, twirled like the tuile we dip in creme a la glace. In heart, they unfurl, dark florid centres, eruption of style and stigma. She'd want to stay in this place long enough to harden, from Aphrodite to diamond, a rigorous state. Parts which fit adamantine and refractive, evident into one another. I'd rather curl into leaf-packet, Parasol, or accrete into pear, a protective curve and swell and gives a repetition that it a completion, pinkish and crinkling in relation. Pleat, unfold, replete.
Note
The poem's title, "They are not real reasons—good reasons. . . gleams in the water," "and beside the brook lay the trunk of a fallen tree" are from Henry James, The Europeans. "From time to time things deviated into profound sense" is from Laurence Durrell, Monsieur.