The Clock Had Not Yet Struck Her Prettiest Distance

The Clock Had Not Yet Struck Her Prettiest Distance is a collection of three surrealist poetry books by Dale M. Houstman. Each book differs in source material form and emotional ambiance... The Starlit Dog: and Other Tales an illustrated book with texts inspired by fairy tales that dark fountain of psychological matter; Enfleurage composed by utilizing pulp detective texts and itself divided into three parts; Calcutta Orchids a series of minimalist poems imbued with a mytho-poetic atmosphere a sensation of place. These three books were created in 2007 2001 and 1991 respectively as the book moves backward in terms of initiation headed for a wellspring. Although these three sections differ by way of their variety of settings and tones their unifying force is founded in Surrealism - the philosophy of liberated imagination - and also in a 'making' free of obligatory and arbitrary strictures. Surrealism is not - and never will be - a literary style a toolbox of proven techniques nor a fatuous machine of self-expression. Yet the work does not lie beyond comprehension or pleasure even as it refuses the anchor of comforting paraphrase which can only offer up a reassuring meaning while discarding the poetry now rendered obsolete by exegesis or - more precisely - by the egoistic projection of opinion. Another discernible and unifying quality of the three books is the prevalence of whimsical and childlike elements scattered throughout having blossomed from a consciousness enriched by such artists as Lewis Carroll Arthur Rimbaud e.e. cummings Benjamin Peret and Alfred Jarry as well as from fairy tales science fiction comic books a persistent resistance to the mundane and a yearning for a revolution of consciousness in which there is no separation between the intended and the accidental.