Whiteboardings

<p>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. </p>