Ed Baker: Three excerpts from “Stone Girl E-Pic”

[1]                              

                                    to

                                    get

                                                 a

                                                better

                                                            view

                        dawn

                        arrives

i say what

can be said
written
in a line

exactly

on
her
back

see is

another

angle

                        she

                        asks

                        gives

                        only

                        what

                        is
                        yet

                        to

                        give

                        g i v e n

stone

sees
mind
sees

                           face

                           wide

                           grins

                                                short black hair
                                                flick in frames

                                                    nguyen

[2]

together

new

strokes

all

same

time

rhythm

moving

                        some
                        same

                        rise

                        into

                        verbs

                             circumference

                             centering

                             surround

hold s

flower
in a
perfect
cracked
vase

[3]

so
close
that
mind

can
touch
smell

taste

her

clearly

contradicting


briefly
confused

his
look
is
to
get

a
better
sense

of

her
in
heat

rock

before
breath

who
says
now

and
what
to
whom

leisure

allows
creation

stone

girl

image

language

inherent

[NOTE.  Ed Baker’s Stone Girl  E-Pic, a massive gathering of drawings & writings, was published earlier this year by Leafe Press (Nottingham, England, and Claremont, California).  It is as such the celebration of a poet/artist/calligrapher whose work attests to its almost outsider status, in the quasi-rawness of the print & pages in the paper version, not visible as posted here, & in the play between visual images & minimal, often scroll-like versings.   The opening citation in Conrad DiDiodato’s foreword has something to say of this: “It is important to collect these writers because, as has been the case over and over in the history of literature, the best and most innovative writing, the writing that advances the art and that in the future becomes the classic and defining work of a period, is almost always the work of outsiders.”  (John M. Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State University).  Or Baker himself: “... the facts that provoke (or precipitate) a poem or a piece of art that is inside or outside or simultaneously inside/outside ... the poem/piece.”  The line between inside & outside is accordingly called into question, even into doubt.  
      A detailed review by Joseph Hutchison can be found at http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-bakers-stone-girl-e-pic.html. (J.R.)]