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

[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 by Leafe Press (Nottingham, England, and Claremont, California) in 2011.  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. (J.R.)]