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.)]