Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space by Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn

$20.99

 

In this remarkable anthology co-authors Howard Stein and Seth Alcorn use the image of the whiteboard to explain and illustrate their unusual creative collaboration. We typically use whiteboards in group settings to brainstorm and note ideas. This is essentially what the authors do in their joint writing, only their whiteboard is the safe “third space” of their collective unconscious and their process involves working with protopoems until they emerge as an expression of the connection between two beings, an intertwining so profound it cannot be disentangled. The poems that emerge from this process are by turns hopeful, bitter, contemplative, and droll.

 

The authors cast their net wide, embracing topics from tubing to medical calamities, the joyless workplace and George Floyd’s murder. They ask timeless and unanswerable questions: What is the meaning of life? Have the better angels of our nature deserted us? What vanishes and what endures? Can we escape from the zero-sum games that sometimes seem to constitute our lives? When is it time to let go and of what? Many of the poems have images of a world gone awry, such as a river flowing upstream. Others are imbued with an elegiac tone, a sense of looking back on life, sometimes in wonder, sometimes with regret, wondering whether life amounts to anything more than “hulls by the side of the road.” Yet the authors also consistently search for hope, the gentle humanizing touch in an otherwise cold hospital, the upward spiral rather than the Ouroboros snake perpetually eating its own tail, the possibility of meaningful legacy, remnants of felled oak trees whittled into enduring objects. “Nature will have its way” the authors realize and they both mourn and accept this truth. The power of this collection lies in the fascinating way in which two brilliant minds work in tandem to examine this truth together.”

–Johanna Shapiro, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Department of Family Medicine; Director, Program in Medical Humanities & Arts, University of California Irvine School of Medicine

 

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. Associate Professor Graduate Program Director Department of Health Care Administration California State University, Long Beach

 

WHITEBOARDING is not an easy read. It’s not that the poems are inaccessible or oblique. Not at all. These poems are wide open, clear eyed, generally absent of ambiguity or mystery. No, these poems rip to and from the heart to deliver a full frontal attack on two interrelated core elements of contemporary culture and social values: one, the human cost effected by corporate practices that determinedly demean and dehumanize their workforces:

 

Corporate engineering

Began as a fad in the 90’s

Downsizing its method.

Soon it became raw obsession, then a necessity

Eventually routine, through today, the early 202’s

 

And, two— lethal and endemic—humankind’s seemingly never ending addiction to

genocidal wars from which the collective and individual psyche never recovers. World

War II and Vietnam being the two that most personally hit home to haunt the

collaborating poets— Stein and Allcorn:

 

Burning bodies in open pits

And crematoria spewed smoke

For all to breathe the stench in the air

“We didn’t know it was happening”

 

Everywhere, us and them—

Killing fields went by different names:

Cambodia, Holocaust, Shoa, Bangladesh

Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda,

Native America —different places

 

Nam stays with you

 

Woven in and throughout the collection are poems that provide flashes of relief from the global and personal degradations. That relief comes mainly when Stein and Allcorn spend time in Nature, outdoors, alone or together although even then the tumult of life tends to intrude:

 

Owls call; moths flutter

Light and delicate

Evening mist settles in—

Night hovers as a Presence Who

Bears gifts of wonderment

And delight.

It is like this for us

In the twilight of our lives

Darkness envelops us;

We navigate the stars

For as long as we can—

All of us mariners

 

–Review commentary by Dolores Brandon, poet, memoirist, actress: website @TRACES http://www.doloresbrandon.com

 

 

Description

Whiteboardings: Creating Collaborative Poetry in a Third Space

by Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn

$20.99, Full-length, paper

979-8-88838-150-2

2023

Whiteboardings is a unique collection of co-authored poetry. We co-create poems on an imaginary whiteboard between us as we visit weekly on Skype.  We have coined the term whiteboarding as a verb that distills our method, how we work. Its prime values are tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, emergence rather than directional planning.

We imagine the surface of a whiteboard in the transitional, open space between us (a notion derived from Donald Winnicott) and write on it our shared “free associations.”  Spatially, this process can be visualized to be located between us rather than entirely within each of us. It feels as if the emerging poem has a life of its own, what Thomas Ogden calls a “third,” ours, neither yours nor mine.

From the outside, our way of working appears formless and directionless, disorganized and messy! A poem eventually emerges from not needing to know at the outset where we are going – or even that we are going somewhere. Only along the journey through the unknown do we find the path. Yet the resulting poem feels like an amalgam, unitary, seamless, whole, perhaps even inevitable.  The poems we have assembled here are the result of this unique experiment in writing poetry.

Howard F. Stein, an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist, as well as organizational consultant, psychohistorian, and poet, is professor emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, US, where he taught nearly 35 years. Howard and Seth, long-time friends, have co-authored numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and books, some of which include Howard’s poems.  This book is their first collaboration on poems. Howard is Poet Laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology and has published five previous chapbooks with Finishing Line Press.

Seth Allcorn is a retired, former health sciences center executive at the University of Missouri – Columbia, University of Rochester, Loyola University Chicago, Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, and former Vice President University of New England.  He is an Associate of the Center for Psychosocial Organization Studies and the author or co-author of fifteen books, and over one hundred articles in scholarly and practitioner journals.

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