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.
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.
