Poems by Dale Going
Collages by Marie Carbone
Em Press
Mill Valley, CA
[64] p., 13 x 11.5
Work in Progress
Aerial Perception documents a long artistic collaboration between friends.
Created in intentional or accidental relationship to each other, the poems and collages are not equivalences or illustrations of their partnered art; they are extensions of the same conversation. Collaboration is elaboration. Collaboration is a type of collage.
And collage is a type of collaboration, a meeting of matter.
The poems, as much as the images, are collages.
Aerial perception: Artists, we are gods. Our work is cosmopoietic: world creating. We take the tears and tears (weeping, rips), the world’s grief and error, and make wholes of the broken, born out of an instinct for mystery and an urge towards coherence.
Archetype of aerial perception: Icarus quenching his thirst for the clarity of starlight, falling into sun-glint, fabricating flight with imbricated wings. Feathers & wax: this image is an image of the writer/artist: the writing quill & the wax tablet: inscribe, incise. When we still worked in an actual world, hot wax was the glue artists used to fix text and images pliably to the graphic page.
The intervening atmosphere between you and me, between us and the stars – this scattering of light conveys and defines the visible and the audible. Air is the agent to which light and sound adhere.
The poet, the collagist, spends much of her time looking down at the space of the page. The initial emptiness of that air. Then little bits. Little bits, the whole is only seen from a distance (from above).
- Dale Going, Note from Aerial Perception
Contents
A Separate Set of Visions
Heard
The Margin [at the margin you can have a lot of leverage]
Venuses and Sirens
Resisting Resonant Vibrations
Receptable Glance (The Present)
Then She Rose, Without Even Keeping Her Finger In Her Book
Song [love tunes seed in reedy pepper]
How I Write
Portrait of Myself, Preparatory Study for the Large Illusionistic Ceiling Fresco
Guided by Perfume to Look at the Stars
from My Life as a Lark
Codetta
Sewing the Land
Melancholy for a Dance
The Margin [The dancers slam into the white walls of]
Its Flux and Constancy
Marks Which Darken or Let in Light
The Varied Field Before Us
Brocaded Moment
Songs from a Breviary of Breath
Uselessness as a Virtue a Good
Song [observers saw different things]
“…We Traversed…the Aerial World…”
Every Actual
Colophon
Poems printed letterpress from photopolymer plates and collages printed with archival inkjet, on Rives BFK with deckled front edge.
A dozen broadsides of poems & collages from Aerial Perception and an unbound version of the book in a custom box by Victoria Heifner, accompanied by audio recordings of the poems read by Dale Going with musical interludes composed and performed by Marie Carbone, were exhibited in Unbound & Undercovers at the Berkeley Art Museum.