Dale Going
San Francisco State University
1990
$10
Available through Em Press
77 p., 9 x 6
Winner of the
San Francisco State University
Poetry Chapbook Award
Brenda Hillman, Judge
She frames her poems experimentally. Stepping back onto a vibrant surface after a sudden polaroid encounter, she then re-hangs the frame. I am impressed by the glowing areas of these poems.
–Barbara Guest
Dale Going’s poems race along the high wire, balancing on one wheel, eight wheels, handlebars. Her language is cream-thick dream think, edible and languourous; her formal inventiveness provides ingenious props for a madly whimsical imagination. Going prefers the preacrious present tense, loving its rose-madder details for their pure materiality yet dissatisfied until they are wholely reconstructed in the fresh air of her page. We breathe that air gratefully.
– Kathleen Fraser
The title of Dale Going’s book with its ‘cubist’ slash mark signals its postmodernism, an attention to and play with language, an attention to process and form in themselves… The book creates an effect of framing, as if poems, poet, and reader were placed within concentric frames, but any and all frames could be shifted at a moment’s notice. Yet, instead of being cold and ‘formalist,’ the book is written with grace and humor as well as a compelling authorial presence.
– Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
Images stack up but do not clutter like the magic house, always a new door to open into… Or reverse motion where rooms are disappearing as one backs out of them, as in “Something About Absence.” The words revealed in “Passionate,” the first poem in the series, are then rearranged, deleted, and give the feeling of their titles: “Constructed,” “Narrative,” “Broken,” “Coda.” Each poem a memorial, the same one wearing down to the essential image and white.
– Denise Newman, Brilliant Poet Series No. 2: Dale Going
Contents
House Dreams
Green framed in gold, ginger,
He toasts with champagne
Immediately I made the bed in the yellow room. Washed dishes.
I couldn’t settle into anything else until we’d gone marketing
I’ll be a happy man if, when I come home,
I sat in the sun after that to
Moving the paintings – the wild ginger
Two things dropped out of pockets at the film.
Returning the piano on the back of a truck,
Finding a second amethyst on the airplane (for his mother).
Green painting in the garbage
astilbe is a shade plant, will grow in light if well-watered
See
I, Zibalbay
This Is Your Doing, Woman! Are You Not Afraid?
You Shall Pay For That, Englishman
I Did Not So Much As Suffer My Eyelids To Tremble
Presently The Curtain Was Drawn And The Lady Maya Joined Us
It Is I, Zibalbay,Your Lord, Come Home
Confused
Muse-Sick
Crawling in Windows
Midsummer’s Eve
Something About Absence
Passionate
Constructed
Narrative
Broken
Coda
Love As/Of The Whole
(One Woman is Lifted For Every Two Who Walk((
Colophon
Set in Bembo and printed by university Printing Services at SFSU. Cover printed at West Coast Print Center, Berkeley.
Cover photographs by Kathryn Clark, untitled diptych (Woman and Eggs)©1989; from the series, mindful affection; original color prints, 30 x 60.
Author photo: Erik Butler
Cover design: James McElheron and Dale Going. Book design: Paul Bailiff, Dale Going, and Mary Hazlewood.