The “She” Series: a Venice Correspondence Holaday Mason & Sarah Maclay, (What Books Press, 2016) 

Setting the stage by announcing the pronoun, Maclay and Mason’s entangled conversation acclaim l’écriture feminine. Two women, speaking as women, develop an interpersonal dialogue through poetry. In concordance, collusion, in midlife, She tells us who She is. Two in singular command, an equation in geometric refraction; a sheen slips through gaps within this sybaritic lexicon. She embraces and sublimates limitations. In this call and response collaboration Maclay writes: “It is questionable whether there is a she – as she with her heart full of bees.” In reply, Mason, at the end of the poem which follows, echoes: “I know she whispers & leans closer—one can justify any belief, even none.” The question of belief is a buzzing within the chest, a breeze, a whisper, a breath. The poems of seamless conversation are also soliloquies. The poems, created as if in woven fragmentation and alienation, are sharpened by their autonomous connection. 

A quiet lulls the body. The breath stills. The voices, as instruments, swill a liquidity: oceanic, “slick & wet.” She's saturated in Venice (Venus): a world of vigour, commerce; a voluptuous waterway, ancient, wild.

“We shook—sometimes all over in fear (even when there were veils of stratus clouds or fog which from below were as much as they were from above & we understood this but could not fly). In mirrors our bodies grew strange, teeth stratus, joints stalactites & transparent opal.” (HM p.120)

The gaps between voices establish reciprocity, and provide a tonal hue, but the hue shifts, it is a glow. 

“If it occurs in a room, the room is white—sheer white—

and if someone walks there, the movement is purple

—almost a shadow, but sheerer” SM p.121

This scene in Maclay’s poem, a white room, is reminiscent of the room in in Marguerite Duras Malady of Death. It is timeless in space, as if designed for theatre. A tension binds these scenes: transgressive, but also adventure. There is a clarity, a pause, an emptiness that exists in the proposition of a room. For Duras, the masculine and feminine tension create a focal point in the story, the question the capacity. The room established the sense of absence between the push-pull. Whereas with Maclay, the interior imaginings give traction and are invitational. For Maclay, the image of a room recurs at various junctures. The room holds sway and guides towards accepting, intuiting. “Walk with me into this new room…Do not pretend you have to name it/limit it or know it.” (SM 33) This is an apt metaphor for appreciating poetry, and for engaging in the voices of She's mystic style. The to-and-fro creation begins at the doorway. We enter a room where women's voices gain deeper momentum. Subconscious projections spark new currents into the slipstream. Each poem is newly surrendered. 

The poems are natural, stream of conscious, imbued with buoyancy. It is as if the poets speak between dreams where their voices stretch and rise in a tumult of orphic whispers. The linear is capsized. She, the vehicle of Maclay and Mason’s language, ushers a feminine noir. One which is lush, primary.

These poems give impetus to the “mark of our time.” She cajoles through the unconventional and dispels the rigor of patriarchal language. She celebrates the corporeal. Alive in Venice, She acquires a theatre of language in an empowered jouissance. Two women in the act of kinship, prove the arc of communal invention, the secret of language. She hosts the “Pure dilemma of the moon” “Yes…the word every woman knows because she remembers that she speaks moon.”

Read here for the poet’s commentary on collaboration, and poems earlier published at Poemeleon:

http://www.poemeleon.org/sarah-maclay-holaday-mason/

[1] “women’s writing,” as coined by Helene Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa (1976)