KimberlyLyons
Inside Outside/Inside
One of the fascinating aspects of a memoir is the dynamic of the movement. Why in some examples a narrative progresses without a chronological framework that is apparent or that controls the story. Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth and also Sartre’s Words and Richard Wright’s memoir Pagan Spain all elicit in the reader a double awareness of impulses beneath the surface that are brought up into and seem to propel the flow. I prefer those books for in some other instances of memoir the logic is over apparent. You may read a dreary litany of dates and events that spin off incident and recollection as the author mentally marches through an organized memory of their life thus far which the reader endures for the sake of the information. Recent memoirs return to the tradition that imparts a micro history of a time and place via the filter of the narrator’s consciousness and personal story. The dynamics of those situations move the narration. Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay Jennifer Motley’s The Middle Room and How I Became Hettie Jones and Basil King’s series of autobiographical writings Learning to Draw are recent memoirs of contemporary literary life that share that effect and that may be seen in a context with this memoir.
Martha King’s Outside/Inside (Blaze Vox, (2018), while sharing some aspects of all of those memoirs, is not really like any of them. For one thing, the voice which imparts this life history, is much more directed towards the reader than the others mentioned are and demonstrates a sensitivity to the reader’s participation. “Don’t worry” the preface advises “trust that in a real tale events occur and so do inventions.” (13) I did not detect anything in her memoir that struck me as invented, in fact the opposite. Only a devotion to the facts as the author knows them and a felicity towards the sensations around memory. King provides insight to her meanings when she writes later: “Small surprise that what I remember is so indistinguishable from what I was told…Memoir is always…a form of fiction” (138). This is an almost transparent circle in her story: a kind of argument with the very form of memoir or the falsities of memoir, which this author -with her ethics- is bound to report. The direct address establishes a sort of relationship between reader and author and King will not claim any hierarchical knowing outside of or above the reader. The memoir allows us to understand that this sensitivity is a result of the person she is, becomes, and is a result of having suffered affront from others. And therein lies part of the tale.
I read Outside/Inside as standing as a large tree. A pine say, with concentric circles of growth rings on its trunk and a few slashes that cut through all the rings to the heart of the thing. Following through on this provisional circular metaphor, there are multiple stories here nested inside one another yet each story overlaps with the others and surfaces, submerges and resurfaces throughout the narrative. Inside/Outside indeed.
These rings of narrative are not chronological nor causal – or not exactly causal but realms of attention. What it is that motivates the author, Martha King, and her development and story.
Let us say the outermost least personal but embracing shell she notes is an account of historical eras. As we know, eras are broken up into briefer durations (1960 through 1966 in American life being a very distinct phase from 1966 through 1969 yet both are periods of “the Sixties”).
Martha King’s account begins in 1955 more or less until about 2004 with drop-ins to 1886 to tell the story of a house and 1942 to mention early school days. Those drop- ins are significant. For King, everything that happens layers on and affects everything else. This is in part the poet she is. There is always a back-story and underneath story. Perhaps, in part, her particularly Southern growing up brought about also a sense of old problems and patterns enduring underneath. For many readers, King’s account of a youthful life in the American South, Black Mountain College in the late 1950s and Bohemian San Francisco and New York City is a rarity and as this reader did will curiously devour the off -hand details such as “… Miles Davis haunted everyone.” King describes her experience of the waves of changes in the years her memoir includes yet there is very little sense of fresh start, of wiping away or of not remembering. Or optimistically of progress. King repeatedly notices the theme of historical tangents, national grudges and effects throughout her memoir. “History has no beginning” is how she summarizes Charles Olson’s idea but I would vouch that is Martha King’s intrinsic idea as well. A shared sense of things with her partner, Basil King, and the layered, oblique portraits in much of his painting and drawing. Throughout Outside/Inside shifts in thinking or talismans of the eras are described and that is one of the book's rich offerings: a sense of historical moment. For example, King describes the late 1950s new ideas in American theatre about artifice and reality and audience participation as she experienced those ideas studying theatre at Black Mountain. She offers a trope of a late Black Mountain moment: “Charles said the novel is over, it was done by Melville…”
The ring inside the shell of historical era is personal time. Harder to track, more elusive. The stitch in this weave is gossamer but so very steely and. Historical era overlaps personal time in her apprehension of Olson’s belief in 1955 of a fresh way of an intellection, of “getting to the root” that fits with King’s “war I was in for my own existence.” King begins a chapter with a statement locating the moment in time because fateful 1957 following 1956 is important. Black Mountain College closed that year and finishes the young Martha Davis’s dream of becoming a full-time student there (finally denied not by time but by her father). In 1957, the poets and painters scattered, and one of the points in that scatter was San Francisco where she had just landed. Another instance: King notes that at the age of 91 her mother said from her deathbed to Basil King, Martha’s husband, “You are the best thing that ever happened to this family.” Many years after the quixotic bohemian wedding (with poet John Wiener is providing marital counseling), that King’s mother had tried her best to make not happen. That’s personal time. Throughout Outside/Inside there are details about time and its slippage and near misses. How years, months and days separated or brought together encounters or blocked them all together. Outside/Inside registers those strange confluences on lives, reputations and ongoing perceptions.
The track inside time in Outside/Inside is place. There is so much resonance in King’s evocation of places. And her places are not just certifiable biographical locations but the long linoleum hallways, however obscure, in-between places that become places themselves. For the book tracks inside time various places however transient, enduring, temporary, strange, unknown, loved and finally lands home. For a certain kind of reader there is a fascination and a magnetism to such descriptions of walking in the “wet mountain cool, lit by mildly phosphorescent gravel, sparkling with mica shards” And Fontana Dam “once in the water, the bottom was hundreds of feet below…" and the “huge, fake Plains Indian teepee out in front.” Another, surprising place King evokes, far afield, is Michigan’s “ice-bermed Grand Valley” And Durham, North Carolina with its “Victorian Structures filling street after street, pale orange brick with painted over windows.” Lumpy American mountains, Mt. Mitchell, Mt. Craig, Basalm Cone, Potato Hill and Big Tom also come in. King’s description of the physical Black Mountain College of 1955 is careful, thorough and unidealized. “Adirondack style- lodges with porches, beamed ceilings. Fieldstone fireplaces. I peered through the glass door.” What she could not see or prevented from seeing doing to buildings being locked she does not evoke for the sake of fleshing out the BMC of legend. What she could see and lived in is “plywood, cinderblock, corrugated metal…” It was partly closed down when she was there and that is part of the story. Pithy observations of the territory between Slovenia and Austria, Vienna, London and Rome and just as much as Hudson Avenue of Brooklyn are detailed and compact. King’s descriptions of 48 Ferry St, and 33 Whitehall St. “by the sludge water, the pulse of tides, the Atlantic Ocean…” and the tiny street tucked behind the Jefferson Market Courthouse; of old Washington Markets provision warehouses later torn down for the World Trade Centers, of the Cedar Tavern and another King home for a while, “the Rose Building painted more than once by Edward Hopper” (127) are particular and are carefully described and vivid. These evocations tell not only her story but also our story, possibly, because these rooms, apartments, and old houses are shared. People move in and out and on in time. All of New York and Brooklyn is layered that way and such evocations are so poignant and rare. Descriptions of the actual places we live our lives, the intersections of inside and outside. Decades later, she catches a slice of her own beloved Ferry St. loft, ancient and handmade, in a Danny Lyons' photograph. A particular New York experience where everything happens on top of everything else all the time, someone is painting it, writing it, photographing it, and you do not even know. And it is that way with people sometimes. “I never knew Frank as well as I wanted. Baz knew him since his first days in New York. And how could he not? Baz was everywhere, then and so was Frank.” (217) begins a section on their friendship with Frank O’Hara. People are places.
Some aspects of the New York bohemian life Martha King lived and described continued for many decades as she well knows but that particular life, circa early 1960s, jammed up against the loss of industrial New York, pre- real estate New York but just verging like the birth of pop art is so very specifically itself as she tells it. Place is time.
Inside time and place, which become enclosing outsides, is Martha King’s account of a marriage, friendship and artistic collaboration – and a family, the smaller, tighter enclosure within. Perhaps one could say that Martha and Basil King’s realized projects of paintings, books, and magazines exist right alongside- but distinct from- the family. This tale of a life outside is not just about the Cedar Bar and Five Spot. King names and describes it directly. Poverty. She writes: “No purchase no matter how small without a pressured calculation. Can I go around…Do without? Do without?” (200). King never fudges, not for a moment labeling theirs “voluntary” poverty and the feel of that life is imparted evenly and fairly. “No story about an artist’s life is true if money isn’t mentioned,” writes King (262).
I found Outside/Inside so much more a story of a creative dyad than one finds in many other memoirs where the mate is relegated to the private room we do not open. Whose influence has to be discerned from their effect on the narrator? (Interestingly, Jennifer Moxley’s memoir involves a partner quite a bit. Perhaps creative women may include the others more). In fact, a part of the memoir here is the story of painter and writer Basil King. To be read inside Martha’s story and hers inside his. One cannot help but think of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in this relation although the mirror tricks of that biography are not this book. King straightforwardly discloses at the start of Outside/Inside that in some ways this is a double story. This durable, weaving circled line includes the growth of Basil King’s art. King brings it in organically, where it fits and it’s an exciting story for all the patience and waiting it requires. Basil stops painting for more than a minute. He’s stuck. We hold our breath because things are getting dicey for many reasons and in a lot of ways and then Martha King describes a man drawing circles with ink on ream of white paper on a kitchen table amongst the “domestic wildness” and a fire catches. It really is a great moment and for anyone who tries to make things, real as hell. Along the way, King explores how Basil King’s art looks and comes to be and means. This memoir confirms that she has looked the longest and deepest and knows Basil King’s art best. The descriptions of an oeuvre a lifetime in the making are rich and penetrating.
Inside this relationship, there is a shadowy double circlet of considerations of fame and situation, of canon and legacy. A haunting. Yet, these two artists and their artist and writer peers, close companions and friends persist and flourish and their works are treasured among the cold calculations and accidents and strictures of American social structures of how art comes to be known and valued “A loop as perverse as a Mobius strip” (335). To be included.
“Bravery is in this language. There’s a common willingness to go where the conversation will go, to allow a suspension of control” writes King of a Black Mountain principle and I think that holds true for the many artistic friendships she describes She realizes, exuberantly
It’s not a question, finally, of who rises to a place of respect and visibility or should rise or should never have risen. Who are these people
probably isn't the important question. Process, my dictionary proposes, means a set of facts, circumstances, or experiences that are observed
and described or they can be observed and describe throughout each of a series of changes continuously succeeding each other. Passing
through. it goes on. A continued onward flow. (91)
The overlapping stories that Martha King tells of these companions could have been the book. It’s a rich and various and fresh assortment - of famous and not famous writers and artists crucial to Black Mountain, Abstract Expressionism and the New American Writing and the networks of experimental New York and beyond. Yet, she does not relate these stories gratuitously. It is the meaning of what they do and try to do and the meanings of their friendship to Martha King and Basil King that are the crux. For Outside/Inside tells of how two artists supporting one another and with companions cross a fraught sea of doubt, hurt, aloneness and on some good days the ocean of artistic discovery and invention and expansive swooping calm. Despite it all.
The innermost core of this book, “the source, the thing in itself, why it worked” is the first growth, the development from a sapling of a writer, starting with: “I was passive, soaking up as much as I could of what passed around me, and it was a rich stream.” In 1964, Martha King is a mother, wife and hardworking at a breathtaking variety of jobs building a career as a professional editor and writer. “I had become completely invisible,” she writes and then, a little later, slips in “I began to think about writing myself.” That story picks up its thread after many other things happen:
…I stare at my big electric typewriter on a work table at the end of our bedroom. It swirls and chugs. My brain rebels. The music flees,
and returns but only sometimes. I pace. I smoke cigarettes and examine the view from every window. I start again. (204).
In part, and this is what makes King’s narratives subtly complex, is that truths of art as she comes to know them are hidden in what she writes about other people. John Weiner’s “….alchemy, the reorganization that the poem could give him and that he could give to poems…” (121) conveys a lot about King’s perception of poetry and its forms and alchemy and of what she was working on in her own poetry and stories. Although King writes that she never harbored principles of poetics, Inside/Outside offers a way to read her work (and Basil King’s writing as well): “the resonance of a place is revelatory and that out of a jumble of information-personal stories, devices, connections, extensions- could come form…” (316). At a later point in the memoir, she tersely continues:”…And in early mornings, or in hours on the weekends, I kept working at becoming a prose stylist.” (441)
.
The inside inside of the outside is Martha Davis King, a writer through decades of experimentation and passages of writing and experience.
I am one of those companions of Martha and Basil King’s (and have written about the art of Basil King and founded a group of poets to advocate for his art and writing). I thought I knew the inside from reading Martha King’s poetry, short stories and novels and hearing and reading segments of this book but the complete realized memoir yields a story that I did not know at all, really. The private mystery of an artist’s pursuit, travails creation and “need to give.”
One of the fascinating aspects of a memoir is the dynamic of the movement. Why in some examples a narrative progresses without a chronological framework that is apparent or that controls the story. Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth and also Sartre’s Words and Richard Wright’s memoir Pagan Spain all elicit in the reader a double awareness of impulses beneath the surface that are brought up into and seem to propel the flow. I prefer those books for in some other instances of memoir the logic is over apparent. You may read a dreary litany of dates and events that spin off incident and recollection as the author mentally marches through an organized memory of their life thus far which the reader endures for the sake of the information. Recent memoirs return to the tradition that imparts a micro history of a time and place via the filter of the narrator’s consciousness and personal story. The dynamics of those situations move the narration. Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay Jennifer Motley’s The Middle Room and How I Became Hettie Jones and Basil King’s series of autobiographical writings Learning to Draw are recent memoirs of contemporary literary life that share that effect and that may be seen in a context with this memoir.
Martha King’s Outside/Inside (Blaze Vox, (2018), while sharing some aspects of all of those memoirs, is not really like any of them. For one thing, the voice which imparts this life history, is much more directed towards the reader than the others mentioned are and demonstrates a sensitivity to the reader’s participation. “Don’t worry” the preface advises “trust that in a real tale events occur and so do inventions.” (13) I did not detect anything in her memoir that struck me as invented, in fact the opposite. Only a devotion to the facts as the author knows them and a felicity towards the sensations around memory. King provides insight to her meanings when she writes later: “Small surprise that what I remember is so indistinguishable from what I was told…Memoir is always…a form of fiction” (138). This is an almost transparent circle in her story: a kind of argument with the very form of memoir or the falsities of memoir, which this author -with her ethics- is bound to report. The direct address establishes a sort of relationship between reader and author and King will not claim any hierarchical knowing outside of or above the reader. The memoir allows us to understand that this sensitivity is a result of the person she is, becomes, and is a result of having suffered affront from others. And therein lies part of the tale.
I read Outside/Inside as standing as a large tree. A pine say, with concentric circles of growth rings on its trunk and a few slashes that cut through all the rings to the heart of the thing. Following through on this provisional circular metaphor, there are multiple stories here nested inside one another yet each story overlaps with the others and surfaces, submerges and resurfaces throughout the narrative. Inside/Outside indeed.
These rings of narrative are not chronological nor causal – or not exactly causal but realms of attention. What it is that motivates the author, Martha King, and her development and story.
Let us say the outermost least personal but embracing shell she notes is an account of historical eras. As we know, eras are broken up into briefer durations (1960 through 1966 in American life being a very distinct phase from 1966 through 1969 yet both are periods of “the Sixties”).
Martha King’s account begins in 1955 more or less until about 2004 with drop-ins to 1886 to tell the story of a house and 1942 to mention early school days. Those drop- ins are significant. For King, everything that happens layers on and affects everything else. This is in part the poet she is. There is always a back-story and underneath story. Perhaps, in part, her particularly Southern growing up brought about also a sense of old problems and patterns enduring underneath. For many readers, King’s account of a youthful life in the American South, Black Mountain College in the late 1950s and Bohemian San Francisco and New York City is a rarity and as this reader did will curiously devour the off -hand details such as “… Miles Davis haunted everyone.” King describes her experience of the waves of changes in the years her memoir includes yet there is very little sense of fresh start, of wiping away or of not remembering. Or optimistically of progress. King repeatedly notices the theme of historical tangents, national grudges and effects throughout her memoir. “History has no beginning” is how she summarizes Charles Olson’s idea but I would vouch that is Martha King’s intrinsic idea as well. A shared sense of things with her partner, Basil King, and the layered, oblique portraits in much of his painting and drawing. Throughout Outside/Inside shifts in thinking or talismans of the eras are described and that is one of the book's rich offerings: a sense of historical moment. For example, King describes the late 1950s new ideas in American theatre about artifice and reality and audience participation as she experienced those ideas studying theatre at Black Mountain. She offers a trope of a late Black Mountain moment: “Charles said the novel is over, it was done by Melville…”
The ring inside the shell of historical era is personal time. Harder to track, more elusive. The stitch in this weave is gossamer but so very steely and. Historical era overlaps personal time in her apprehension of Olson’s belief in 1955 of a fresh way of an intellection, of “getting to the root” that fits with King’s “war I was in for my own existence.” King begins a chapter with a statement locating the moment in time because fateful 1957 following 1956 is important. Black Mountain College closed that year and finishes the young Martha Davis’s dream of becoming a full-time student there (finally denied not by time but by her father). In 1957, the poets and painters scattered, and one of the points in that scatter was San Francisco where she had just landed. Another instance: King notes that at the age of 91 her mother said from her deathbed to Basil King, Martha’s husband, “You are the best thing that ever happened to this family.” Many years after the quixotic bohemian wedding (with poet John Wiener is providing marital counseling), that King’s mother had tried her best to make not happen. That’s personal time. Throughout Outside/Inside there are details about time and its slippage and near misses. How years, months and days separated or brought together encounters or blocked them all together. Outside/Inside registers those strange confluences on lives, reputations and ongoing perceptions.
The track inside time in Outside/Inside is place. There is so much resonance in King’s evocation of places. And her places are not just certifiable biographical locations but the long linoleum hallways, however obscure, in-between places that become places themselves. For the book tracks inside time various places however transient, enduring, temporary, strange, unknown, loved and finally lands home. For a certain kind of reader there is a fascination and a magnetism to such descriptions of walking in the “wet mountain cool, lit by mildly phosphorescent gravel, sparkling with mica shards” And Fontana Dam “once in the water, the bottom was hundreds of feet below…" and the “huge, fake Plains Indian teepee out in front.” Another, surprising place King evokes, far afield, is Michigan’s “ice-bermed Grand Valley” And Durham, North Carolina with its “Victorian Structures filling street after street, pale orange brick with painted over windows.” Lumpy American mountains, Mt. Mitchell, Mt. Craig, Basalm Cone, Potato Hill and Big Tom also come in. King’s description of the physical Black Mountain College of 1955 is careful, thorough and unidealized. “Adirondack style- lodges with porches, beamed ceilings. Fieldstone fireplaces. I peered through the glass door.” What she could not see or prevented from seeing doing to buildings being locked she does not evoke for the sake of fleshing out the BMC of legend. What she could see and lived in is “plywood, cinderblock, corrugated metal…” It was partly closed down when she was there and that is part of the story. Pithy observations of the territory between Slovenia and Austria, Vienna, London and Rome and just as much as Hudson Avenue of Brooklyn are detailed and compact. King’s descriptions of 48 Ferry St, and 33 Whitehall St. “by the sludge water, the pulse of tides, the Atlantic Ocean…” and the tiny street tucked behind the Jefferson Market Courthouse; of old Washington Markets provision warehouses later torn down for the World Trade Centers, of the Cedar Tavern and another King home for a while, “the Rose Building painted more than once by Edward Hopper” (127) are particular and are carefully described and vivid. These evocations tell not only her story but also our story, possibly, because these rooms, apartments, and old houses are shared. People move in and out and on in time. All of New York and Brooklyn is layered that way and such evocations are so poignant and rare. Descriptions of the actual places we live our lives, the intersections of inside and outside. Decades later, she catches a slice of her own beloved Ferry St. loft, ancient and handmade, in a Danny Lyons' photograph. A particular New York experience where everything happens on top of everything else all the time, someone is painting it, writing it, photographing it, and you do not even know. And it is that way with people sometimes. “I never knew Frank as well as I wanted. Baz knew him since his first days in New York. And how could he not? Baz was everywhere, then and so was Frank.” (217) begins a section on their friendship with Frank O’Hara. People are places.
Some aspects of the New York bohemian life Martha King lived and described continued for many decades as she well knows but that particular life, circa early 1960s, jammed up against the loss of industrial New York, pre- real estate New York but just verging like the birth of pop art is so very specifically itself as she tells it. Place is time.
Inside time and place, which become enclosing outsides, is Martha King’s account of a marriage, friendship and artistic collaboration – and a family, the smaller, tighter enclosure within. Perhaps one could say that Martha and Basil King’s realized projects of paintings, books, and magazines exist right alongside- but distinct from- the family. This tale of a life outside is not just about the Cedar Bar and Five Spot. King names and describes it directly. Poverty. She writes: “No purchase no matter how small without a pressured calculation. Can I go around…Do without? Do without?” (200). King never fudges, not for a moment labeling theirs “voluntary” poverty and the feel of that life is imparted evenly and fairly. “No story about an artist’s life is true if money isn’t mentioned,” writes King (262).
I found Outside/Inside so much more a story of a creative dyad than one finds in many other memoirs where the mate is relegated to the private room we do not open. Whose influence has to be discerned from their effect on the narrator? (Interestingly, Jennifer Moxley’s memoir involves a partner quite a bit. Perhaps creative women may include the others more). In fact, a part of the memoir here is the story of painter and writer Basil King. To be read inside Martha’s story and hers inside his. One cannot help but think of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in this relation although the mirror tricks of that biography are not this book. King straightforwardly discloses at the start of Outside/Inside that in some ways this is a double story. This durable, weaving circled line includes the growth of Basil King’s art. King brings it in organically, where it fits and it’s an exciting story for all the patience and waiting it requires. Basil stops painting for more than a minute. He’s stuck. We hold our breath because things are getting dicey for many reasons and in a lot of ways and then Martha King describes a man drawing circles with ink on ream of white paper on a kitchen table amongst the “domestic wildness” and a fire catches. It really is a great moment and for anyone who tries to make things, real as hell. Along the way, King explores how Basil King’s art looks and comes to be and means. This memoir confirms that she has looked the longest and deepest and knows Basil King’s art best. The descriptions of an oeuvre a lifetime in the making are rich and penetrating.
Inside this relationship, there is a shadowy double circlet of considerations of fame and situation, of canon and legacy. A haunting. Yet, these two artists and their artist and writer peers, close companions and friends persist and flourish and their works are treasured among the cold calculations and accidents and strictures of American social structures of how art comes to be known and valued “A loop as perverse as a Mobius strip” (335). To be included.
“Bravery is in this language. There’s a common willingness to go where the conversation will go, to allow a suspension of control” writes King of a Black Mountain principle and I think that holds true for the many artistic friendships she describes She realizes, exuberantly
It’s not a question, finally, of who rises to a place of respect and visibility or should rise or should never have risen. Who are these people
probably isn't the important question. Process, my dictionary proposes, means a set of facts, circumstances, or experiences that are observed
and described or they can be observed and describe throughout each of a series of changes continuously succeeding each other. Passing
through. it goes on. A continued onward flow. (91)
The overlapping stories that Martha King tells of these companions could have been the book. It’s a rich and various and fresh assortment - of famous and not famous writers and artists crucial to Black Mountain, Abstract Expressionism and the New American Writing and the networks of experimental New York and beyond. Yet, she does not relate these stories gratuitously. It is the meaning of what they do and try to do and the meanings of their friendship to Martha King and Basil King that are the crux. For Outside/Inside tells of how two artists supporting one another and with companions cross a fraught sea of doubt, hurt, aloneness and on some good days the ocean of artistic discovery and invention and expansive swooping calm. Despite it all.
The innermost core of this book, “the source, the thing in itself, why it worked” is the first growth, the development from a sapling of a writer, starting with: “I was passive, soaking up as much as I could of what passed around me, and it was a rich stream.” In 1964, Martha King is a mother, wife and hardworking at a breathtaking variety of jobs building a career as a professional editor and writer. “I had become completely invisible,” she writes and then, a little later, slips in “I began to think about writing myself.” That story picks up its thread after many other things happen:
…I stare at my big electric typewriter on a work table at the end of our bedroom. It swirls and chugs. My brain rebels. The music flees,
and returns but only sometimes. I pace. I smoke cigarettes and examine the view from every window. I start again. (204).
In part, and this is what makes King’s narratives subtly complex, is that truths of art as she comes to know them are hidden in what she writes about other people. John Weiner’s “….alchemy, the reorganization that the poem could give him and that he could give to poems…” (121) conveys a lot about King’s perception of poetry and its forms and alchemy and of what she was working on in her own poetry and stories. Although King writes that she never harbored principles of poetics, Inside/Outside offers a way to read her work (and Basil King’s writing as well): “the resonance of a place is revelatory and that out of a jumble of information-personal stories, devices, connections, extensions- could come form…” (316). At a later point in the memoir, she tersely continues:”…And in early mornings, or in hours on the weekends, I kept working at becoming a prose stylist.” (441)
.
The inside inside of the outside is Martha Davis King, a writer through decades of experimentation and passages of writing and experience.
I am one of those companions of Martha and Basil King’s (and have written about the art of Basil King and founded a group of poets to advocate for his art and writing). I thought I knew the inside from reading Martha King’s poetry, short stories and novels and hearing and reading segments of this book but the complete realized memoir yields a story that I did not know at all, really. The private mystery of an artist’s pursuit, travails creation and “need to give.”