The Cubist and the Lost Notebooks of the Painter s Wife

Diane Glancy was working on two manuscripts. The prose poems of The Lost Notebooks of the Painter's Wife and the variants of The Cubist. Notebooks was narrative; the other, in the Cubist style, looked at subjects from several perspectives. The manuscripts began calling to one other, though they seemed to have nothing in common. One day, she had the thought they could be the same manuscript. She combined them--alternating poems from each, one after another--until she found they came out even. The diary format of Notebooks fragmented by time. The roving Cubist fragmented by fluctuations in form and subject matter. There was a jarring relationship between them. It seemed that's where the chime was. Therein the highway she traveled. The plot-driven poems of Notebooks along the left margin of the page. The drifters of The Cubist on the right margin of the facing page. The steeple between them, clanging with a reverberation that lasted into the next poem. Verso / recto. Pushing back and pulling much like the misery saw. "In my painting / my eyes were cherries. / My mouth a small wedge of cherry pie in a background of orange and red."