William Crawford reviews Constance Stadler's and Rich Follett's Responsorials (NeoPoiesis Press)

If the act of definition begets the act of dissolution, then Responsorials never commits the 
folly of defining itself.  Alterity, ego, anima/animus projection/possession evolves into 
something more constructive, more progressive, a sublime symbiosis.  A full diapason of 
human interaction emotively charged and honest eyed.  The anima/animus archetype of 
contrasexuality is profoundly explored; discovered and rediscovered through the fusion 
of personal and collective unconscious.  The integration of the anima/animus realized 
through seldom used dialogical and dyadic poetic constructs.  Where one writer uses 
metacognition, to apply and synthesize what has been written by the other, and then 
forms a spirited, trenchant response.  The concentrated response retains its power by 
being spontaneous rather than disciplined.  At times sharply contrapuntal, at other times, 
plangently harmonious.  Either way the result provides a uniquely holistic and fulfilling 
adventure. 

Carl Jung said that confronting one’s shadow self is an apprentice-piece; while 
confronting one’s anima is a masterpiece.  I believe that cunning old codger Jung would 
dust himself off, rise up and give Constance Stadler and Rich Follett’s Responsorials an 
impassioned standing ovation.  With seismic awe, he’d declare this unprecedented work 
of art, medallion level.

Half-way through Responsorials, I found myself envisaging a painting not unlike Emil 
Sinclair’s painting of Beatrice from Hermann Hesse’s masterful novel of Jungian 
existentialism, Demian.  

“It resembled a kind of image of God or a holy mask, half male, half female, ageless, as 
purposeful as it was dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive.”

By the time I finished, an entire gallery of androgynous and abraxian paintings emerged.  
The read had accomplished what it sought out to do; that is, transcend or at least amend 
the lines and parameters the reader often finds himself penned into by the majority of 
modern poetry.  The veritable miracle then occurs, the reader transcends himself, the ego 
is denuded, defense mechanisms dissipate, and self-evasion becomes self-consummation.  
A golden dawning; the momentous genesis of emotional honesty; the dream/reality bird 
cracks through its shell, sharp-eyed/beaked, wings spread; she/he detonates into sudden 
first flight.  There’s no ceiling, no window, no vague intention; just a pure energy that 
guides the wing, the quill, the brush, the heartbeat.

The first dyad (responsorial) offered here is Wing Spans.  The framework for the rest of 
the book is erected here.  It is clearly an unconditional mission statement, refreshingly 
free of mawkish self-sentiment or tergiversation.  The naked emotion of the piece is 
edifying.  The two voices become a mirror for one another, then, they too, become one; in 
fire fused communion. 

"I give you the luminous
and the transcendent 
all that sanctifies this ‘One.’”

-Stadler “Vow”

“until your light 
warmed into oneness my nothingness
and from benighted desert
conjured an inexplicable, abundant harvest.”

-Follett “Entreaty”

Rush Hour is the second offering.  Here, through a beguiling kind of poetic alchemy, a 
prosaic and quotidian inner city exchange is made precious and profound.  An ephemeral, 
cosmic collision of two free spirits that have forgotten just how free they really are.  For 
something like a second they are reminded, paralyzed by a monumental moment of self-
rediscovery; the shock of contact, the soft promise of proximity; they let the moment slip 
away. 

With Irreconcilable Similarities, Stadler and Follett limn an evocative portrait of a couple 
in crisis, trying to conquer the vicissitudes and, at times, seemingly insuperable obstacles, 
of marriage.  The cold epiphany when both discover that love doesn’t always mean 
forever (in the programmed sense), that love, real non-Hallmark card love, always 
requires an equipoise of pleasure and pain.  And that both blend ineffable elements of 
sweet and bitter.  They seek the advice of a toy keyboard voiced therapist and quickly 
realize it’s better to fall into one another than on some hired, overpaid and over glorified 
voyeur.  The diaphanous falsehoods surrender, almost elegantly, in the bold, unapologetic 
light of such verities.

Tobacco Road  Pietà is one of the more enigmatic pieces in Responsorials.  With its 
colloquial tongue, its brooding, Southern gothic intensity, and impactful echoes of old 
time religion; it is a tour-de-force, and a welcomed detour, down a red dirt road to a 
church in a cul-de-sac.  It’s a profoundly visceral piece filled with blood, slow dazzling 
guts, and a strange, indefinable glory; with several gods, devils, bleeding virgins and 
fallen angels in the details.  It has the beautiful bursting bones of a novel or an epic film 
condensed into two stunning and staggering stained-glass poems. 

Y? is more a molecular than a mental dyad.  A winsome concatenation and re-conjuring of
magical moments from the halcyon days; it is rich with that weightless, butterflies in the
trousers, sensation one remembers from descending hills on afternoon school bus rides.
The heart too is rendered weightless again.  The writing here is spectacular in its simplicity
and efficacious in its purpose.  The piece soundly works like a game of Scatman Crothers’
kick the can.

Stadler and Follett let us levitate for a little while before grounding us with the sudden 
trapdoor that is Rx.  A palpably painful and tenebrous piece regarding a pragmatically 
pessimistic hospice patient and his quixotic, mirthful nurse.  The equipoise of light and 
shadow is exquisite here.  A chiaroscuro is masterfully painted.  This scene reads very 
real, and if you are not careful you may find yourself sewn inside of it alive.  There’s 
both the sweet first breath of birth and the acrid deep sigh of death’s supposed finality 
here.

“Witnessing the emptiness
As streams of loved ones
          walked blithely by…
I slipped into your room
   to tuck a sheet,
         stroke your brow
             as you twisted in
                         fitful
                           sorrows.”

-Stadler “11A, Ward 5”

“I am dying;

we both know I cannot live.

Why, then 

(in infrequent intervals

of medically induced somnolence)
do I drift, dreaming
toward the white light
of your thighs?”

-Follett “Necromancy”

Chivalry, Once Removed is about as emotionally honest as artful writing gets.  It’s the all 
too true tale of a boy that overacts and plays the clown for the benefit of a highly 
imaginative, handicapped girl.  The poems presented here are so alive, vibrant, and 
gloriously human.  The interrelation between the boy and the girl, the two poets, is 
sublime and vital.  What really elevates the piece is the open willingness to show 
vulnerability and find strength in it.  The ability to find ineffable beauty in the tragic 
dimensions, to pause not bypass that difficult beauty, therein lies the purpose of art, 
humanity too.  This piece is pure poetic thaumaturgy. 

“Beach blanket, fun-in-sun lakeside halcyon hours
                         cascade even now in memory’s clarion canon;
                                           your carillon laughter was my joy.”

“You, dear Susie,
              my Dulcinea –
                        would never walk,
                                         never speak,
                                                      never be
                                                             like me.”

-Follett “Squiring Susie”

“If you stare at wallpaper long enough
Hyacinths will bloom
In the distilled quiet of no voice
The robin sings to you
and the absence of a stance,
                         a step
frees cheeks and fingertips
to dance.”

“When the boys sailed by
                             with wild whirl kites
pointing at my chair
and girls made ugly faces
        the mimicry of she, piercing air with sound,
                                 agonistes unbound…
You made them ashamed, disgraced
           by saying 
how pretty my hair was
         as it blew across my face.”

-Stadler “Shining Knight”



In the Gloaming consummates the experience, for, let’s face it, this is more a shared 
experience between reader and author(s), than a book, with an almost broken ballad that 
deals with senectitude.  It is impeccably written and mines for the same warm golden 
rush that Tom Waits imbued his timeless ballad, Martha, with.  This is a piece rich with 
sense triggered memory and maybe just a wistful pang of nostalgia; which, in Greek, 
literally means, ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more 
powerful than memory alone.  

The salve, of course, is love.  And that salve is applied not liberally but sensibly until the 
wounds sing, the bones hum, and the healing festival begins.  The innate ability to handle 
such frangible and invaluable pieces without breaking them, this is the true mark of a 
master’s hand. 

Responsorials is more than art, more than words; it is a human condition, a cause and a cure. 



-William Crawford, author of Fire in the Marrow (NeoPoiesis Press) and Pushcart Prize nominee.