What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G by Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G

Gary Percesepe & Susan Tepper

Cervena Barva Press September 2010

ISBN 978-0-9844732-8-1

$15.00



The letters in this novel are as tumultuous as Jackson's paintings,

splattered in movements, layer upon layer, as the story reveals

itself the same way the paint speaks abstractly:



"Before you, all I could see was a pit. Dori look what you've

done for me already! I'm partly to blame for your troubles.

I'll never call you a little girl again. Inside your body I reach

the center of the earth."



This is a love story and a story of lust between a seasoned womanizer who is a self-absorbed artist, and a young naïve woman. In places this story feels as if it could be a fairy tale, but in essence, Pollock is speaking to himself, longing for his own youth and the rigor of those early experimentations, in this case through narrative? Yes. There are two voices, Pollock and Dori, but are they really one Pollock?



"Pollock turned back to her. She studied him in the dying

light. It occurred to him that he could share with her the

thoughts he'd pieced together in the car, lay them out in

sequence, with the earliest, tidiest first, just lay them down."



The two authors take an interesting view of who Pollock was and how

he effected a larger audience:



"DORI. YOUR NAME IS DORI. KEEP THAT UNDER

YOUR PRETTY HEAD OF HAIR. No I don't play golf.

I'm a painter. A painter and your lover. That's the sum

total of my life."



Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press