clutches ink, Tia Ballantine 1975
Selected reviews: poetry & . . .
Most of the reviews below, excluding the first (excerpted from a longer review), were written during the last few years and published in SPHINX, the fine Scottish journal edited by poet Helena Nelson and dedicated to publishing reviews of poetry chapbooks .
The first review was written for the blog Mindful Shopping where you can read the full review and see more pix! Now, I'm not much of a shopper -- indeed, I only shop when I actually need something (what a concept) -- but I was so excited about the clothing designed by these Bay Area artists that I couldn't stay silent. The folks at Remade in America, for example, the brainchild of Charity Romero and Ezra Eismont, use screen prints and imaginative revisioning to convert recycled clothes into exciting unusual designs that are fun to wear.
More poetry chapbook reviews are published on the Happenstance website. Please visit to read more -- and subscribe! Buy poetry! Support artists and poets!
FUTURE STYLE: Oakland’s collaborative clothing designers
I’m not much of a shopper – never have been really. When seeking to clothe my body, I usually head for The Goodwill. As someone who thinks recycling is not just a good idea but essential to the survival of our world, I have always frequented second-hand stores, seeking out finely constructed clothes, silk and linens, leather boots and feathered hats, but purchasing whatever fashions are currently available. Usually, those fashions are not exactly current. I have solved this problem by purchasing clothes with classic cuts, never fancy but always durable and sometimes even elegant. Trash chic, perhaps. I never dress poorly – I am happy with my frequently brand-new (but $3.00) Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, my silk knits and tailored linen tops – but I will admit that I rarely look hip. What to do – continue to recycle clothing, wearing last year’s (or last century’s) fashions or take the plunge, pay a bit more, and be somewhat respectably conscious of the contemporary?
Recently, I discovered a solution to my dilemma.
A consortium of young designers in the SF Bay Area are gathering up used clothes, turning discards into exciting cutting-edge fashion – and then offering them at reasonable prices. In the past two months, I have had the distinctly good fortune of attending two of their always spectacular fashion events, featuring piles of used garments that are closely examined, dismantled, reconstructed and made even more lively with additional on-the-spot silk screening of unusual and often surprising images. Giant dragonflies, labeled HERO, alight on shoulders; flowers sprout from pockets while Kali dances over a barbed wire mandala, machine guns held aloft. The first event was the giant San Mateo Maker’s Faire where thousands gather annually to display creative suggestions for revising contemporary dedication to consumption: green inventions and playful sculptures, tiny electric cars, giant Rube Goldberg machines – and tips on how to be a better recycler. At the Swap-o-rama-rama of the Maker’s Faire, the inventive playful fashions of these young designers were a highlight of the show.
Featured were designs by Remade in America and Field Day . In the picture above, the vests from Remade and skirts from Field Day combine to create playful and audacious outfit.
Last week’s July 28 event at the Balazo Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission district (a gallery known for its cross-disciplinary multi-cultural shows) was more intimate than the Maker’s Faire but equally thrilling. The event, “Alter : State,” was a “celebration of recreation” staged in support a of PatchWerk Press, an Oakland-based collective and collaborative print shop and design group, including Remade, Field Day, and What What. For the price of admission (a suggested donation of $5-$20), participants were encouraged to “be your own hero,” to pull garments from massive piles of accumulated cast-off clothes and imagine new shapes for these scarcely used and still vibrant pieces of clothing. Throughout the night, those willing to experiment worked with the assembled designers and then left at the end of the night with bags full of exciting wearable art.
Of course, none of this happened in buzzing whispered silence. Visitors to the Balazo Gallery were treated to music played by a number of underground Bay Area groups, including the remarkable Catfive, voted best electronic band of the Bay Area in 2005, and still caterwauling on the back fence. Balanceman, one of the founders of Catfive, first played a hauntingly beautiful solo set of electronic music, and then the three remaining members of Catfive, DJDarkat, Doc Oliver, and Tweaktech, offered an hour of digital trip-hop while projecting an energetic and politically potent live video mix on the wall. MTV, take note, these guys are the NEW live TV.
POETRY
JEE LEONG KOH. Payday Loans.
Poets Wear Prada, 2007. $10.00
The first thing I noticed when I picked up Jee Leong Koh’s Payday Loans was the overly cutesy name of the publisher and the sloppy stapling of the pages. Hmmm, I muttered, this might just be yet another fashionable product of the glitzy American ‘Po-biz’ (I was particularly grouchy that day). When I turned the pamphlet over and read Marie Howe’s comment: “Smart, irreverent, often unnerving, these sonnets smirk, smile, argue and bless . . . Cash in your paycheck and buy this book,” I settled down somewhat. After all, I write sonnets. Then, still prickling from the “poets wear prada” bizziness, I opened the pamphlet.
Now, after reading again and again Jee Leong Koh’s fine poems, I want to stand on every street corner in every city and hand this chapbook to all who pass. Thankfully imperfect and patiently brilliant, this chapbook introduces a poet whose compassionate insightful voice deserves to be heard. Organized by time – each poem representing consecutive days during April 2005, America’s National Poetry Writing Month – these thirty sonnets are indeed irreverent and smart but never supercilious or self-conscious, never sneering. And they never smirk. They are instead generous, honest, and lively –poems that illuminate the difficulties faced by a genuine poet alive in a world overflowing with bitterness and angst, a world angry with itself, that nonetheless can be (as these poems suggest) deeply ethical, tender and richly hopeful.
As introduction to his poems, Koh quotes the American poet, philosopher, and social critic Paul Goodman, one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy, who states that it is the “persistent attitude” of a poet that is the poem and that “the whole book is more [ the] objective poem.” Jee Leong Koh has successfully – and usefully – created such a gestalt and so I will not quote lines. I agree with Marie Howe. Buy this book, but write to the poet: (jeeleong@gmail.com). My efforts to buy the book online were decidedly frustrating.
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DONALD GARDNER. The Glittering Sea.
London: Hearing Eye, 2006. £3.00
Decades after his first published poem appeared in Paris Review, Donald Gardner is as irreverent as ever. The sea is not the only thing that glitters in this delightful collection of sly poems that delight with their honesty and humor. Gardner loves life, loves to laugh, and makes firmly unpretentious poems that murmur playfully between lines and behind stanzas, reminding us that joy can be found in the most unlikely places and that beauty is definitely not in the eye of the beholder but perhaps has taken up residence on park benches. Under his winking gaze, the Amsterdam Zoo becomes a conceptual work of art where the snake exhibit lacks “an intellectual dimension” and a dangerous icy street hosts a post-modern ballet where “trepidation did the splits” and bikes were “wavering in good will” while others “did their best just standing still.” Even when he turns from descriptions of everyday glitz to more sober exposés of darker moments, he speaks with amiable honesty that breathes hope.
Three sober poems, “Parts of Speechlessness,” “Dust Sheet,” and the ballad “The Glittering Sea,” come swiftly on the heels of a rambling and quietly joyous poem praising NYC’s Central Park for its late winter abundance large enough to hold ecstasy springing alive in this “age of limited possibilities / where we negotiate our free moments like small change.” The three poems that follow the rapturous “Central Park Vistas” reflect the events of 9-11 and all that followed, but with an isolating gaze rather than with rage. In states of emergency, fences are down. Prepositions go into hiding and “waving a flag / and waving goodbye / become for the time being / one and the same thing.” Perhaps the time has come for all to stop waving those flags, stop waving good-bye and, like Donald Gardner, start shouting joyous hellos to our beautiful world that gently supports us all. Before it is too late.
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DIANA HENDRY & TOM POW. Sparks!
Mariscat Press, 2005. £6.00
What a gift Diana Hendry and Tom Pow have offered us! Some years ago, I stood in front of an Ellsworth Kelly painting, a canvas that was ‘simply’ yellow. Around me, numerous onlookers grumbled that this wasn’t art, that any kid could paint such a thing, but closing my eyes, I heard the conversation of the color and the voices of disgruntled art patrons faded steadily away. I left the museum that day convinced that art was not statement, not representation, not theoretical construct, but rather an ongoing honest dialogue between artist and viewer.
When Diana Hendry and Tom Pow set for themselves a task of creating a poetic dialogue that would span a year—each offering the other a monthly ‘spark,’ a two-pronged directive suggesting direction for both content and form of an as yet unwritten poem—neither may have considered publishing these experiments. We are fortunate that, at the end of that year, they decided to share both their process and the poems produced from sparks exchanged. Without telling us which was more difficult, creating the spark or fanning the flame, we know that both matter..
“Write and number ten things you know to be true,” Tom writes to Diana, a ‘spark’ she admits gave her trouble—after all, we have been seeking for centuries to discover just what we can ‘know,’ if anything at all. “I hope to end on a positive note,” she writes as her last listed ‘truth,’ “I’m working towards it. Dredging the dark.”
These two poets are indeed dredging the dark, digging useful channels in the muck of the everyday and gently unearthing light in places where least expected. Sparks! demonstrates that interpretative power gains strength from remaining honest, from staying ‘nearer the bone,’ and also that technique must be pliable enough to transform as needed by the poet.
“Write a poem,” Diana writes to Tom, “about back gardens, a minimum of three. The stanza breaks should indicate a wall, a hedge, or a fence.” And Tom writes a poem that ends with a stanza that might be carved onto the lintel of any door that swings open onto the generous space of this book:
Sometimes, I come to stand
in my own unloved garden –
a patch where early the land’s
cast in shadow, where cats run
the birds away. There, I’m unmanned
by a strangeness that I once found
standing on another’s ground.
What happens when we allow ourselves to stand, even for a short while, on another’s ground? If we listen, closely and carefully, we might hear again the conversation of color, the dialogue that is art. Many thanks to Diana Hendry and Tom Pow for reminding us of that.
