HEDWIG DANCES
Jean Howard, a founder of the poetry slam, takes a more ambitious route, combining her poetry with Alice Q. Hargrave’s photography and Jan Bartoszek’s dances in Dancing in Your Mother’s Skin. Howard’s first book of poetry is illustrated with Hargrave’s photographs; this performance at Link’s Hall Studio, with Bartoszek’s dances, was described as a book-release party.
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Howard’s work has the weaknesses common to performance poetry. It treats only a few subjects: urban blight, bad romances, and intolerable parents. It tends toward the lurid rather than the lyrical. Howard’s title poem is dedicated to the serial killer Ed Gein, who murdered women and then wore their skins. (Gein’s case also inspired Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs.) Performance poetry is like the photographic negative of traditional lyric poetry, emphasizing ugliness rather than beauty. Howard’s poetry is seldom cathartic, as Patricia Smith’s poetry on the same subjects often was. Howard’s poetry seems to revel in the ugly subjects rather than seek release from them.
Each of the three sections in Dancing in Your Mother’s Skin is based on Howard’s poems on a single subject. For a poem in the voice of a women’s bathroom attendant, a beautiful series of Hargrave photographs of abandoned toilets is projected onto the back wall. But the photographs don’t yield any insight into the bathroom attendant, becoming mere dystopian decoration. Using Hargrave’s photographs to illustrate the book works much better, because the photography and poetry can be appreciated separately.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Alice Q. Hargrave.
