Shopping for International Women’s Day

by Carolyn Boyd

This International Women’s Day, I plan to celebrate with one of my favorite activities: shopping. I don’t mean at the mall; I mean on the internet, buying magnificent works of art created by women all over the world as a means to their economic, social, and political independence. By doing so, I will not only be enabling women to support themselves, but also bringing back a very ancient kind of women’s art and empowerment.

Women have always created great art. Of course, the spectacular embroidery, quilting, weaving, painting on functional objects, and other arts that have been women’s specialties in the home are called “crafts,” while work done for pay outside the home, more frequently by men, is known as “art.”

One way to bring honor back to traditional women’s art while improving women’s lives is by purchasing our clothes, home goods, foods, and other items through “fair trade” or other similar organizations. These groups providing opportunities for the women who make the art they sell to support themselves and their families, sometimes leave abusive homes; educate themselves and their children; gain self respect; and form bonds with the other women with whom they work.

We who buy what they make are lucky enough to surround ourselves with hand-created beauty and symbols of sisterhood, hope, and empowerment. As I write, a red basket made by women from Rwanda graces my file cabinet; beaded necklaces from Uganda swirl in my jewelry bowl; vests, pants and dresses from India hang in my closet; wooden bracelets from Nepal click on my wrist; soup mixes from Chicago sit in my sister’s kitchen; and a purse made by a teen in a residential program in my town lies in my closet.

Each day we are given more choices of where we can purchase such art. Organizations that are designated “fair trade” have committed to a variety of business practices, including providing a reasonable wage, safe working conditions, and opportunities for advancement; equal treatment of women; and environmental sustainability, among others. Many of these organizations have both men and women artists. Ten Thousand Villages at http://www/tenthousandvillages.com and A Greater Gift at http://www.agreatergift.org both offer a variety of items from around the world.

Some organizations provide goods made exclusively by women. Http://globalsistergoods.com offers jewelry, accessories, and home decorating items made by women from many nations. Http://beadforlife.org sells beaded jewelry made by women from Uganda. Http://www.marketplaceindia.org has a variety of clothing and home decor made by women from India. The Women’s Bean Project at http://womensbeanproject.com sells food products made by U.S. women. Finally, feminist organizations like the Feminist Majority Foundation, at http://store.feminist.org, sometimes offer products by women as part of their mission.

So often the economic system works to exclude and impoverish women. By buying women’s art through these organizations, we can form a very global special circle of women that has economic, political, and spiritual impacts. This International Women’s Day, it’s time to shop!

Writing on the Line: The Poetry and Life of Alda Merini

by Shannon K. Winston

Alda Merini, born in Milan in 1931, published her first poetry collection, La presenza di Orfeo, when she was only twenty-two. By and large, her poetry is characterized by a deep ambiguity. While her early poems are filled with hope and love, her later collections, especially Tu sei Pietro (1962), exhibit a more angst-ridden and troubled Merini. After suffering from mental breakdowns, she intermittently spent time in asylums, especially after the death of her husband in 1986 (O’Brien, 174, 177, 181). Merini’s struggle with her mental illness, her desire for a “normal” life, and her longing to be loved all come to shape her poetry (O’Brien, 177).

One theme that resurfaces in Merini’s writing over and over is the precariousness of life. Overall, Merini’s writing is modest and the “I” is diminished and private. In her poem “Confessione,” published in 1948, for example, she opens: “You always ask me,/ but I don’t live a continuous life;/ I will nourish you with only small instances”) (all translations mine) (Merini, “Confessione,” 1-3). These “instances” are the central theme of the poem, which is only twelve lines long and could be considered only an “an instance” itself. Love and life, the speaker reminds readers, are transient in the face of death. In addition, this poem, published only several years before she began to suffer from mental illness, could also testify to the fact that sanity and “normal life,” for Merini, is also fleeting. The speaker continues: “I am the apparition that disperses/and the time that exists between two moments/ is a truce in death’s favor” (Ibid, 4-5). Within these lines, she wavers in a liminal space between life and death. Yet, her sense of helplessness is interrupted, if only for a second, by a moment of tenderness and love. The speaker continues: “I live in the space of an exchange: you age me without realizing it/ under the heat of your caresses.”

Catherine O’Brien writes of Merini’s work: “[Her] poetry reflects her intention of highlighting her inner self but his effort causes her bitter disillusionment and grief as she waits for someone capable of understanding her” (O’Brien, 180-181). What renders Merini’s work so compelling is that despite her struggle with a mental illness and her proclivity to write about death, she still finds glimmers of hope, which is apparent in several of her poems. When speaking to Catherine O’Brien, she complained: “They ask me often what the asylum is like, but no one asks me about what it’s like to be alive. Life is part of the asylum because it’s in this unholy and abject place that I found life” (Ibid, 185). She, thus, uses poetry and the page as a creative place in which to negotiate and embrace the intense joys, loves, and anguish that define her life.

Antonella Anedda: Encounters with Silence, the Page, and the World

by Shannon K. Winston

Antonella Anedda, one of today’s most prominent and promising Italian women poets, once called poetry her “reality.” In that same interview with Niederngasse in 2006, she explains that poetry is “the way [she has of] opening [herself] to the world, with verses, with rhythms that [she has] in [her] head and it is on this score that [she works] when [she writes] on the page” (translation mine). For Anedda, poetry is therefore an implicitly musical genre that unfolds on a register that differs from prose; it allows for a greater space of silence, contemplation of human existence, and death. The speaker of “Nocturnes,” for example, urges the reader to “Accept this silence: the world caught in the dark of/ the throat like a stiffened animal, like/ the stuffed boar that sparkled in the cellar during/ October storms” (Poetry International Web). Night, just like writing itself, becomes place not only reflection but also of a critical examination of the self and its position in an increasingly volatile world. In fact, many of Anneda’s work is grounded in ethical concerns about war and injustice, which are the central themes of Notti di pace occidentale. Rather than assuming a safe and privileged position within work, Anedda and her speaker are deeply entangled in the struggles that she grapples with. She ties contemporary and literal wars with her battle with language in the poetic process. In “This language has no innocence,” her speaker begins: “This language has no innocence/ listen to how speeches break up/ as if also here there were a war” (www.lyrikline.org). How, she seems to ask, can the poet and reader remain innocent in a world where there is injustice? Here, like elsewhere in her poetry, Anneda complicates issues of agency, guilt, and hope for a more peaceful future. Here, however, her hope is intermingled with doubt that she, as a poet, can effect change: “I write with patience/ to the eternity I don’t believe in./ Slowness comes to me from silence” (16-1Cool (Ibid)). Silence, then, becomes a predominant theme in Anedda’s work as the place where change becomes possible.

Another distinguishing feature of Anedda’s poetry is the diminished “I” of the speaker. Rather, the “I” becomes a distanced observer that attempts—but sometimes fails—to grasp the present moment/moments in the poem. “I don’t like invasiveness,” she says and then goes on to say: “I don’t like texts in which the narrative “I” is too present, in which [the “I”] confesses itself” (Niederngasse). This distancing mode is prevalent in Anedda’s entire corpus and reflects her greater poetic vision “to write in order to disappear, so that life is revealed to [her], without [her], [her] face at last more blurred than the whiteness of the paper, bereft of reflection. A world where one can forget oneself. Not a mirror, but a stone” (Poetry International Web).” For Anedda then, poetry and truth—as it leads to a greater understanding of the world—emerges out of a desire to capture more than individual experience; it reaches beyond the self and the page to grapple with both contemporary and timeless struggles that continue to shape our existence. In undertaking this task, Anneda writes with a grace and humility that cannot help but to enthrall readers.

For more information on the life and works of Antonella Anedda, please visit Poetry International Web.

Full Circle Exhibition

1875 - 2008 Salon Show

Fifth Annual Women’s Show at VARGA

by Lynn Alexander

The VARGA Gallery of Woodstock, New York, recently concluded the annual Women’s Show–an event showcasing more than thirty artists of diverse styles and themes. The show featured a solo exhibition by surrealist visionary Cristine Cambrea and Corinne Dolle, (a.k.a. Coco), whose pin-ups have appeared in The Village Voice and The New York Times. In addition the show also featured workshops and opportunities for audience participation, all elements that make the Women’s Show and the VARGA Gallery must-see features of Woodstock.

Cristine Cambrea is a Vermont-based artist and self-described surrealist visionary. In 2007 she sold-out a six-week solo show in NYC’s Meatpacking District. She has upcoming exhibits in New York City and London, and opened The Cambrea Stone Gallery in Vermont with her husband, independent filmmaker Drew Stone. Her paintings are “a map of experiences, feelings and energy and the relationship between their physical, emotional and energetic environments.

VARGA, owned by Christina Varga, is not your mother’s gallery. In addition to providing a creative outlet for emerging artists, Christina’s vision includes representation of “outsider” artists, self taught artists, and artists who are often overlooked by the so-called mainstream art establishment because they lack the credentials or formal training often seen as necessary to the successful execution of creative work. Of equal concern to Varga is the rather exclusive nature of the art world and the traditional lack of female representation. Angered by what she describes as “disdain” for such artists, she became committed to an inclusive vision for her own gallery.

“There is certainly a greater respect for outsider and self-taught artists now than 10 years ago, but I was turned off from approaching galleries from a few experiences…and being treated with disdain. It’s the disdain that chaps my ass. I can’t stand it. So when I opened my gallery I knew that I did not have the “credentials” to decide which art was acceptable in the art world’s eyes and which art was credible and salable. I never had aspirations to be exclusive, as in to exclude people. Obviously I make some decisions as to what I find  aesthetic, but more important to me is nurturing the creative spirit in artists, especially self-taught, outsider and visionary artists. These kinds of artists are VISIONARIES.”

Her desire to create an outlet for showcasing female artists remains a driving force behind the highly successful Women’s Show, which has enjoyed tremendous popularity for more than five years. Yet Varga maintains that she is not interested in propagating separation along gender lines, but rather in working together to find common ground while cultivating shared creative spaces. In her support of self taught and outsider artists, Varga expresses a specific interest in the work of those she refers to as “visionary” individuals, whose contributions she feels are necessary to achieve societal transformation and transcendence of cultural barriers. She believes that every major leap in understanding has been accompanied by creative work, and that the nurturing of this work is an essential part of what it means to support art as an aspect of social change.

“I believe we are in a transformative period in our consciousness,” says Varga, “ and the growing pangs of evolution come through most readily in the creative processes of humankind. Every major leap in understanding and consciousness is accompanied by art and creativity and I seek to support the conscious leap from dark and churlish war-ridden fear mongering to an acceptance and understanding that each and every one of us are connected, speak a universal language and that art transcends all communication barriers. Upon seeing, or in the case of blind or visually impaired people, feeling, we are communicating with others. Specifically, I feel a need to support women artists because I know through the years it has not been easy for them to come up through the oppressively male dominated art world.”

The Women’s Show featured selections from the travelling art exhibit called “1 in 8: The Torso Project” founded by Pam Roberts.

In selecting work for the Women’s Show at VARGA, the goal was to include work with a message, but also to allow the exhibits to stand on their own, imparting the artist’s intentions. While many do center on a particular issue, such as selections from the “1 in 8 Torso Project” about survivors of breast cancer, Varga refrains from trying to characterize women’s art as limited in scope or content. She does not try to define what women’s art “should be,” but rather aims to support expression as it is and as defined by the artists themselves. (Interview Questions, Christina Varga)

“I don’t think women’s art should be anything in particular. I am often surprised by the work women create, and a lot of it can be quite dark. But on an intuitive level I think that women are very sensitive to emotional context; their works are packed with feeling and they stand on their own.”

This emphasis on the voice of the artist, whether established or emerging, is an aspect of Varga’s vision that resonates with many women, who are tired of the obligatory characterizations or defiance of notions about what women’s art is “supposed” to focus on. Many women might also respond to her message about the validity of the self-taught artist, and the convergence of our history with grassroots communities in response to creative and political marginalization. While it is true that acceptance for outsider art has grown tremendously and that the participation of women in the arts has increased, there is still an aspect of rebellion and self determination to these movements that form a part of an honored legacy for which galleries like VARGA continue to pay tribute.

Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveler in Southeast Asia by Tamara Sheward

Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005
Review by Cheryl A Townsend

A travelogue of hilarious and sometimes perilous escapades for the adventurous woman

Tamara Sheward is an Aussie-born adventurer with a penchant for taking the road less traveled when vacationing. When she overhears a fellow Aussieman talk of his travels in remote areas of Asia, she immediately calls up Elissa, her backpacking travel partner. Tamara is between jobs and El is on summer vacation from teaching. It’s a must go and they do. Herein begins a vacation of perpetual “Bad Karma“ segues.

What follows is a lively recap of monk flashings in Udon Than, risky rent-a-heap planes, “Chicken innards on a stick“ kiosks, inane phrase book entries put to use in Bangkok, horrid disco bands in Laos, hitchhiked booze-running to Khe Sanh Hue, a boat-ride to total debauchery, cursing a family in Saigon, visiting a temple with Victor Hugo as one of their saints, getting stuck in a sniper tunnel in Viet Nam, and finally meeting up with their initiator in Cambodia.

Tamara writes with a jovial style one could easily envision conversed over drinks at a local tavern, especially as most of the adventures were centered around imbibing. Her camaraderie and bawdiness reminds me of the acidic wit of Dorothy Parker while still getting the vital points across. Picturesque and anthropologically intriguing, this is how all travel books should be penned. Tamara is a risk-taking, intent on annoying, penny-pinching trailblazer for the rest of us cruise ship wimps. While I doubt I’ll have the guts to go her route, I assuredly applaud her audacity for making her own history so appealing.

Tamara has a travel journal website.

Defying the Eye Chart by Marilyn Jurich

Mayapple Press, 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Dacus

Opening this book at random, I was struck by the prevalent combination of frankness and expressiveness in these poems. The first poem I read, “25 Lines for Ascending and Descending Keys,” compelled because of its overarching music metaphor of piano keys and also because of its jazzy language and eccentric rhythms. Using music to dramatize a backward look at one’s childhood is a fresh and clever idea that seems to characterize a central quality of Marilyn Jurich’s poetry.

The poet addresses her child self with both compassion and reproach in these lines:

The eight-year-old rises, sticks out her tongue.
I (the she who used to be) refuse this mockery,
defeat – begin to practice “holds.”
I taunt, “I’m better than what you could become”

She continues the reflective review in a rueful self-duet: “You’d be much better now if you’d listened/ all those years, not closed your ears on me.”

The musical versatility of many of these lines reminds me of the imagistic surprises of Wallace Stevens and the verbal adroitness of Elizabeth Bishop. Jurich defiantly eschews the flatness current in so much of today’s poetry, and opts instead for often surreal imagery and dense language. I found her voice at its most original in poems combining these two qualities, as well as often incorporating myth – such lyrical pieces as “Oedipus Visits the Ophthalmologist,” “Prayer Addict” and “Planetary Pantoum, Glyphs on Mars.” The latter poem’s setting is strangely beautiful and repellent at the same time: “Across Phobos, fearful rock-fish moon,/ grooves tilt, repeat in narrow bands.”

poet describes other worlds – whether they are Mars or he Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin – in pithy mouthfuls. Jurich’s poems sometimes reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s linguistic and landscape fantasies. She uses even punctuation as a type of music in the following passage, whose uneven rhythm suits the exotic subject of a Martian landscape:

Like petaled comets, whorls lift from the crater.
Spiraling canyons above, colossal pyramids;
aureole fluting plays on polar ice-caps,
Sudden … mist, clouds massed like granite, wind.

Defying the Eye Chart is long for a poetry book (113 pages) and the focus broad (with seven different sections), but the length is justified by its honest, musical look at life and history, both personal and collective. This is poetry that makes no bones about life’s hard realities – aging, blindness, disability – but who avoids lament and rather sounds the wiser notes of praise, appreciation and laughter. There is elegance and sincerity here. Marilyn Jurich writes her own review in two lines from the poem, “Reading the Eye Chart”: “Unraveling my soul by what I see/ you count how close I come to hold desire.”

The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle

William Morrow Press, 2006
Review by Cheryl A Townsend

When an elementary boy tries to kill himself, people tend to look for reasons. What they find is horrendous.

Katrina Kittle writes a deeply emotional, albeit fictional lament of little Jordan Kendrick’s childhood. A quiet, skinny, pale boy, he tries to kill himself to escape the horrors he endures through his parents sexual abuse and their party-life sharing. When their pornography ring is brought to light, the town is aghast at their own naivety and quickly accesses their own children’s potential involvement.

Jordan’s father subsequently skips town, his mother is thrown in jail, and Jordan is left with nowhere to go but a foster home. There he starts his long, tumultuous journey into trust and eventual love. With amazing insight, Kittle writes through the voices of foster parent, Sarah, her son’s Nate and Danny, and of course, Jordan with believable emotions. By the end of the novel, you know these characters. She includes concise legalities to give it credence and a little more to chew on.

An amazingly illuminating book that could easily serve as educational, were it nonfiction. I could not put this down. Though disturbing in nature, it was also a triumphant example of a happy ending. Kittle manages to get all the atrocities of this story across without the use of graphic shock value.

Kittle writes from Dayton, Ohio, where she also teaches middle school theater and English. Kittle previously wrote two novels, TRAVELING LIGHT, which focus is AIDS and the other, TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE, on alcoholism. Kittle was implemental in the founding of the All Children’s Theatre in Washington Township, Ohio. She earned an Ohio Arts Council Grant with chapters from this novel.

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

Riverhead Books, 2006
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

Tea and Self- Reliance

Until the Victorian Age lessons in the art of Japanese tea ceremony, were afforded only men. That changed when Yukako Yen, took advantage of social change to amend the course of study for girls enrolled in Kyoto’s schools, to include training in the tea ceremony. Now lessons are offered to women all over the world. Ellis Avery studied the art for five years and drew upon that experience and her knowledge of Yukako Yen to create Yukako Shin, one of the primary characters of her novel The Teahouse Fire.

Like Yen, Shin saves the art of tea ceremony. However, she must overcome the disappointment of being married to a man who abandons her and the decline the Shin family. By gaining the trust of the new Japanese leadership she becomes an advocate for women’s education opening her home to girls who want training, many of whom come from wealthy families: “Baron Sono, who was amassing a second fortune selling Japanese antiques to Western art museums, sent Tsuko, his large-eyed girl. And Advisor Kato, with much clearing of his throat, came to ask if Miss Mariko could continue her studies with Yukako as a boarding student. He was till pushing for his electric stage to go smoothly and needed all the support he could rally.”

The following passage also underscores the novel’s over-all message of self-reliance which is put forth by Aurelia on the first page of the book: “When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate. I walked into the shrine through the red arch and struck the bell. I bowed twice. I clapped twice. I whispered to the foreign goddess and bowed again. And then I heard the shouts and the fire. What I asked for? Any life but this one.”

Thus from the beginning the story is about changing and recreating self. For Aurelia this means taking in as much as possible from an environment which is supportive only when she is performing the duties of servant: dressing Yuako, and accompanying her on outings. Otherwise she has no position — except that of a person so vile she must not even bathe in the community bath, as she is told by a women named Hazu: “Look. If you ever-ever-get into the bath her again-she began. I wondered what the end of her threat would be. Was she threatening to break my kneecaps if I dirtied her water? -we will have to drain the water, scrub down the basin, and start over.”

At this moment of this dialogue, Aurelia, realizing her situation, takes a translating job — a move inspired by Yuako whose first lessons were given, without her father’s permission, to a geisha. Most importantly, when dismissed from the Shin household, Aurelia will not leave, saying, you gave Aki a dowry for the nuns, I want a dowry, showing that Yuako has also, taught her servant to rely on her self.

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