Hollyanne: Word Painter
By Victor Schwartzman, Target Audience Poetry Editor
Way too many poets write about their sex lives, drinking histories and general failures. Like, in detail with diagrams listing who got laid and what drinks they drunk. With those poets, you know in advance what you will read—detailed tales of sex, booze and rejections of all kinds. A problem is that you’ve read it all before. Just because a poet finally gets fucked (or, perhaps perversely, makes love) does not mean you should give a fuck.
And then there is Hollyanne.
She does not write about herself (although she seems to), but takes what most poets would write as a story and instead turns it into a painting with words:
Bomb
He put a bomb in my chest
when he took out my heart.
The bomb is round and black
like in a cartoon
and it has a long, long fuse.
He soaked the fuse in petrol
and wound it inside and out,
through my veins, my blood,
squeezing across my lungs,
tying down my tongue.
He wound around my throat,
down across my breasts,
looping back to pin elbows,
hog-tied wrist and ankle,
pulled tight between my legs.
He put a bomb in my chest.
It is heavy and pulls me down.
Soon it will be November 5th.
You would not want to be around when that narrator explodes.
There are no incidents described, no broken dates. Good–who cares? What counts is the impact of some God-awful betrayal. The poem creates an avenue for readers to see themselves (although actually, hopefully not see themselves. Tragedy is much more entertaining when it happens to someone else.)
So who is Hollyanne, the painter poet?
Hollyanne was born in the UK, where she writes that
“I was a child for a number of years. Then I was supposed to grow up. However, that last bit has yet to occur. I spend my time closeted in a darkened room, muttering nonsensically to my cats and bashing hell out of my keyboard – I have yet to master the art of typing quietly. I blog at www.hollyannegetspoetic.
wordpress.com and will admit to being a little obsessed with badgers and cheese. And tea.”
She may live in Worcestershire (the place not the sauce). But to get back to her concentrating on creating pictures of emotions rather than telling a story (at least, not telling a story in the ordinary way):
Burn
It is a black, red and purple feeling,
pulsing in the fists, tense in the muscles,
an arterial bleed from the tongue
splattering the walls with hot, corrosive
anger, spitting out like miniature explosive
match-flames of bile. Singeing fringes and
searing off moustaches of anyone nearby.
Surprise! It’s flammable! They never knew.
And now the gore and the bile and the
blood-spitting tongue burns and the pulsing
fists fan the flames.
That is colourful. Words, in one interpretation, have gone beyond speech and have flamed on. Note that it is men who appeared to be crisped.
These images actually painted would be lurid. But written out, Hollyanne gets away with it. But it’s more than gets away with it when it grabs you by the neck.
The poems in this review were selected from four months of poems on Hollyanne’s blog. None are to be found in literary quarterlies, chapbooks or zines. They are self-published, online, in her blog. (She has been writing for a decade, but made her work available starting only four months ago.) This is a golden age for poets. They no longer have to struggle to get their work out there. Anyone with a computer can get their stuff posted, and then maybe someone will notice. That’s sort of the way it used to be, with paper and vanity presses, but this is a whole new paradigm (and that is this reviewer’s twenty cents worth).
Speaking of which, the poem below does tell a story. Horror is always good. This one is unusually twisted, so be careful, it is a slow build to a butchery:
Pumpkin Smile
I am ripe and firm and round. The best
they found: selected, bought, then brought
home to the warm. Left the others, rejects,
neglected, cut-price on the grocer’s rack.
Not me, this time
I am admired with oohs and aahs, stroked
and gazed on, tender touch grazing my
smooth orange skin, the children’s eyes
skimming me: the glow of acceptance
tickles deep to my seeds. Me, this time.
Then they get a knife.
I am cut across my crown, top lifted off,
insides scooped out. My flesh, my seeds,
my juice bleeds over tugging children’s
hands – sticky with giggles, fingers
wriggling in my ooze.
They hack me a face. I never had
a face like this. Eyes triangle spikes,
a decisive point of nose slashed out,
jagged smile of prescribed happiness.
Their choice
is a jolly ghoul. They put a candle
in my hollowed out middle, my sides
swept clean still weeping. They replace
my crown, my stalk stuck up, a silly stump
from my mother plant.
They dance, squeal as I burn: fire inside
crackling tears of orangey goo congealing
my new face. Me, this time.
Perhaps now is the time to note that this poem is not about a personal experience Hollyanne had. She never was a pumpkin. Moreover, she says her poems are not about her own experiences. Rather, she imagines herself into situations and writes about them. Bomb implantee, flame thrower, pumpkin. Is there a common thread? All appear to be victims. One fights back immediately, one’s on a short fuse, so these are hardly victims. However, it is true that the pumpkin gets it in the shorts.
Almost all of her poetry is about fundamental human issues—usually, how we relate to each other. There are no political issues raised, no social concerns. But neither does she wallow in deadening ‘look at me’ poems. Instead she focuses on the effects of those woes and then paints a word picture.
But not all of it is angry. She can paint gently, even playfully:
Sleeveless
She wore her heart on her sleeve
but caught her cuff in everything:
slammed in the car door,
dunked in tomato soup,
clamped in the dog’s teeth,
scalded under the hot tap.
Soon enough she was fraying.
Threads coming loose, colour
bleeding. She was no seamstress,
and anyway, feared the mess was
beyond repair of even the cleverest
needle. Could she afford a new shirt
to replace this one? But she liked this
one best. Some of the stitches still held.
But then, a heart, what use is a heart
that constantly catches
in everything?
Perhaps she would cut it out,
put it safe in a drawer at home and
go sleeveless.
Hollyanne’s voice is original, challenging, angry, nastily funny. If you’re going to read poetry, you get a double bang because you get a poem and a painting. Most of the poems are about angry women, and while you don’t know how they got there you sure can guess. Definitely they are all pissed.
This last poem sums up what is so fresh about her poetry. You can find more on her blog, and maybe you should or you might end up like this woman, who clearly needs one hell of a catharsis:
Clenched
She is a clenched fist of a woman,
compact, defensive, ready to cut the
air. She is a closed book, hardback
with sharp corners, to clip painfully
on soft bits when hurled. She is a
beer bottle, freshly neck-broken on
the bar’s edge, swinging in a gritty
glitter-tipped arc. She is a razorblade
slipped inside a loose sleeve. She is
a quick kitchen knife, a stone thrown,
a cricket ball wrapped sly in a sock.
She is a mouth closed like concrete,
a brick wall of silence to bang heads
on. She is a deaf ear and a blind eye,
both gouged deep with an acid-dipped
knitting needle. She is terrified, empty.
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