Conversation with Krista Franklin

I met with the incredible Krista Franklin back in July. I asked Krista Franklin to describe her work. She described it as  “pretty diverse. Visual artist, poet, sometimes performer (mostly around the poetry or poetics, papermaker...visual art includes papermaking, collage, letterpress, [and] sometimes bookmaking every blue moon.” She is also the writer of the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books), and most recently Killing Floor (Amparan). She also held a position of artist-in-residence with Arts and Public Life/Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator.

I asked her what drew her to collage in particular. She explained: “I can draw but I’m not the best drawer. So it was a natural response for me to use magazines to get the most realistic image that I wanted to have. So that’s what led me to it; the idea [of having] things look as realistic as possible, [but] not being able to render them myself. So [it was about] figuring out ways to snatch the ideas I needed in a direct kind of way.”

I asked about her use of media, including photos. She told me, “That’s evolved over time. My initial impulse was to have a realistic image…I have before used a lot of antique photographs in my work especially in the early phases…I was using a great deal of antique photographs of people of color... As well as popular culture figures who have passed away that I had [a] deep appreciation and admiration of… I was using their iconic faces or iconic histories to pull at things and to herald them… Much of my early work especially dealt with pulling from the ideas and theories of the Black Arts Movement in particular, and how people of color (specifically black people in this country and across the globe) have been represented in very insidious ways. What I sought to do with my art, particularly visual art in this case, was to create images that would resist those ideas, that were antagonistic [to] those ideas, that showed us the way I saw us: as full, human, beautiful, complex, and worthy [of being] loved…

“We Wear the Mask is a recent series for me, particularly about women...There’s a lot of things happening... I became very interested in Afro-Surrealism in the past three years...I wanted to push the envelope of my collage [practice] into the surreal realm, to play with the idea of disruption and [the] idea of the full imagined space from the weird way my brain works. I was thinking [about] a lot of ways in which women are seen as dangerous, gold diggers, dangerous creatures. I wanted to pull and play with some of those concepts, blending the female body with animal, plant, other organic spaces in the world, fusing those all together. The ideas that I was getting at had to do with negative perceptions placed on women by history, which ultimately lead to misogyny and violence against us, seeing us as somehow tricky or slick. I wanted to push the envelope about that around the [woman] body.

"So the title, of course, is taken from [the] Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem, [a] very famous poet. He’s from the same city I was born (Dayton, OH). His house is there, it’s a historical monument. So also [I’m] tipping my hat to Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s [idea] of wearing masks to survive in the world as a person of color... and [how it] plays out as a woman of color, as a woman in the world in my experience.”

That’s just a small section of a wonderful interview. To check out Krista Franklin’s work, go to her website: http://www.kristafranklin.com/

Susan Yount and the Chicago Poetry Bordello

In the beginning of the project, I talked to Susan Yount, poet and head of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal. She is also  Madam Black Eye for the Chicago Poetry Bordello. Here is a taste of our talk back in October 2014. The Chicago Poetry Bordello holds amazing evenings filled with song, dance, burlesque, silhouette artist, and, most important, poetry whores who for a price will read poetry for you (and an enterprising loved one). I’ve been fortunate to participate in two shows as a temperance worker and a plant for a fake medium. I highly recommend checking them out!

I asked Susan Yount about what she wanted to achieve with the Chicago Poetry Bordello. She said, “I think the main goal of the show is to help people who don't always read poetry discover that poetry really isn't just a stuffy art for intellectuals at coffee shops. I think that's the main goal of the whole show, and I think that [it] is successful in doing that. I have friends that I worked with that have left my office and don't work there anymore. They still come back to the Poetry Bordello. It's because it's an escape. It's going back to when everything was a little more romantic... The one-on-one reading poetry, I mean that's what they used to do. Yeah, so I think that's very romantic and people appreciate the attention.

“And you can ask questions. If they don't understand your poetry… I've had many a person ask me... if that was real life.  In a sense, it is real life. It's all coming from life. So I think that's the main goal: to show that poetry is fun. And then there's this secondary part where it's an artist community. Artists are meeting other artists. I've met playwrights. A historian came to our show, more than one historian has come to our show now that I think about it…

“But other artists, you know like the Steampunk community too, which they're into the art of dressing. So it just caters to so many people. It's such a wonderful mix of people because everybody's meeting somebody else that they're interested in and/or have other things that they can do with them, with other forms of art, other communities of art. So I know that Pinch and Squeal has done stuff with one of the big guys from the Steampunk community. He went out and was doing their vaudeville tent with them, I know that Sara Chapman does stuff with them. So she's the pianist and she's hooked up with the White City Rippers. I feel like that’s part two: everybody connecting with other people who are also writers and artists. We got a great silhouette artist now... so that's a great. It's a great community of people. It is like herding cats, but somehow it all comes together and really amazing things and connections happen.

“And once I had this guy, after I read a poem to him, he yelled out: ‘You should write horror movies.’ And I thought: ‘Wow, I wish I could write horror movies, right.’ So you kind of get a perspective I think that you just don't get anywhere else.”

Check out Chicago Poetry Bordello website here: http://www.chicagopoetrybrothel.com/

Check out the amazing Arsenic Lobster Poetry Magazine here: http://arseniclobster.magere.com/index.html