4th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: Day 26 :: Jeannie Hoag on Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay
[script_teaser]Growing up in my small Wisconsin town, there were four places I loved above all others: the park, the Dairy Queen, the stationery aisle of the drugstore, and the public library.[/script_teaser] When I was 12 or 13, I found among the
3rd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: SABINA IBARROLA on LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
When I think of Leah Lakshmi’s poems, I think about femme. I think about hustle, and I think about love. I think of words like pussy and glitter and plum and open. I think about that pretty brown brown. I
3rd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 20 :: Christina Rodriguez on Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva, and the Art of Breathlessness
It's a slow kind of love that builds as the pages are turning. When you read a book, you grow to love the story, the characters, and the author. If you are a writer, you might find a mentor and a
3rd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 16 :: LAUREL KALLEN on JACQUELINE OSHEROW
In Dead Men’s Praise, Jacqueline Osherow explores the world through her identity as a Jewish-American woman poet of the first post-Holocaust generation. The tensions that define and trouble this identity are apparent in Osherow’s exploration of how a simple trip through
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 29 :: MORGAN VO on MINA LOY
“I was trying,” Mina Loy observed in 1927, with reference to her polyglot, punning, scholastic, asyntactic, unpunctuated free-verse poems, “to make a foreign language, because English had already been used.” Read more: http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/loy-mysteries/#ixzz2Rp0FfojT Under Creative Commons License: Attribution from Morgan Vo, on and of Mina
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 24 :: ELIZABETH CLARK WESSEL on GRACE PALEY
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling. My favorite Grace Paley stories have one-word titles: Wants, Debts, Love, Friends, Mother. Each is just a few pages long. To me they comprise a world literature. Expansive, weighty, inexhaustible. To
2nd Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 21 :: LUZ SANCHEZ on FOROUGH FARROKHZAHD
I like to believe I've always been a woman of culture, a student ready to learn about the world, a kid who might still believe that for as much as we are all so very different we are also so
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO :: DAY 17 :: CAITS MEISSNER on YONA HARVEY
I have drunk in the words of Yona Harvey a'plenty and surfaced quenched. She is a blessing of a poet, a writer who's words stick in the psyche for time. Of her breadth of work, there is one particular poem
2nd ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 8 :: MONTANA RAY ON ALICE NOTLEY
Alice Notley. Alice Notley. Alice Notley is a miracle worker. That much we know is true. I heard --from Rachel Zucker-- she didn't care where she published. See: the tightly wound ball of rage that is "As Good as Anything." See here: "Written and judged
ART: "Meet Miss Subways!" Photography, History and Identity :: Fiona Gardner
[caption id="attachment_1555" align="alignleft" width="493" caption="Angela Vorsteg Norris Miss Subways March 1950"]
[/caption]
If you're not from around here, you may not know that Meet Miss Subways is more than a Ferlinghetti poem.
And, as such, you may not know that
"Miss Subways was a title accorded to individual New York City women between 1941 and 1976. The woman who was "Miss Subways" at any one time appeared on posters placed on New York City Subway trains, along with a brief description of her. The program was run by the ad agency "New York Subways Advertising".
To be eligible, a woman had to be a New York City resident and herself use the subway. Winners were usually chosen by telephone-based voting, from among a group of contenders whose photos were all placed on the subways; the nominees were chosen by John Robert Powers, a modelling agent."
{thank you, Wikipedia!}
I'm a sucker for New York memorabilia, and photographic projects examining identity, place, and culture, so when I happened upon Fiona Gardner's series -- in which she documents, via striking, technicolor-esque present day portraits and tells the stories of former "Miss Subways," alongside the now-dated newspaper clippings introducing these "girls" to an adoring city -- I immediately rang her (um, or, since it's not 1960, I messaged her on facebook, where I found her through our mutual friend, painter and herbalist Michael Viola).
