Firstindigo&Lifestyle

21-century art

Tag: poetry

  • An Escape from Solitude

    An Escape from Solitude

    Olena Jennings, New York City based poet and designer, escapes to the train in her latest work. During COVID-19, social distancing has been in place. For Jennings, new kind of creative process has evolved during this time, when thinking of poetry and design together.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: Would you like to name some inspirational poets?


    Olena Jennings: Inspirational poets include Alice Notley, Don Mee Choi, Galina Rymbu, Queens poet Micah Zevin, Cladia Rankine, Simone Kearney, and Gala Mukulomova.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: Your artistry has evolved from poetry to textile art, and dress making. Hows is this combination working?
    OJ: My thoughts become free as I sew and this process helps me to release words that I catch for the page. It can be meditative. I like the idea of connecting textile works with poetry. It’s fun to force the words into a visual shape. It’s become an important part of my process even if I never share the textile work. It helps me think of the words in a different way. It helps me to give them shape.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: Do you feel that your cultural identity is in a process or evolving in the making of your new textile art?

    OJ: My cultural identity is linked with memory. When I go into the past I explore my culture. It makes my culture more personal and different than it might be for other people.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: Did COVID-19 change your practice and plans a lot, how have you coped during this time?

    OJ: COVID gave me the solitude that is necessary to be creative on almost a full time basis. Even when I’m working, I am thinking about projects.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: When looking at this dress and the design of it, is there anything special about making the ‘rails’ of the dress?

    OJ: The fabric of this railroad dress, which I made, is polyfil and wood. It was inspired by the poem “Social Distancing” by Christine Turczyn published in Lightwood 4.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: The dress is essentially echoing the poem, and the theme of it. There is a special rhythm in Christina Turczyn‘s poem that stimulates this design?

    OJ: The specific line from Christina Turczyn‘s poem is “Anna painted a railroad tie that stretched across her hand.” The fabric that looks like wood came from scraps of the previous dress I made, so everything is connected.

    Firstindigo&Lifestyle: This is fascinating. So eventually, you wrote your own poem “Escape to the Train”. Did the poem by Christina, and making the dress inspired by the poem, end up in your own poem?

    OJ: First came Christina’s poem, then the dress, then my poem came (without thinking of Christina’s at that point.)

    Railroad dress by Olena Jennings.

    ESCAPE TO THE TRAIN

    By Olena Jennings

    They took the photo
    with the fire escape in the background.
    They would sit outside
    among the plants in terra cotta pots
    and smoke cigarettes.
    Sometimes it was the highlight
    of their night until they started
    to plan the train rides.
    They couldn’t speak French
    well and bought a ticket
    to the wrong city that they decided
    to go with because it was much closer:
    their Strasbourg.

    She was the third,
    sat on her own next to a stranger
    who kept pulling his cardigan around him
    as if he had something to hide.
    Her friends’ voices sounded
    like whispers the row behind her.
    Everyone was keeping secrets.

    The journey was captured
    in her arteries. The movement
    tugged at her from within.
    She followed the rhythm,
    getting off a stop early,
    leaving the giggling of her friends
    behind.

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  • Shakespeare and Earth Day

    Shakespeare and Earth Day

    Earth Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday both take place in April, a month known for its showers and blossoms. The poetry month of April resonates with the nature’s big events, and surely that of playwright and poet William Shakespeare’s imagination. Earth Day is celebrated on the 22nd, and Shakespeare gets his day on the 23rd.

    Earth Day wishes to bring us back to thinking of hope in the days of chaos, and optimism for our futures during crisis. Each of us has a voice in creating our ideas for, what the future might hold, and what kind of world would we rather imagine. Perhaps a look back in the history will show us, how not to live in the future. From the point of view of conservation, Shakespeare’s times weren’t necessarily better than our more recent past.

    “The Shakespearean Forest” is a book written by Anne Barton (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The book handles woodland in early modern drama. “The Shakespearean Forest” puts the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests. It also questions, how the forests might have been staged in the early theater. Forests as surroundings were also “stages” for leisure hunting, and preparation for warfare. 

    Shakespeare’s birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was surrounded by the Forest of Arden. This forest was already in decline in his time. It is believed that during his lifetime, trees were more of a commodity, used as timber for building houses and ships, and functioning as fuel for cooking and heating. 

    To see nature in a positive light in Shakespeare’s work is not hard though. Nature acts as a metaphor in his writings numerous times. One of the greatest is from “King Henry“: “Let heaven kiss earth! now let not Nature’s hand Keep the wild flood-confin’d! let order die! And let this world no longer be a stage To feed contention in a lingering act.” (Henry IV, Part 2).

    There are so many beautiful and accurate comparisons between seasons and our life cycles, seeing weather as a backdrop for actions, and setting its moods for our own. Not to mention how romantic sentiments are created within nature. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 98” is an appraisal for the month of April, a song of Spring. 

    From you have I been absent in the spring,
    When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
    Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
    That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
    Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
    Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
    Could make me any summer’s story tell,
    Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
    Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
    They were but sweet, but figures of delight
    Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
        Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
        As with your shadow I with these did play.

    meadow @Firstindigo&Lifestyle
    meadow @Firstindigo&Lifestyle

    The Folger Shakespeare Library,  in Washington D.C., opened in 1932 being an independent research library devoted to advanced study of the Renaissance and the early modern period in the Western hemisphere. It is a world-class research center with an outstanding collection of editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The Library has one of the world’s finest collections of 15th- through 18th-century rare books and manuscripts from Great Britain and Europe.

  • Olena Jennings: THE MEMORY PROJECT

    Olena Jennings: THE MEMORY PROJECT

    In 2018, a New York City poet Olena Jennings created poetry based on her family’s stories, attempting to visualise photography with words. The poems that resemble photography, carry them as frameworks of memory. In Olena Jenning’s THE MEMORY PROJECT: The memory comes before the poem. The poem comes before the art.

    “I chose ink and paper for the poems. I chose fabric for the art. The poems are a small slice of time in which I experienced memories, many based on photographs in my grandparents’ photo album. I experienced the memories in 2018 and they were embellished by memories I was creating as I lived.” 

    The project was presented in various incarnations at Queens Farm, the Red Barn, and Bliss on Bliss Studio.

    POPPIES        Olena Jennings 

    Red and blue on the dresser,
    dust in the folds,
    stretching towards the dim lamp.
    Click of lipstick cap,
    spritz of perfume,
    snap of purse,
    and she will turn the light off.
    The flowers will wither
    into their dreams
    and I will put my lips
    into their centers,
    ready to blow away pollen.
    The yellow dust caught in my eyes,
    when I see for a moment
    from her perspective, I look out
    onto the yard. I see myself
    throwing a rubber ball into the flowers,
    crushing their petals,
    the place where I convinced
    my little brother there was a snake,
    there was something to fear.
    To make up for my deception,
    I gave him one of the plastic flowers,
    deceiving him again, pretending
    I bought it at the corner gas station
    from which we had collected all
    of our dishes with the points we got
    from pumping gas. I want to make up
    more than that now—absences
    when I would become like that yellow dust,
    a quiet star.

    Olena Jennings, Map Dress, installation view. Photo: Elvis Krajnak.

    PAPER MAPS        Olena Jennings

    Even flat maps have texture.
    They carry with them
    someone’s memory of the streets.
    I will walk near the water
    to draw the places off the map
    on the palm of my hand.

    We used to make paper
    out of recycled letters,
    rough, imperfect,
    for a moment – wet,
    on our knees
    ripping

    We mark our way to the castle
    with the handle of a shovel.
    We could live inside
    our fairytale, find our way
    despite the sand
    in our eyes.

    Poems and dresses by Olena Jennings. Photos of the dresses by Elvis Krajnak.

    https://www.olenajennings.com/