Her Kind, a literary community powered by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts chose hair as its September theme. Lisa Russ-Spaar and Zayne Turner’s conversation on the site responded to the question “Why do we care so much about hair?”
Here’s a snippet from Spaar:
Hair, like fingernails, can apparently grow after death, and survive in graves and on mummies for centuries. The potent, the rogue, the surprising, the transformative: this is also the stuff of poetry.
And Turner:
Personally, I find that my desire to style myself into invisibility has waned—both in terms of my hair & my poetry. So I find myself reading & writing more in the liminal areas. But then I find myself thinking of hairy questions like: at what intervals do erudition, intellection, formal/procedural necessity become so tangled they become more about the spectacle of the mass, the physics of the impossible snarl? And if so, does that matter? Or what if someone decides to take a snarl & slather it in tonic? If we make snarls shiny, but do not undo the tangle, do we just make our knots able to be skimmed over, combed through? What of those who decide to keep everything in a ‘manageable’ style or length, where nothing can possibly tangle?
The conversation is thick with allusions to everyone from Mary Magdalene to Harryette Mullen (I say that as if there’s a clear continuum between the two). Spaar and Turner cover poetry, art, identity, and more in this really imaginative and lively conversation.
I recently saw Kimberly Brazwell feature at a poetry reading where she only read poems concerning hair. She had enough of them to do a whole show. I think I’ve got a few hair poems that are really about desire and/or identity. Interesting. Her Kind/VIDA is on to something with that theme. Read the rest of Spaar and Turner’s convo here.
