yellow silk @ 30

thirty years ago today i came home with cartons and cartons of the first issue of my new magazine, yellow silk. cartons and cartons would be piled into my car then unloaded into the middle of my (fortunately large) second bedroom which served as my office. as would become a habit, we threw a fundraiser to pay the printer; harry the baker made a cake that looked like a magazine cover, and bunches of poets came to read their work from the magazine. since the first issue was all women (they responded to a cal for manuscripts more quickly than the guys did), we had the reading at a local women's bar, the long-gone bacchanal. the place has been called britt-marie's for years now, and they've kept the old 'stained glass' B over the door.

a funny thing happened last night. i was reading over the excerpts from the magazine that i had put online long ago, and an amazing thing happened -- i felt really proud. i hadn't read that poetry for years, i guess, and it was like it was all new to me, and i loved it, and i wanted to share it with you, despite the fact that i saw the million typos for the first time too!

so please enjoy some little bits from the 15 years that it lasted.

there are many stories, ask if you want. i just might answer you.

or go see more. Yellow Silk

by the way, please don't order anything on the website. also, to progress from page to page, the easiest way is to start on any given issue. click on any word that is underlined. this will take you to another page with work from the same issue. on that second page, in eensy tiny letters, it will say, 'go to next issue' (or something like that. if there is no underlined word, the 'go to next issue' will be on that table of contents page.

courtesans, prostitutes & whores: Part I Whores

MARCH 1911

It trou- bles me to think that I am suited
for this work — spectacle and fetish —
a pale odalisque. But then I recall
my earliest training — childhood — how
my mother taught me to curtsy and be still
so that I might please a white man, my father.
For him I learned to shape my gestures,
practiced expressions on my pliant face.

Later, I took arsenic — tablets I swallowed
to keep me fair, bleached white as stone.
Whiter still, I am a reversed silhouette
against the black backdrop where I pose, now,
for photographs, a man named Bellocq.
He visits often, buys time only to look
through his lens. It seems I can sit for hours,
suffer the distant eye he trains on me,

lose myself in reverie where I think most
of you: how I was a doll in your hands
as you brushed and plaited my hair, marveling
that the comb — your fingers — could slip through
as if sifting fine white flour. I could lose myself
then, too, my face — each gesture — shifting
to mirror yours as when I'd sit before you, scrubbed
and bright with schooling, my eyebrows raised,

punc- tuating each new thing you taught. There,
at school, I could escape my other life of work:
laundry, flat irons and damp sheets, the bloom
of steam before my face; or picking time,
hunchbacked in the field — a sea of cotton,
white as oblivion — where I would sink
and disappear. Now I face the camera, wait
for the photograph to show me who I am.

from Bellocq's Ophelia, Copyright 2002 by Natasha Trethewey. All rights reserved.

whores are the lowest on the ladder of status, perhaps in all of society, but certainly in the world of companionship for money. in the early 1900s, prostitution in new orleans was limited to a neighborhood nicknamed 'storyville' after mr. story, who passed that law.

e. j. bellocq, as fictionalized in louis malle's 'pretty baby,' took photographs of women who worked there. sixty years later, mayumi oda paid them tribute in woodblocks, and another thirty years after that natasha trethewey did so in verse.

each saw beyond the frame, beyond the neighborhood, to young women who had made very difficult choices. none glamorized nor condemned. it is interesting to me that we in this country have only photographs, from that time, and not the fine arts that we have from japan, and france.

it's by no means meaningless that the US was founded by puritans. this is not to say that the real lives of the women in japan and france were all that wonderful, but the art was glorious. more next post.