Poets at MQUP: Helen Hajnoczky

National Poetry Month is drawing to a close this week, but don’t worry! Our poetry month sale will be going strong until mid-May. The online sale features all titles in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, including our newest releases,  Some Dance, by Ricardo Sternberg, and Outside, Inside, by Michael Penny. Click here

To wrap up our celebration of Poetry Month, we’re featuring the wonderful visual poetry of MQUP’s own Helen Hajnoczky. Helen’s first book, Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising, was published in 2010 by Snare Books, an imprint of Invisible Publishing.

Her current project, entitled Magyarázni, which means ‘to explain’, but translates literally to ‘make it Hungarian’, explores Hungarian folk art through visual poetry. The following work, Magánhangzók (Vowels), is one of the visual poems in the project.

From Helen’s Q&A with Gary Barwin about Magyarázni at Jacket2:

GB: I’m intrigued by how this work engages with issues of art vs. decoration, artist vs. artisan, and handiwork vs. print.

HH: Though many people who create folk art are talented, skilled artists, folk art is at the same time something that lay people can confidently engage with and participate in. Some very charming folk art is not perfect, but contains irregularities that reveal the hand of the artist. This is certainly the case with my work. I am not skilled at drawing, but I don’t think that fact precludes me from making interesting folk art. One of the things I find appealing about making contemporary folk art is that you can draw from a broad set of existing designs to use in your own work. Making folk art does not demand that you be completely innovative. Instead, anyone can borrow and recombine existing traditional designs to create new folk art, without worrying about being completely original or about copyright laws. Folk art is a collective project. As a result, using folk art in my visual poetry has fit in nicely with my interest in found poetry.

In these poems I wrote the letters in by hand in order to suggest the feelings one might have about a language, specifically a parent’s first language. Because I do not speak Hungarian as well as I speak English, and because I learned it in a very particular context, I have feelings about the language that I don’t have about English. Reproducing this visual poetry in print will accomplish something akin to publishing a confessional poem. Though I am not physically creating the piece when it is reproduced, it will carry evidence of my hand, such as the way I draw a letter, or the imperfect lines of my drawings. I can’t speak Hungarian perfectly, I can’t draw perfectly, I can’t draw letters so that they looks like professionally designed type—working on this folk art visual poetry allowed me to express and validate my linguistic, emotional experience.

(…)

GB: Are certain kinds of design ‘gendered’? (I see these works as perhaps related to some kind of sewn work, work that might appear on fabric and as such, often the work of women.)

HH: Certain mediums of folk art have traditionally been quite gendered. For example, women traditionally practiced embroidery, and men traditionally practiced carving. However, the floral designs were traditionally used in a variety of mediums. Flowers can be found carved into furniture, painted on pitchers, and embroidered on men’s and women’s clothing. My interest in Hungarian folk art was sparked by a wood chest that my dad carved, and that we used as a coffee table in the living room. On the other hand, in Hungarian scouts I was made to embroider things as a camp activity. All that being said, I feel like there’s something a bit academic about my work, in that it is on a page and not adorning a useful or decorative item. As a result, much of the context that would gender the designs is absent, and the book is something of a catalogue of designs.

Read more here

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You can find more of Helen’s work in Rusty Toque, as well as chapbooks The Double Bind Dictionary (above/ground press) and False Friends (No Press). She blogs ateacozyisasometimes.blogspot.ca and tweets @helenhajnoczky.