Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – ‘Her Makeup Face’ by Garrett Hongo with Janis Brandenburg Lee
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Her Makeup Face’ by Garrett Hongo. Japanese American poet, Hongo, was born in Volcano, Hawaii, on May 30, 1951. He attended Pomona College and the University of Michigan. He received his MFA in English from the University of California at Irvine.
His collections of poetry include Coral Road: Poems (Knopf, 2011); The River of Heaven (Knopf, 1988), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Yellow Light (Wesleyan University Press, 1982). He is also the author of The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i (Knopf, 1995), winner of the Oregon Book Award for nonfiction.
His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon at Eugene, where he directed the creative writing program from 1989 to 1993.
I have matched art work untitled by @janisbrandenburg – Janis Brandenburg Lee with this poem. You can view and follow her on Instagram here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
Her Makeup Face by Garrett Hongo, 1951
There were years at her bedroom vanity, daubing on
makeup, fussing with clips and brushes, a clamp
for eyelashes, the phalanx of powder jars and perfume
bottles assembled like the glassy face of a wave standing
over a box of Kleenex. She’d paint on lipstick,
then blot the excess with a fold of pink tissue pressed
between her lips, pulling pins and a net from her hair,
grabbing up her purse and high-heeled shoes,
almost ready to step up the tiered flights of City Hall stairs
and the long day’s work bossing the typists and Clerk IIs.
How long was this her life, composed or grudging amidst
the clatter of machines, the pouches and memos
that swelled like a tide of incoming blather each day
she stood at her desk, commanding Stella Sue from Memphis,
Helena from Jalisco, and Kay (short for Keiko) from Boyle Heights?
How many times must she have thought of flowers floating in a tree,
archipelagos of plumeria buoyed on their branches
hello again – please donate
We have a small favour to ask. More people than ever are reading TheAppWhisperer.com and we could not be more excited about that. We specialise in mobile photography and mobile art and we value all of our readers, writers, contributors and viewers but we do have costs and we do need to ask for your help. We at TheAppWhisperer spend many hours each day, each week and each month to bring you this high quality level of journalism. We do it because we are passionate about it and because we want others to be as passionate too.
If everyone who reads our website, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be so much more secure. Please help us by offering a contribution or supporting us with a monthly donation of your choosing.
[seamless-donations]
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photography journalist, editor, curator, and the founder of *TheAppWhisperer.com*, one of the world’s leading platforms dedicated to mobile photography and art. Since its launch in 2009, TheAppWhisperer has become an international hub for artists of all levels to discover, learn, exhibit, and engage with contemporary photographic practice.Built on principles of inclusivity, accessibility, and artistic excellence, Joanne has spent almost two decades championing mobile photography as a serious artistic medium. Through interviews, critical essays, exhibitions, competitions, and education, she has helped shape and document the evolution of mobile art on a global scale.Her work has taken her internationally, lecturing on photography and mobile art at institutions and events including the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, alongside appearances in the UK and Europe. She has served as a juror for international photography and mobile art awards across Portugal, Canada, the United States, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.Joanne is also the founder of *TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com*, one of the first online galleries dedicated exclusively to collectible mobile art, connecting artists with collectors across Europe, the United States, and Asia.Before founding TheAppWhisperer, Joanne worked extensively in print journalism and photographic publishing, including roles at a paparazzi photo agency and as deputy editor of a leading photography magazine. Her freelance journalism, criticism, and commentary have been published widely in both the UK and the US, with bylines in *The Times*, *The Sunday Times*, *The Guardian*, *Popular Photography*, *NikonPro*, *DPReview*, *Which?*, *Vogue Italia*, *LensCulture*, the *BBC*, and more recently, the *Financial Times*, where her published letters on photography continue to contribute to wider conversations around the medium.Alongside her editorial and curatorial work, Joanne’s own photographic practice has been exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, South Korea, and the United States. Her work increasingly explores themes of grief, loss, death, memory, and the body.Her current research interests centre on grief, death, and poverty, with forthcoming postgraduate study leading towards doctoral research in these areas.Joanne is currently developing new long-form writing and photographic projects and is available for commissions, editorial projects, speaking engagements, and collaborations.Contact: joannetheappwhisperer@gmail.com)
