Jennifer Blowdryer, nee Jennifer Megan Baring-Gould Waters, came from a hell of a household with 2 parents who read all the time, the Dad wanted to be a known poet but….never was real good. The Mom, Lenore, never had a chance to flourish in the outer world – starting with Grandpa Paley banning her chance to go to Hunter High School, a major regret. Mom and the girls got out with their lives – and got on – Jennifer became a type of bum, while her sister worked has ass off to support the family. Jennifer was mental (sane but touched), and began to bob and weave through her first Punk band in SF, The Blowdriers, ’77 – 79 SF, her first book Modern English, ’84, and public writing, beginning with a piece in Punk Globe – “The Ten Most Hated Women on Television” – ’78, columns in Maximum Rock’n’Roll, and newspaper box prose at New York Press.
She’s had a butt load of books published, but when she met Bruce Isaacson of Zeitgeist Press in SF (possibly at an after-hours, gender-fluid hat shop in the Haight), he showed her the light regarding the Independent and Perfectionist chapbook. A hard-paper cover, a fly-leaf, justified cut on the edges, legible legible legible. Chap-books may be short for “Chapter books”, but maybe not. Homonym Press (RIP) went to town with teensy square lil books, and contemporary poets like Rob Plath still dabble with that form. Zeitgeist books were a standard 8.5-by-11 fold with a respectably smooth staple line.
The Café Babar readings, and Bruce’s respectful sense of what a chapbook could be, helped the Spoken Word kick in – all of a sudden it flew – as well as NYC’s ABC No Rio, another anarchic s-hole. Hecklers ? Oh please, no big. Meeting Annie Sprinkle and Spider Webb upon returning to the East Coast, after hearing/seeing poetry by Kathleen Wood and Danielle Willis – who’d trifled with the strip clubs without being driven completely mad (yet) by the machinations of the Owners and Clients – compelled Blowdryer to start running Smut Fests in a lapdancing parlour in Tribeca – it was an important shift, from men writing about bravely visiting the girls who dance, to hearing exclusively from the girls who dance.
The Zeitgeist Press chapbooks read smooth as prose with line breaks, they were no hidden-meaning poetry – accessible as they were relevant – and Vampyre Mike is funny as hell to ANYBODY who reads him. JB’s greatest aspiration, at the reading, was to have the old man at the end of the bar remain seated at the bar, even if it took deploying the two most universal words of all time, “Anal Sex” ! She’s done pretty f-ing well as an inadvertently underground lifer, and still isn’t mean to the young. It’d be nice if they didn’t have to suffer like the rest of us did, but maybe that’s impossible.
CLICK HERE to see Books by Jennifer Blowdryer.
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