Frank Hinton, I Don’t Respect Female Expression, Safety Third Enterprises, 2011."Who is Frank Hinton? The author of the newest chapbook from Safety Third Enterprises? Why yes, but more so Frank, a manifested male character, is the voice of a woman searching out for masculinity while on an island of femininity.
“He is made. In the chapbook he is made when a father dies. He is a kind of child idea, a child born into fiction,” Hinton says of her own creation within the narrative walls of I Don’t Respect Female Expression.
Can men and women ever truly understand each other? At our best social moments we come to claim victory by only grasping at the patterns of our sexual opposites. In the grand scheme we stumble clueless. Hinton seeks to get past that, all the while enjoying the juxtaposition of female power and female powerlessness as they stand as a cage and weapon mixed together, a modern cocktail."
“I’s a way and I’s a way to know. I’s not forty thousand dead crabs on a beach. I’s not the dog Will Smith kills in the movie or the photo of your dad’s old paddle boat. But sometimes I is soft and lonely, and sometimes I makes the hole that makes more holes. Frank Hinton makes the I that knows what it holds. Knows without affect, affected by tenderness. When this chapbook asks you to dance, you’ll shake your head no and dance anyway. There’s a lot to be kissed on our trip to the shore.”- Mike Young
"I have focused on Steve Roggenbuck’s latest endeavor, Internet Poetry on this blog before. While the whole site offers a plethora of material yanked from the internet’s general indifference, one piece got stuck in my head. That was Frank Hinton’s piece, which apparently is called “unrequested livejasmin.com pop-up”. I thought about it a lot and decided to find out a little more about this person.
Frank Hinton keeps busy. Halifax, Nova Scotia doesn’t really offer a great deal of activities, excluding an airline (Air Canada Jazz) which elicits some of the angriest emotions I can muster out of my near-uniform polite attitude. I reckon Frank Hinton is the chief exporter of poetry and literature for the general Halifax metropolitan area. Besides writing her own poetry, she’s also an editor and founder of the online literary journal Metazen. Metazen is probably one of the best places to publish literature online, since they tend to curate the work and apply such abnormal things like standards. Originally it started as a place to post her drunken writing. As someone who created a Facebook group for this sole purpose, it is reassuring to know some drunken thoughts transform themselves into full-bodied literary journals.
Obviously she is a female and writes under a male pseudonym Frank who she refers to as “A sad man, a pathetic man”. How she explains it is her enjoyment of ambiguity. Living on a gender pendulum, it allows a greater amount of freedom than simply being thought of as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ writer. There are countless articles explaining how this kind of perception (either as a male or female writer) can create a certain expectation. By using an obvious pseudonym, it makes things more interesting. Her online persona is extremely shadowy, mysterious. We don’t really know much about her besides her writing. Keeping mysterious yet accessible makes the work more interesting, as I find it can be easier to write something when I know I’m anonymous. The pain of writing something with your actual name attached probably contributes to a great deal of dishonesty within literature, as if the writer is trying to impress you in some small way. Frank Hinton’s writing is direct painfully so at times.
She has a few poems lying around in odds and ends. Apparently she also has a chapbook called “I don’t respect female expression” coming out around the end of April from Safety Third Enterprises. But I haven’t read it. So I won’t go over it. Instead, I’ll go over her poems she’s had lying around, whatever I could find basically. Most of these I found on her Spartan-style Tumblr which you can access here. Though I won’t review every one of these, I do recommend reading all of them.
Her piece for Lamination Colony, called “How to be Me, an Instructional Video narrated by Frank Hinton” shows a certain playfulness. In here you learn how to hate people on a bus, chew off your fingernail in public (which is an actual skill) and how to avoid negative thinking upon waking up. Since she does have this on the internet, she explains how to post online in order to flame or remain anonymous (both good choices). Along with these apparent instructions is the final sentence which states “You were once a child and you had it all”. That’s probably one of my favorite lines of hers. Children get lucky with the amount of happiness they get. Then come teenage years they grow overly angst-ridden and depressed. Finally, in their twenties they begin trying to improve themselves through questionable practices of self-help, self-improvement and other endeavors of dubious merit.
Relationships get a lot of attention in her poetry. Every word she uses has a distinct meaning or conveys a particular meaning. In “I’d be a Barbie without him” she takes on a female persona. Frank becomes one of the antagonists in this story/poem. Jumping between ages, you see the evolving attitude and increasing knowledge of sexuality. Some of it is humorous, like at age 17 when she tried to return the rock to Glenn but Glenn didn’t live there anymore. Other instances show Frank as a 12 year old, then what I’d think was a first-time at 18, I could be wrong. Everything is in shadows here. Nothing really is fully explained, but as time progresses; certain numbness sets in followed by a plea at the end.
Part of my joy reading these are how well she describes various feelings about love. Love is a difficult thing to write about without falling into the extremes of anger, sadness, despair, happiness, coy, and so on. Frank Hinton avoids these. She writes things with an honesty that’s hard to find. Being honest could be funny or tragic, it depends on the circumstances and often her work can be both. Her chapbook will explore these themes even further." - Beach Sloth
"If you are at all involved in the online lit community you have most likely heard (or read, as it might be) the name Frank Hinton. Hinton is the mastermind behind Metazen, but she is also one of the community’s most vibrant voices. Now, with her first chapbook, I Don’t Respect Female Expression Hinton is poised to take an even larger share of the community into the folds of her words, her vision.
Coming from Safety Third Enterprises, the folks behind the wildly successful He Is Talking to the Fat Lady by xTx, Hinton’s chapbook feels like a natural follow-up direction to xTx’s collection. What the two share as writers is stark honesty, the inability to pussyfoot around, and a fearlessness when it comes to the words they choose to put to paper. For instance in “Father/Daughter” Hinton writes from the perspective of a girl who is remembering seeing her father’s penis.
Hinton writes with a poet’s sensibility. Her stories are fragments of realism wrapped in dream sequences. “I want to create a machine with our tongues revolving around one another,” she writes in “Something Pure and Good.” And you will find yourself nodding, hoping along with Hinton’s narrator that such a thing could be possible.
Like any good chapbook, I Don’t Respect Female Expression will make you ache for more of Hinton’s work. It will make you feel Hinton’s loneliness, uncertainty, and yes, bravery. It will tell you of the promise in Hinton’s words, and it will make you believe that she will continue to deliver."- Ryan W. Bradley
"The collection is comprised of eleven fiction pieces of varying shapes and sizes, and Hinton writes with a somber, meditative ease.
From A Starting Place:
“In the curl of the banister I rest my head. I put two slugs of clementine into my mouth and wish they’d melt. Of course, I need to chew. This is my favorite place in the house. My back fits well on the wood. My head feels good on the curl.”
It’s the simple observations of this piece that make it so damn endearing despite its brevity. That’s not to say that short work can’t be good; it’s just not always easy, and some of the shorter works in this collection don’t always break off cleanly.
I felt the struggles for depth in the short form were most apparent in Father/Daughter and Make a Man. In the former, a young daughter sees her father’s penis, and, years later, reflects on the incident and the overall bond the two of them shared. It’s a good idea and it strives to be a touching story, but in this instance I felt the brevity worked against it, as did the emotional, telling catch-all, “I loved my father very much.” I enjoyed this story, I simply wanted more.
The concise pieces in this collection challenge us to accept them, oftentimes earning their way with addictive architectures like the one found in A Material That Doesn’t Exist,
“I put in a cherry tomato and took it out. I put a baby carrot up there and took it out. I put an egg up there and pushed it out and the eggshell didn’t break.”
or with expertly executed verse fiction like the kind found in Fake Kiss,
“You took me to a beach. You put me on a blanket where I shivered in the wind. You pointed at the playing children and laughed. You kicked a castle back to sand.”
My favorite piece in this collection is the lengthier All Of The People In These Pictures Are Dead Now, a wonderfully crafted study of tragedy and loss. Hinton gave herself some room to move here, and it served the work well:
“Here’s a picture of Janice Baker sitting on a wooden bench at the park holding her exposed left breast. This might be my favorite picture. I’ve looked at it so many times. Janice won’t care that I’m showing you this, at least not in this realm because she’s dead.”
Overall, this is a solid collection that employs themes of love, loss, and impermanence, and it’s at its best when stretching its legs, rolling in the poetry of second person, or simply relaxing. Frank Hinton and Safety Third Enterprises have done it again, and I can’t wait to see what both of them have in store for us down the road." - Mel Bosworth
A Conversation with Frank Hinton By Brad Green
Emotionally dissonant but solvable: An interview with Frank Hinton
Metazen
Frank Hinton's blog
