You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
What can poets’ fashions tell us about their approach to words?
Do you think poetry has hidden meaning, depth and gravity, but spending time thinking about what poets wear is frivolous? It’s quite surprising how many people do. This is an idea we’ve been testing at the National Poetry Library, through a new exhibition called Poets in Vogue.
If that title seems like a paradox, the fact is that many poets have been in "Vogue"; the poet Mina Loy even contributed to a spin-off called "Rogue". People often like to think of poets as glowing heads on a frame, kind of metaphysical toffee apples, but the truth is that clothes and fashion form part of the embodied life of a writer. Publishers should pay close attention to the entirety of their authors’ lives and consider what their choice in clothing communicates.
Poets in Vogue, curated by Sophie Oliver, Sarah Parker and Gesa Werner, focuses on seven female poets and the clothes they chose to wear and write about. Edith Sitwell used fashion as a way of bridging her interest in distant periods, such as the Early Modern, with a Bowiesque surrealism that pulled past and future into a startling, immediate present. Anne Sexton was at the fore of the contentious turn in the late-1960s towards poets reading their own work in front of an audience. "Go Home Poets" one headline stated from a male critic who described Sexton taking to the stage in a "shocking pink" dress. Audre Lorde, following her mastectomy, wore an asymmetrically printed caftan, a conscious choice to show the contours of her body as it was, post-surgery. "Your silence will not protect you", Lorde wrote, "for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences".
Lorde’s practice as a poet was inseparable from her ideas of community, of conversation and dialogue – all of which required a body, one that was clothed and presented in a way that she felt fitted with her politics and poetics.
People often like to think of poets as glowing heads on a frame, kind of metaphysical toffee apples, but the truth is that clothes and fashion form part of the embodied life of a writer
The exhibition responds to these poets with inventive, playful and hugely imaginative installations and creative re-creations. Sitwell is reimagined with a three-metre-high dress, inside which is a mini-boudoir, including a table with a velvet turban, accessories and mannequin hands wearing jewelled rings. At the centre is a picture of Sitwell herself, in a frame, suggesting that identity exists between what lies buried inside and what is on display. It isn’t Sexton’s shocking pink dress on show but a recreation of her favourite red reading dress, the one she wore at a reading at Goucher College in 1974, which plays through the headphones. Sexton reads with a gravelly, commanding voice, as she smokes and coughs, telling us it’s "all good", just days before her suicide. Known for her so-called confessional poetry, the replica of her dress stands with arms out, suggesting Christ or a dramatic embrace at a dinner party.
There is a temptation to see poets as the disembodied receivers of transmissions from some far-off place, beaming it back to a Moleskin notebook. Anyone’s who’s tried writing an extended creative work knows that the body doesn’t sit still. The bladder has a habit of pinching just as Hermes arrives with the idea you’ve waited for all week. Hunger games are literal and it’s colder than it was yesterday. None of these things are excuses against writing, they’re vital signs from the body that writers live with, reminders that the act of writing is about human contact.
Clothes are fascinating things for poets because they respond to these human needs, but they’re also surfaces, textures, signs and signifiers – and just like poems they are carriers of identity. As part of the exhibition, the library has commissioned two contemporary poets, Amy Key and Jane Yeh, to write poems in response to the installations. They explore the linguistic threads between what it means to write and what it means to wear. "For both clothes and poetry, the cut is everything", says Amy Key. "For example, the form a garment creates when worn – is it sharp and contained or is it bold and voluminous? … A poet might be thinking of the form they want to use – is it unconstrained by pattern or does it need structure and rules to guide it?"
If this all sounds like glitter falling from another world, then here’s a practical point for publishers to think about: what does your author’s clothes tell you about them? With the average writer’s annual salary in the UK being £12k, and much less for poets, what are your authors not wearing, and not out of choice? Or perhaps they’re making their own clothes themselves or raiding charity shops for combinations that extend their aesthetic into every lived gesture. Words on the page are just part of the story.