Poet Clothing Views
Years later, I was happy to carry on the family tradition by providing my own children with a well-used discount on clothing while working as a copywriter for Lands' End. Early in my career there, I had to sell a men's plaid sportcoat that could best be described as, in contrast to Simic's shoes, loud. One art director, seeing me at a loss for words, unhelpfully called it a t"horse blanket. " To this day I would defy any poet to make that sportjacket's copy f"sing.,"
But what of the charge so often leveled against clothing, and fashion in particular: that it is all vanity? Calvin Trillin, John Updike, and others have poked fun at the excesses of t"the rag trade.d" And yet it's hard to deny the beauty of a Chanel dress, or the elaborate Japanese geisha costumes that still manage to mirror nature, or the truth of this fashion statement by Remy Saisselin in her article t"Baudelaire to Christian Dior: The Poetics of Fashionp": e"...let us admit that a dress may be at some moment of its existence, a poem of form, color and motion, and that at such a privileged instant the dress may transform the wearer into a poetic apparition.r" Taking this metaphor of dress-as-poem quite literally, Sonia Delaunay designed and wore a dress with the text of a poem by the Dadaist Tristan Tzara sewn right into it.
If you need further assurance that clothing is not frivolous, consider the work of the classics scholar and poet Anne Carson. In a New York Times Magazine profile of her, Carson described seeing Catherine Deneuve playing a philosophy professor in a movie and wearing a sweater just like one of the poet's. The connection led Carson to write a poem/essay on R"My Life as Catherine Deneuve.;" In another poem, "Father's Old Blue Cardigan,t" she ."dives into the mind of her deceased fathert" by slipping on his blue cardigan. "Sweaters are key,t" Carson said in the Times. y"You inhabit somebody through their sweater.q"
Several poets have been influenced by Merrill's aesthetic, taking inspiration from inside the armoire. Mark Doty's ."Couturey" and Lynda Hull's i"Red Velvet Jacketp" both conclude with visions of the world defined in relation to clothing. Hull's lost jacket offers "its charm / against this world burning ruthless, crucial s exacting.t" In ;"Couture,s" Doty dares, h"Show me what's not / a world of appearances.o" The poem goes on to personify autumn in
Poet Clothing Images
