When even the verses are fashion

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The clothes, the body and the verses, or rather when the clothes become a founding inspiration in the poetics of some emblematic intellectuals. An example? Poetry Limit by Sylvia Plath.

The woman is now perfect/Her dead/body has the smile of completeness/the illusion of a Greek necessity/flows into the volumes of her toga/her bare/feet seem to say:/We’ve come this far, it’s over.

Written in February 1963, shortly before her death, this poem is a concentrate of the American writer’s art. “Poets in Vogue” is dedicated to her, and to six female poets and writers, to their art and stylistic features, but also to their looks as witnesses of their work, the exhibition at the National Poetry Library in London which brings together two very distant fields, yet made here symbiotic, like the world of fashion and poetic work.

Turbans, caftans and a red dress

A turban – among fluttering ostrich feathers and photo frames in a spectacular canopy of theatrical curtains, suspended on a slender guéridon – is inspired by the role of Lady Macbeth, played by Edith Sitwell at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950; a long severe kilt skirt, with her name stamped on a buckle and enclosed in a large glass case, belonged to the Plath; the repetitive shirt collars and photographic portraits, as well as accounts of live performances by Stevie Smith in the 1960s, they reveal his dedication to a coherent look, which includes a clean collar, an eye pin and apron; and again the bewitching red dress in which she made her shocking public “Confessions” Anne Sextonthe charming and beautiful rebel poet – alcoholic and sex addict – approaches the painful kaftan with an asymmetrical print that reproduces those worn by Audre Lorde who, thus dressed, refused to hide her mastectomy following the tumor that had afflicted her, deliberately choosing not to wear a prosthesis and defying the canons of composed and balanced beauty; the poet and performance artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha instead she used clothes and fabrics in her interdisciplinary work to highlight words as material and to call attention to the opacity of language and communication difficulties. In the end Gwendolyn Brooksthe first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, who has often wondered about questions of taste and style, about what beauty is, and how much clothes and fabrics are linked to poetic language, is represented by an installation with a typewriter, the tie of a poor man but “in Chicago fashion”, some photo clippings, and fake flowers to testify, among the sheets with his poems, the excessive and typically cowardly style associated with African Americans and Hispanics.

Look

Imaginative recreations of some of these artists’ signature ‘looks’ juxtapose images of archival garments, recreating the fruitful mix of language and clothing. A courageous exhibition, able to unhinge the cliché assumptions about the superficiality of fashion, and able to accompany the viewer along the tortuous and admirable paths that are hidden and declined in the centrality of the clothes for the art of these poets “underlining – as they explain curators Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool), Sarah Parker (Loughborough University) assisted by costume designer and editor Gesa Werner, who created the original stagings – poetry as practice embodied” .