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Sarah Rosenthal is the author of the cross-genre book Manhatten and several chapbooks, the most recent of which is called The Animal. Her interview collection A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area was published by Dalkey Archive in 2010. She had has received the Leo Litwak Fiction Award and grant-supported residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale. She writes curricula for the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland. For more info, please visit acommunitywritingitself.com.
Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry—the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) and two chapbooks—as well as the critical study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo, The Nation, Cura, TriQuarterly Online, Contemporary Literature, Black Nature: A Century of African American Nature Poetry, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, and Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poets from the Carolinas. Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing.
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Ana Božičević | Broke Poets and Spring Fashion: Things More than $1Becca Klaver | OUR STYLE: A CollageJillian Mukavetz | fabric girlStacy Gnall | An Abridged History of CostumeMichelle Detorie | Fashion and Writing ShowKate Durbin | N O BIKINICatherine Daly | What I WoreAngie Kirby | Diana in the BathCristián Flores García | What Can Poetry Teach?Arielle Greenberg | from Locally Made PantiesMarisa Crawford | from ReversibleKhadijah Queen | 3 PoemsDanielle Pafunda | from The Book of ScabDolly Lemke | Orsino and Joanna: left to their own adornmentsYvette Thomas | The Panoply of SilkAnna Lena Phillips | desiderataNicole Steinberg | From a Closet of GriefJessica Bozek | "trunk to the blow": a poem-dressLily Ladewig | 5 HatsJennifer Tamayo | CUSTOM & CLOTHINGDanielle Roderick | The Pantsuitjojo Lazar | 4 PoemsSusan Yount | Socks of FireAngela Veronica Wong | On Looking LikeElisa Gabbert | "Some Notes on Fashion"Dana Teen Lomax | from All Made UpRosebud Ben-Oni | "No Las Olvidadas"Carrie Murphy | "Reticule" & "Armored"Ingrid Pruss | "Ad Fontes"Becky Peterson | "Clogs"Alexandra Marzella | "OKay."Amaranth Borsuk | "IDEM THE SHAME"Amanda Montei | "Four Poems"carina finn | "this is the girl of the moment"Daniela Olszewska | "White Dresses, Red Soles + Oil Paintings: Some Notes on Emily Dickinson, Christian Louboutin, + John Berger"Andrea Quinlan | "Crinoline Hems Trailing in the Mud: A Tribute to Vintage"Allison Layfield | "What Is It, and How Do You Use It"Caolan Madden | "FRILLWHIPPER"Daisy Rockwell | "Wedding Dress"
We would be walking down the street in the poetrycity. Gauze would be everywhere. The day would be big, halting, gracious, revocable, cheap. We’d be the she-dandies in incredibly voluptuous jackets ribboning back from our waists, totally lined in pure silk, also in pure humming, and we’d be heading into the buildings with knowledge – that is, ephemeral knowledge, like leafage or sleeves or pigment. The streets are salons that receive abundantly our description. The buildings are charming. And our manners are software. We feel sartorial joy.
—Lisa Robertson, “Lucite (a didactic)”
Poetry & Fashion & Performance: Together 4Evah
It may be said that poetry, which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress, and upon the stage.
—John Stuart Mill, “What is Poetry?” (1833)
What Is Existence?!
Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is. . .
—Theodore Roethke, from “The Poetry of Louise Bogan”
Poetry and Girls and Beauty, Conflated Again!
Somehow poetry and the female sex were allied in my mind. The beauty of girls seemed the same to me as the beauty of a poem. I knew nothing at all about the sexual approach but I had to do something about it.
—William Carlos Williams, I wanted to write a poem: the autobiography of the works of a poet
Fooled Ya!But we feel sartorial joy, and although there may be some freedom in inscrutability, we’d rather you read and look at what we’ve made. We’ve strung some words. We’ve made some images. We’ve tried to bring a whole vocabulary that women have, and sometimes share, into the light.
The poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs. . . .
—W.H. Auden, from the introduction to Adrienne Rich’s first book, A Change of World, 1951