Ad Fontes

by Ingrid Pruss

I cannot explain the motivation but can certainly capture the glee of the late January morning I committed to purchasing a file of 50 designer fonts for Windows 2010. It was a snow day. Though I hate shopping, the pleasure of this online purchase was deeper and purer than the hot pink pashmina I dreamt of wrapping around my shoulders all winter long, having saved five dollars a week for the past eight months in the hopes of having it by Easter Sunday. But there was something more mysterious and tempting about the black shadowed letters with their tiny hooks of ALGERIAN, a quality infinitely more seductive than a cape could ever be, something that lent an erotic air of authority a soft, bright shawl could never confer.

I was enamored of 50 choice spices, fragrances, hues, fabrics, textures, moods, cloaks in which to watch my words parade across the page; it was like having my own private fashion show or a grown-up version of Barbie and Ken or, as I imagined it, Camille Claudel and Rodin whenever desire dictated.

Sitting at my desk, the font choices loaded on MS Word 2010 making me feel like the proud owner of the complete box of Crayola crayons–the one that-included-gold-and-silver-and-a-pencil-sharpener--the long, sleek, expensive box Mom said I didn’t need because I wasn’t really an artist. Having these fonts, however, I could confer the title artist upon myself and have the opportunity to live up to it.

Add to that the choice of colors from kelly to forest green and fuschia to lemon yellow, and I wondered if any piece of writing would ever be finished or if I’d defer the end so I could revel in the process of trying on as many outfits as possible on every single word, just to see how they looked – taking them off the hanger, zipping them and unzipping them, buttoning and unbuttoning them, and hanging them back up -- comforting myself with my mother’s false promises about ice cream, “the novelty will wear off” which has not happened yet.

The carefree confidence of capital letters in AR BERKLEY, extended my identity just as I imagined a coveted Mont Blanc fountain pen might; it gave me a wild but sane sensuality as if wearing a black felt fedora, with a large red ostrich feather perched on its brim, to run errands about town, looked respectably eccentric instead of brazenly crazed. There was something tucked-in yet laissez-faire about its boldness, a quality rather like Herrick’s kindled wantonness.

The scripted fonts set my language free, allowed the syllables to sound their way out of my body fearlessly, as if my words needed a costume for safety, a disguise for immunity, similar to an author’s nom de plume. Though this made no rational sense, it was liberating. How strange that a simple typeface could create such wind for my words to set sail on, but if you glanced at Vivaldi, you’d see the amplitude of its simplicity. So I pared down all the phrases I made as hiding places and stared down the small square of space that scared me – the truth of my place on this planet, even more miniscule in this galaxy, Perspective is everything, and when I saw it, I knew who I was, where I fit, and how everything would fall out of its place ultimately, so I sat and fleshed out my words, letter by letter in flagrant celebration of imperfection, homage a la vida mortale.

I wanted these 50 fonts more than a Renaissance-bell-sleeved velvet dress or over-the-knee red suede button-up-the-side boots. I wanted them more than sparkling rhinestone shoulder duster earrings or a Weiss aurora borealis headlight-style antique brooch. I would wear the fonts far more often than anything in my closets or drawers.

And these highly stylized files of ink could dazzle me into believing myself a member of the belletristic benevolent writerly aristocracy long enough to redeem even the most abject poems and prose from the depths of my own darkest censor.

(Photo by Barry Lipman)

Bio: Ingrid Pruss teaches English at WCSU (4/4), and has published in the JAISA, the George Herbert Journal, Violence Against Women, and Quay. She's been teaching 26 years, 22 at WCSU. While her specialty is 16th and 17th century British Poetry, her passion is to teach students to develop their own imaginations, to create their own de-familiarizing images. and to think for themselves. She asks all her classes to make multimedia projects with visual and verbal images in addition to writing papers.

Reticule & Armored

by Carrie Murphy

Reticule

The poem is a navy blue leather purse that used to belong to your grandmother.
The poem is an embroidered tapestry-style satchel.
The poem is a vintage silver clutch with a Lucite handle.
The poem is a sow’s ear, a silk slipper bag, a bejeweled tampon case.

where do you put your poems/where do you keep

The poem is my purple L.L. Bean backpack with my initials in dingy white.
The poem is my Pucci-print jewelry pouch, tucked at the bottom of the suitcase.
The poem is my polyester pocket.
The poem is mine.

the poem on your arm/the poem in your hand/open the poem/inside the poem

The poem hanging from a gold zipper.
The poem’s tassels, swinging.
The poem closing with a click.
The poem snapping shut.

put it in the poem/the poem/white space/lipstick bathroom scrawl/
words sewn in the lining/mints&tobacco&aspirin/metaphor/metaphor/metaphor
poem as purse as dark wet cunt/compact mirror reflecting up

Armored

I’m wearing a gold signet ring so when I punch they’ll know who did it. I’m carrying an umbrella with a thick carved handle so I can poke back, hard, against the driving drops & the little rain-slickered ladies. Spike-heels are an obvious weapon, but I use them to pick seeds out of my teeth or to carve initials into the mahogany sideboard at the rest home. This rosary weighs three pounds. This turban will never topple; a ruby as big as your eye, velvet soft like the skin on the inside of your thigh. Sequinned scabs & a polka-dot trance. Silk that never stops rustling. I want to show you my rhinestones, I want you to lick my leather gloves to their tips. Feel the belt where it buckles. I can fit your moth balls into this cocktail ring; see how they sparkle in the light?

Bio: Carrie Murphy is from Baltimore, MD. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her MFA at New Mexico State University. Her poems have appeared in PANK, Keyhole, Prick of the Spindle, and other journals. Her chapbook, "Meet The Lavenders," is forthcoming in early summer 2011 from Birds of Lace.

Our Non-Angelic Halo: Psychic Connection via Time Travel via Fashion

by Gina Abelkop



Inspired by a 1962 photograph of Sylvia Plath, I began to wear my own hair in a Dutch crown braid. This type of braid is taught to me via youtube tutorial led by a lady with a British accent. Sisterhood is powerful, knowledge passed down. Who’s to say this knowledge is not important? A woman in another country helped me to feel closer to a poet whose words have licked at my innards since adolescence. Sometimes it is these small, seemingly insignificant visual cues- fashion cues- that make me feel connected to the words and women I love. I weave them on/into my head, repetitive patterned braiding, one thick red-palomino chunk of hair woven into the next until the circle is closed, a non-angelic halo.

Emily Dickinson is inside of my head often lately. I loved her as a child and she has come back to me in recent years. Recently I dreamed about her while reading the biography My Wars Are Laid Away in Books.

I dreamed about Emily last night
Oh yes I did      I dreamed she came
to visit with her family     In old-
fashioned clothes and brown hair
Her sister in tow      I knew
it was a blind date      I was meant
to romance her      But Emily and I
were awkward with    each
other      We made small talk over
her family’s religion      We met at
a tiny indiscriminate shop     I didn’t
want to scare her    She’d come from
the past       Emily is not mine not mine
In the end I don’t recall how we split
ways       Only that her dress was less
severe than I’d imagined it would be
Time travel seemed natural to me
at the time      But I can’t seem to get it done now

In my dream her clothes were plain and brown; they sat easily on her, without the telltale constraint I always imagine in her era of fashion. What we think of now, in relation to Emily’s clothing, is her white dresses. In my love and obsession with Emily I find myself wearing white more often- seeking it out- strange for me, who loves magentas and oranges and greens and blues, new wave colors buzzing like busted chainsaws against each other. I mix the two- throw some calico in for good Willa Cather-esque measure, gravitate to lilys and roses, those markers of faith and love that Emily invokes in one of my favorite poems. I stroke the material of my few garments from the 19th century and try to feel for Emily’s world in them. I want to be closer, and I want to understand. Ever since we met in my dream I have been trying to step back into her world. In my sleep it came easy, but awake there are so many intrusions: cars, cell phones, the computer I write this on. But when I am reading I can begin to conjure it again, and a world gone past opens up inside of me, a universe of the veins. Blood memory, conjured with the help of rotting deep- decayed musty garments rubbing against my skin. I stink of it. Emily D. is close at hand.

I hold these women and their work to me by way of imitative, bastardized copy-catting. Fashion lords over this house of tribute with a bright and stealthy eye. I wake from 1883 and move forward to the closet: in wakefulness there is yet more conjuring to be done.

Photos: Susanna Troxler.

Gina Abelkop lives in Berkeley, CA where she wears floral print '40s frocks and romances Emily D. in her dreams. She also runs Birds of Lace, a feminist press.

No Las Olvidadas

by Rosebud Ben-Oni

It might seem I’ve turned my back you. That I’m deliberately trying not to blend. Make us target out in the open, where the murky, lazy waters of the Rio Grande sullied all but the bundle tightly wrapped of the dress I’ll wear in a land forbidden. I will walk with my head up, shoulders back, where day runs into night. I know how to tell time from patches in the ground. I will not lurk past la migra.

As a child I had slept like a comet. Laced up my exhaust. Awoken roaring-in-the-works, streak the late-night women who climbed into the late-night worn vans for their late-night shifts at the maquiladoras, our mothers among them. Do you remember how the women would cry out and accuse one another, pinch each other in return? Do you remember their sudden laughter ringing like church bells and the driver looking in the rear-view mirror, disapproving?

Now at the river’s edge, I am half-grown, with wild hair like mossy river plants, a woman who would fan this headdress to the dare the hurricanes to scatter her across oceans. La Migra has been tracking for sign for years. I will not be careful with my footprints. I lost my fear long ago.

I am not turning my back on you. I will not let the man with the big truck hide us between the seats like loose change, or start us as stolen from the beginning. Make us imitate the burlap in the corner. Beg to be broken in. My hair is still wet from the river, the air is a fine mist settling on my skin and the inches of this cotton. I bare my back, under an arch of gentle thunder and uncertain sky.

Follow me, and we will consume their quarreling torches, the hungry headlights that track us deep into every night and every storm. We’ll uproot the pitchforks in their hands with our unspoken secret that is older than language and grows on both sides of the river. It knows nothing of borders. Follow me and we’ll walk until we find eternal evergreens that hide every shadow, we will find the first primordial storms are unearthed from kettle drums, long buried in the vistas of the first desperadas who dared.

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Rosebud Ben-Oni is a member of New Perspectives Theater, which produced her play Quimera on the Storm in September 2010. Her essay “On Writing Quimera and other Fears,” in which she explored the Mexican/Mexican-American relationship in wake of Arizona’s recent immigration policy, will be presented at "Practicing Theory”: The 2011 ASCA International Workshop in March 2011 in Amsterdam, and the PCAACA joint conference in April 2011, in San Antonio. In March 2011, “The Amaranthine Thread” dedicated to the late playwright Leah Ryan, will be part of Georgetown Theatre Company's SWAN Day 2011 Play Reading Marathon. Rosebud is also a co-editor for Her Kind at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

from ALL MADE UP

by Dana Teen Lomax

The following series is part of a larger work entitled All Made Up and was created on March 31, 2011 at the Town Center and Northgate Malls in Marin, California. "Dior" appears in Disclosure (Black Radish Books, 2011). Nothing was purchased in the creation of this work.

Click images for larger view.

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of several books of poetry, including Disclosure (Black Radish Books, 2011) and Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006). With Jennifer Firestone, she co-edited Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poets, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). She teaches at San Fransisco State University and Marin Juvenile Hall and lives in San Quentin with her radical family.

SOME NOTES ON FASHION

by Elisa Gabbert

Fashion is considered frivolous because the industry revolves around women. Fashion is about women, although most designers are male. (Gay men face the same systematic dismissal as women; homophobia and misogyny are at base the same instinct.) Fashion is not the object of the male gaze, but it does lie in the gaze’s path.

Fashion serves two purposes, one functional and one aesthetic. This is what brings it into the realm of design – one wants fashion, like furniture, kitchen implements, and houses, not simply to look good or to work, but to do both.

One of the ways fashion “works” is by signaling our alliances. Fashion communicates – nonverbally, unless your clothes are a text – your socio-economic status, your politics, your personality. Do you seek attention or avoid it? With what subcultures do you identify? This signaling is largely unconscious, and realized through the illusion of taste.

In street fashion, aesthetic flourishes must not detract from usability. In couture, function is sacrificed for style; hence couture is not design, but a purer art. Fashion is art you can wear. Couture is art you could wear, but would probably not.

Nudists aside, there is no opting out of fashion. One must choose to wear something. Thus one’s fashion communicates even if one wishes to remain silent.

Men’s fashion works within a tighter set of constraints, the formal poetry to women’s free verse. In such a controlled system, details become crucially expressive – the tie says more about the man than the purse of the woman.

Fashion is an open text. Much as the director, actors, and even the audience collaborate in the realization of a play, the art of fashion is collaboratively realized through those who style and wear it.

Fashion magazines are often shallow and consumerist, but not because fashion is inherently shallow and consumerist. These traits can be attributed to most magazines, including those focused on the other arts.

Fashion is a Veblen good – the more expensive the item, the more desirable it is. Art aspires toward consumerism.

Design and production processes aside, no schooling or formal training are required to participate in and appreciate fashion. Thus fashion joins music among the most populist of arts, and the least racist and classist. In fact, innovation in fashion often occurs from the “bottom” up; in lower-class communities, expensive clothing is less available as a status-marker, so status may be conveyed through individuality and creativity.

Alice Fulton said poetry is recursive. Fashion too is recursive, always referring back to itself as it moves forward.

In fashion, as in other arts, a kind of crude progress is made over time, but compared to, say, communications or medical science, this progress has no obvious end. Art may improve our lives, but better art does not seem to improve it more.

---

Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of two collections of poetry: The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press), a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and Sentence, among other journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, and The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics. She currently lives in Boston and blogs at The French Exit.

SEAM RIPPER INTRODUCTION

REVENGE OF THE SLIP DRESS SLUTS

Mildred, a black feather eyemask!

-Chelsey Minnis

(Sketch from Hannah Weiner's "Fashion Show Poetry Event")

by Kate Durbin

Since Baroness von Elsa paraded down the street naked save for black paint. Since she wore shower curtain rings as bracelets and postage stamps as beauty marks. Since Hannah Weiner wrote WORD on her forehead and staged the first “Fashion Show Poetry Event.” Since Mina Loy crafted thermometer earrings. Since Sylvia Plath posed in swimwear for her college newspaper’s fashion column. Since the same Sylvia Plath spent her post-divorce money on clothes instead of groceries (girl, I did the same thing). Since Harryette Mullen wrote Trimmings. Since Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons.

In a recent google search on Emily Dickinson, I came across this: “Emily Dickinson was a shy crazy lady who dressed all in white.”

Fashion and its relation to writing, or women writers, is not limited to poets of course. Would Joan Didion be Joan Didion without those massive so-L.A. sunglasses? Who could forget that image of her standing next to a Corvette, a shroud of cigarette smoke obscuring her face, her thin frame sleek in that 70s gown? And while Zadie Smith may be ashamed of her fashion obsession, she still let Vogue into her dressing room, replete with vintage dresses, colorful head wraps, and a Venetian vanity.

Still, there’s something about the dangerous, too-sexy combo of fashion and writing—in particular women’s fashion and women’s writing—that tends to make people react in one of two ways. They either want to tidy the women up, safe-sex them, prop them like dolls, and sell to the highest bidder, much like Oprah’s recent Talbot’s ad of poets. Or they want to dismiss the fashionable women writers as frivolous accessories, unserious artists, like David Orr’s masculinist response to Oprah’s spread. These attitudes unfortunately often trickle down to the women writers themselves, who internalize this unconscious cultural sexism and feel bashful about their interest in fashion, or they compartmentalize their fashion from their writing in a Catholic sort of way.

To this I say: FUCK FASHION SHAME.

I cannot tell you how many female poets have told me that by encountering my work they now feel permission to wear hot pink lipstick and ball gowns to reading or conferences. I am glad they feel permitted, but I think it’s sad they ever felt there was something suspect about wearing lipstick and ball gowns to intellectual events. It’s my belief that my unwavering allegiance to glitter is the most radical stance in my career.

When Becca Klaver first contacted me about co-curating SEAM RIPPER, the title of her email was: REVENGE. In high school, Becca and I were both called into our respective principal’s offices for fashion crimes—hers, a slip dress from the Delia’s catalogue, mine, purple hair. Becca and I have been talking about fashion for awhile now—we really can’t stop talking about it—and we are both drawn toward the many brilliant women writers, such as the Gurlesque poets, who make fashion a part of their work. The thing about most of us fashion poets is that fashion’s been a part of our lives since we were teenagers, and yet, like many things teenage girls obsess over, the larger intellectual community rarely accepts fashion as a legitimate art form. And, if it is “embraced,” it’s misunderstood, as Oprah recently proved. Becca knew that Oprah had ripped off, and misunderstood, some of my work with fashion and poetry. So, like the two teen rebels we are, we decided it was time for a little payback from the Slip Dress Sluts.

Delirious Hem already speaks to fashion in its very title. What better space for a response to the intellectual community at large on women writers and fashion? And what better way to respond than to let these women speak and glitter and shimmy and bedeck and bedazzle for themselves? For that’s where Oprah and Orr made their biggest mistake—they put “fashion” on women, instead of realizing that fashion, like poetry, is something that comes from a woman, that she does by and for herself.