Poets in Vogue: review by Amelia Stout

What do poets wear? My mind goes straight to the Dylan Thomas aesthetic — scruffy jackets, boyish knitwear, the occasional necktie or hat, all topped off with a floppy head of hair and a cigarette. The image of the tortured male poet has now become a cliché. He is painfully pretentious, performatively absorbed in the business of contemplation. His outfit says: ‘I am different from the rest of you. I am a thinker.’

But for the female poets making their names in the 20th century, fashion was serious business. It was about resistance. It was about individuation — the meaningful kind. It was about creating and the right to create. It was about the autonomy of self-expression on the one hand and the anxiety of self-image on the other.

This relationship between woman poets and their wardrobes is the fertile ground covered in ‘Poets in Vogue’, a compact exhibition in the National Poetry Library which uses a mixture of photographs, fabrics, and outfit reconstructions to shed light on seven female poets and their work. The aim is to draw out a link between the sartorial and the textual worlds of these poets, rather than fall into damaging tropes that reduce women, particularly troubled ones, to a series of muse-like, semi-pornographic poses.

This was readily achieved in the first exhibit: a photograph of a piece of performance art by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha from 1975. In it, Cha’s entire face was bound by bandage-like strips of white cloth on which the words ‘VOIX AVEUGLE’ (blind voice) were emblazoned. Meanwhile she held a scroll of fabric below her waist, which read, on consecutive lines: ‘ME’, ‘FAIL’, ‘WORDS’. The photograph was itself printed on a veil of white fabric, emphasising the inextricability of Cha’s words from the materials on which they are printed.

Poets in Vogue, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix (1975)

Given the strength of the first installation, the second was disappointing. It consisted of a reconstruction of Anne Sexton’s ‘reading dress’ but no case was made for a relationship between the glamorous red button-up and Sexton’s work beyond her tendency to wear it to poetry readings.

Stevie Smith, perhaps the most obvious candidate for this exhibition given her famously eccentric wardrobe, was represented by a series of six white collars — a creative reimagining of what the poet might have owned. This display had some thought-provoking parallels with Smith’s poetry, an extract from which appeared underneath. The collars were arranged in three rows, like lines in a stanza, and appeared in a slightly irregular sequence — some pointy, some round, some decorated with Smith’s signature eye motif, some not — mirroring the off-beat quality of Smith’s poetic style. As Sarah Parker, one of the co-curators, put it, the exhibit was designed to highlight a synergy between ‘poetic lines and clothing rhythms’.

In the corner of the room was a ‘material reading’ of Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith’, a mock epic about a man’s attempt to shed his troubled past in the act of getting dressed. This consisted of an enlarged print-out of the poem mounted onto the wall in a downwards curve, from which various objects and materials pertaining to Smith’s wardrobe — from garish ties to synthetic flowers to raw fabrics — sprung abundantly. Although the idea of a ‘material reading’ was interesting in itself, foregrounding the link between text and texture (both deriving from the same Latin root — ‘to weave’), the execution felt somewhat simplistic.

A reconstruction of a gown worn by Edith Sitwell when she played the role of Lady Macbeth in 1950, which hung dramatically from the ceiling, was the visual centrepoint of the exhibition. Again, though, the visual exhibit didn’t say much about Sitwell’s poetics, which were demonstrated by an extract from ‘Waltz’, a poem about two fashion-conscious young girls from Scarborough.

A kaftan worn by Audre Lorde after her mastectomy in 1978 had also been reconstructed for the purposes of the exhibition, purposefully drawing attention to the right chest, the site of Lorde’s surgery. This was a thought-provoking commentary on Lorde’s refusal to conform to stringent beauty standards and was accompanied by a case of textual clippings ranging from Lorde to Sitwell to Sylvia Plath which, visually unassuming though it was, was the material needed to get the exhibition’s conceptual ambitions off the ground. Unsurprisingly, Plath stole the show here, even though, according to Parker, the curators were hesitant to include her at all. Among the extracts chosen were ‘Mirror’, a meditation on the self-consciousness of the female experience told from the perspective of a mirror, and ‘Munich Mannequins’, a haunting account of the demand for perfection by the male gaze and the lifeless mannequins it seeks to produce.

Around the final corner was the only historical garment of the exhibition, a plaid skirt worn by Plath in the 1950s. This was a visually arresting finale, celebrating the majesty and artistry of clothes in their own right, and deliberately detached the garment from Plath’s — often fetishized — image.

The plaid skirt owned and worn by Sylvia Plath c 1956

Poets in Vogue has some interesting material exhibits and some interesting textual sources, but not enough conversation between the two. It excited me more about the potential within this field of study than what was actually there.

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/literature-poetry/poets-vogue