 As
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What Shall I Wear?: The Ur-Question On Metaphors in the Work of Anne Stevenson |
As
Reviewed By: |
What Shall I Wear?: The Ur-Question On Metaphors in the Work of Anne Stevenson |
Poems
1955-2005,
Anne Stevenson’s 21st-century gathering of her life’s work,
invites us to linger over her most interesting tropes. While the poems in
her 1996 volume of Collected Poems 1955-1995 were cherry-picked
from her first to most contemporary work, the later book has been
organized thematically. This recasting of what many would consider an
exemplary book has particular meaning for Stevenson: she did it once
before, revisiting her 1966 take on Elizabeth Bishop for Twayne’s
American Author Series over 30 years later in Five Looks at Elizabeth
Bishop, for the Agenda/Bellew Poets on Poetry series. While that
particular revision may have been, to her, a matter of correction, it may
have had still more to do with her own deeply held convictions about
writing. These beliefs rise to the surface in Poems 1955-2005, with
thematic headings like “The Way You Say the World” and “The Art of
Making.” But Stevenson has always enacted dramas of poetic
creation, even on the level of individual metaphor. Her images of
clothing, strung over a long career, invite us in the more recent
compendium, as they have in all her other collections, to consider not
only their beauty but the method of their making. In this invitation
resides both a crucial question and a possible answer for all poets.
Art historian Anne Hollander, in her expert study of the way bodies
and clothing work together in art, notes that every culture considers
itself dressed whether its members wear clothing or not: as humans, we
adorn ourselves in ideas of the self. And if a painted dress reveals the
body beneath, the body also summons its garments: when we look at the
waistless, high-breasted nudes by Lucas Cranach, for instance, we see 16th-century
dresses enacted in absentia. For an artist whose medium is poetry,
the question is how literally to line form with words, how to fashion what
in other writers Stevenson calls the “paper clothes I coveted / and
ached to try on.”
The fact that Stevenson summons clothing words so often in her
poems over the years suggests that the apparently unexceptional question,
“what shall I wear,” is for her a “Damoclesian ur-question.” And
Stevenson’s questions about poetry, even the implicit ones, are always
gut checks for writers, occasioning what Catholics call ‘“an
examination of conscience”. When, for example, Stevenson describes
Sylvia Plath as a woman who “rebelled in some deep part of herself
against the very image she labored to create,” we see how fashioning
identity in language can go brilliantly wrong, and ask ourselves how our
own images will ultimately play us false. Or she offers this reading of
Plath’s poetic process: Desperately she struggled in the bonds of
selfhood: through her writing there must be a way out! Yet every time she
put pen to paper she began to analyze her strange predicament, sealing
herself more securely into her frustration.” Are we too caught in acts
of self-entombment, which are also, Stevenson reminds us, the consequences
of a gift for “romantic self-aggrandizement?” Because it occasions
such tough, clear-eyed querying, Stevenson’s writing about poetry can be
hard to read late at night, for reasons that only begin with the
biographies of other poets considered, as we try on all poetic habits,
like “paper clothes.”
Stevenson’s incisive accounts of poetry’s craft demonstrate the
perils we must test ourselves against. At the same time, her reliance on
the terms of clothing for poetic language teaches us how to make both
sides of a metaphor “simultaneously create each other” (a phrase she
uses to describe the two-sided contract between world and poet in her
essay “Poet and Place”). Stevenson refers to “the noose” many
times in her poems, and this construction is often associated with danger
or loss, most closely in “Suicide” and more figuratively in
“Portrait of the Artist in an Orthopedic Halo Crowned with Flowers.”
It appears both on and off bodies; in “Without Me,” Death’s “in
her diamond collar” offers an image of the poet driving through a
hallucinatory bracelet of weather brought on by a migraine. Most of the
clothing that appears pinned at extremities, like her circle-wear of
bracelets-manacles-nooses, leans toward the dramatic and unsettling,
whether an innkeeper’s odd excrescence of a mob-cap, a wheelchair
rider’s attraction to Doc Martins, or, more sinisterly, the “helmet of
globe” that lets someone bear the world and slowly drains him of power
in the “pathetic fallacy” described in “He and It.” The more conventional hats seem harmless or even helpful: Stevenson has described herself as the girl who thought a beloved English teacher’s name was derived from her hat, a turban, and the aunts in “The Dear Ladies of Cincinnati” kept their chins up / trying on hats,” as if there is an unseen lever of an idea like “courage” that turns body and clothing into the type of domestic machine each woman once knew how to operate. But Stevenson more often makes such adornments both familiar and strange indeed, sometimes by switching out one side of the metaphor so that it opens out into new terrain, as when the more usual pearls disappear from “Oysters,” and a diamond “clipped” at a “cleavage” becomes: an
oyster between white
dunes on a beach, grown
luscious on sewage’s steamy
tureen of
barely detectable radioactive
garbage Just
as the world produces in its waste we call jewels, so too may human
waste—in this case matched with an unlovely amplitude—produce
disturbing dazzlers. For better or worse, Stevenson suggests, this is the
way art works.
When, in “Arioso Dolente,” the poet’s father bounds
downstairs, shoeless and buttoning his shirt, to direct his daughter’s
piano-playing, he joyfully demonstrates how art both sets us in motion and
dresses us to do its work. The image suggests that poetry’s best
condition matches memory’s poignant immediacy to a (simultaneous)
decorum, a point also made by a well-loved pet who kept his dress shirt
“spinnaker-white” with the same tongue that urgently sought his more
feral “tabby parts.” Importantly, thought itself is capable such
decorous patterning and can be protective, as Stevenson says in “Journal
Entry: Impromptu in C Minor”: “The moment I take off my thought
clothes / I expose every nerve to their (the dead’s) waves.”
The dead “wave” most famously in “Granny Scarecrow,” the
title poem of her 2000 collection. Stevenson has said very perceptively
that Elizabeth Bishop found forms not to “fit” the way her mind
“bore on her material,” but so that some other material could be
“pulled up from beneath.” Similarly, in “Granny Scarecrow” the
skeletonesque wood cross and the skin of an old cotton dress and gloves
between them pull up a whole poetic economy of creation that is referred
to even by the typography, the way the poem is centered on the page.
This concept is all-important, for if nooses often suggest the
danger of closed systems in Stevenson’s poems, crosses tend to
demonstrate how such cruxes and crossroads can literally send us off the
map. It is tempting to suggest that Stevenson’s two Collected Poems
themselves act out the structural principle: the chronological earlier
volume is organized vertically, while the thematic volume offers a version
of the same career seen horizontally. Both exercises may have been
necessary (as were her two books on Bishop), and their conjunction is
fruitful. As the poet has said in “From an Unfinished Poem”: The
idea of an event is horizontal, the
idea of personality, vertical. Let
fiction take root in
the idea of the cross between them. This
is certainly the case in the scenery of “Granny Scarecrow”: when two
girls walk by the field on the family farm where the dead woman’s dress
hangs, personality meets event as they wave back at this creation, fully
animated in its combination of wood cross and flowered garment, the effect
completed by gesturing gloves. When the dress flattens in winter (no
mention is made of anything happening to the “plastic sack” head), and
one glove goes missing, the girls uneasily avoid their usual route, and
once they do a bus appears and they are more caught in their futures than
Granny Scarecrow is on her cross, or even the real granny is, it is
suggested, by death. As the dress empties, the poem implies, they fill:
caught in women’s sorrows, they will never have the vivacity of the
symbol they once passed daily. Wave goodbye, prim old cotton glove: in
“Granny Scarecrow” this ultimate decorum is also a kiss-off.
“Granny Scarecrow” suggests a warning against the clichéd
consequences of women’s erotic contracts (one woman becomes divorced and
a caterer, the other has generations of offspring—neither leave behind a
memorable image when they too “buy the farm”). But when those
contracts are described through clothing, they assume possibilities of
originality and expansion. In “Sous-Entendu,” Anne Stevenson frames
clothing as a metaphor for a sensual encounter carrying significant
implications for a poet, an artist of the word. The initial movement of
the lover’s game is familiar: Don’t
think that
I don’t know that
as you talk to me the
hand of your mind is
taking off my stocking, moving
in blind resourcefulness up
along my thigh. That
the lover’s imagination itself has a body (a hand of mind) is the first
wave of poetic news to shake a nerve here. But what follows, if in one way
less showy, offers a more subtle point about linguistic clothing: Don’t
think that
I don’t know that
you know everything
I say is a garment.
Because
Stevenson is so good herself at getting us to undress what she is saying,
we can enjoy a love-match between unassuming verbs, where, both
syntactically and symbolically, the real action is. In this version of
dress code, the lovers are matched by what they “know.” Still, only
one “says”: she is the re-tailoring tailor for whom language is not
only invitation but lover’s technique. And just as Stevenson has
developed signature images like the noose and the cross—and, over a long
poetic career, she has also earned her own designer label in clothing
metaphors—this earlier poem uses another pointed term: “making.” As
we track down the lines from “know” to “know” to “say,” we
receive a demonstration of what this making looks like.
This habit of showing how poems are fashioned within the poem
returns in the later ars poetica “Making Poetry,” now given
pride of place on the first page of the thematic collection’s
“Prologue.” It’s notable that a clothing term is crucial to the
endeavor as it is now staged in the poet’s lifelong work. “You have to
inhabit poetry if you want to make it,” the voice of experience warns a
novice who at least knows to query the verbs. The instructor’s reply is
that “to make” poetry we must “wear words,” the implication being
that we both put them on and wear them down in order to make them our
“habit.” And lest we think that human language is our only garment,
the instructor adds that we must also sit “in the silk of the morning”
and “the shoe of night”: that is, we must be dressed not only in
words, but in a more sumptuous world. The result is surprising: only then
will we feel “bare and frondish,” as if all this layering is necessary
to arrive at an appropriate, germinating nakedness. The lesson has been
learned via the language of the poem itself, as is revealed in the
interlocutor’s last question: “And why inhabit, make, inherit
poetry?” This third query reveals that the questioner is no naïf.
“Inhabit” and “make” in sequence seems somehow to linguistically
produce “inherit,” and with that, a way for poetry to survive into the
unsaid future.
Stevenson’s “paper
clothes” offer no conventional, mortal struggle between “true” body
and “false” clothes. What they offer instead is a metaphor of
continuous fashioning, which has a parallel in clothing history. Liza
Dalby reminds us that all fashion tends to bring what’s closest to the
flesh outward: underwear, ultimately, always becomes outerwear.
Occasionally the process freezes, which is what has happened to the
kimono, now a recognizably iconic two-piece native dress. But between the
9th and the 11th centuries, kimono generated meaning via layering, until
sumptuary laws intervened, up to twenty different colors in ten robes and
their linings: the result was memorable, decorous, culturably readable yet
individual. Poetry too can avoid being reduced to metaphoric noose or
two-sided cliché by a similar method, Stevenson suggests, and the result
will produce what is no longer its opposite: we will find we are layering,
in her words, “skin to skin,” and the result will still be “sexy as
sin.”
Which is not to say sinful: by demonstrating how nakedness is both
our own and poetry’s garment, Stevenson also neatly dispatches the
fallen man argument that, in Damoclesian fashion, says flesh is sinful,
clothing is not. And thus the answer to the question “what shall I
wear?” becomes something pleasurable we can afford and which suits us:
“something cheap, chic, dependable, off the shelf,” which Stevenson
rhymes wittily with “a naked self.” Once the conventional dichotomy
has been dispatched, the layered creation can head for unknown provinces: (.
. .shocking the panicky crowd that
can’t tell them apart) skin
wearing skin has been allowed outside of Art. Anyone
who writes poetry knows that simultaneous layers of horizontal and
vertical movement are not just symbolic frameworks made palpable in Granny
Scarecrows but are also the physical condition of poems on the page. When
added to this, rhyming offers doubled layers whose pleasure is to exchange
difference for similarity. It is no surprise that Anne Stevenson is a
terrific rhymer.” Note, just as one example, the little narrative
enacted in a single stanza of the poem-long “ed” rhymes in “The
Ballad of the Made Maid”: “maidenhead,” “into bed,” “will be
led, “ ”maiden bred.” From the very beginning, Stevenson’s poems always have wed poetry-making and love, it is fitting that her most beautiful image of making poetry via clothing metaphor describes the economics of an erotic act. Once again she employs a sparring question/answer session as framework: You
asked how experience becomes a poem in
the weightless hour that makes poetry. Look,
it’s happening now in a country, not
home, not foreign, in
language that puts its clothes on carefully after
unpaid, love-making labor in that dark erotic mill, the imagination. (“In Passing”) Here
the place of poetry, “not home, not foreign,” comes equipped with
native dress and local employer. But again Anne Stevenson offers one of
her patented gut checks to those of us who may still secretly believe
words are lesser garments to a more potent, naked unsayable. As language
to imagination, so worker to mill. Each would be meaningless without the
other. Perhaps the work itself is, in some ways, always teasingly unseen.
But if we are to have mill jobs, these are the ones: the doors never close
and if the pay’s not great, the benefits are the best. Where but in
poetry could we go to our work as if to our lovers? And our generous
employer, the “dark erotic mill, the imagination,” fuels and peoples a
whole country where, Anne Stevenson’s poetry suggests, we both gladly
work and at the end of the day emerge in the silks of our making. |
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