This Was Supposed To Be Beautiful: A Failure

Last year when I was fresh from a divorce and had some unexpected and urgent expenses (a car), I got a note from a person who was trying to start up a kind of “intellectual” luxury fashion magazine. She was really nice and really smart. She was offering the kind of fee per word you don’t really hear about anymore. She said she loved my writing and asked if I wanted to write a piece for her on fashion. I enjoyed our exchanges, and her wit, I felt flattered of course. But I demurred—“I’m pretty much a Marxist, I don’t think it’s a good fit.” She insisted. I insisted again, telling her I hadn’t bought new clothes in three years and was liable to do something annoying, like write about the Lowell Mill Girls’ literary magazine, the Bangladesh factory fires, and other incendiary topics. Great! She said. Just what we want. This was before the pandemic of course, when people were still wearing clothes.

I spent some time turning over Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt,” a poem I have loved for a really long time—its nautical lexicon at the open, its stainless economy and enormous reach, its slightly unsettling bloodlessness, a kind of white cold amidst the unjust, the resplendent flames. It is a correct poem, a lesson, and such an immense pleasure to read, both quietly and out loud. Pinksy has described the rhythm as liturgical, and so it is:

…the presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union
The treadle, the bobbin, the code.

As much as I loved it, I thought it was maybe too classy, too creamy, too straight, too perfect, and too beautiful. Is the pleasure in the design or the construction? Is “wonderful” here sublime or colloquial?

Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord.

I thought the shirt too costly, too quality, “down to the buttons of simulated bone.” My fresa mind, not yet out, not yet in love with a woman who is, in fact, a fashion designer, was wracked with guilt and writing shame. Too untutored to be scathing about fashion, and, single for the first time since teenagerhood, too meekly in need of the sparktacular and the shiny, the glossy and the impressive and the voluminous, the HEELS, the compliments, the jewelry, I was flailing in my most outlandish garments. I tried to peacock my way to a new Pinsky about a fucking sequin tube top from Rainbow. The title, after a delightful 2010 YouTube moment, was “Tons of Fuckin Sequins.” I don’t think my editor caught the reference.

The history of sequins is also the history of money, and, more interestingly, counterfeit money, of armor and of apotropaics. The word comes from the Arabic, sikka for coin or minting die. Their popularity surged after the 1922 opening of King Tut’s tomb, where they found the ruler’s finery bespangled in round metallic decorations—a literal treasure chest of metaphorical treasure. Jazz age fashions! Were really about the Egypt craze and imperial plunder. Like mirrorwork in the shisha fabrics of the Indian subcontinent, widely believed to have taken hold during the Mughal period, their flash and dazzle is meant to repel malignant spirits. In shisha embroidery, and in general spangleology, sequins reflect, repel, deflect, dazzle, and though they are made to look like money, they almost always have the opposite effect. This is why I love them.

Things took a turn after I sent her the piece. She didn’t like it at all (I also read that essay on sequins from the Smithsonian! She wrote, accusingly), but was eager to come to some middle ground. Wow, though, the publisher—whose day job was making ads for luxury labels like Cartier—was fuming. I wasn’t in direct contact with him, but she forwarded his laments to me, and I found them let us say symptomatic. He wrote, in all caps (NAME OF MAGAZINE) is NOT A PLACE FOR WORDS LIKE FUCKING. I was hurt, of course, because it was definitely not my best work, and anyway I was a mess. I was spending all my time teaching about imperialism and climate change and writing about terrorism and the history of plagues. This piece felt cute! And a bit thought-provoking, if not a lot. The man’s email was very long. He had many ideas about exactly what he wanted me to write, and how. He was angry; his anger bubbled through every grammatical hole. The first line of his Jeremiad seemed to accuse me not only of personally betraying him, but also of betraying my gender and my vocation: “This was supposed to be beautiful.” I pulled the piece and didn’t ask for my kill fee.

I’ve been thinking about Pinsky’s poem a lot in the year since this failure, since meeting my girlfriend, who knows all these words, all this labor. I’ve been thinking about how I managed to cheapen my love for inexpensive garments, how to reconcile this with my love for the people who made them and the histories they carry. I’ve been trying to come up with language for explaining to my students why “how hot I am” is rarely a good topic for a poem, without degrading the labor and importance of self-presentation and eros, of costume and theater in the draggy Northeast winter. Of pleasure and high femme lyricism in poems and in dress. In a New Yorker podcast episode with Paul Muldoon from 2015, Pinsky picks a poem—this is the format of these interviews, which I love—from the archives, and then reads one of his own, also from the archives. He begins with Elizabeth Bishop’s Nova Scotian poem “At the Fishhouses.” The speaker hands an old fisherman a Lucky Strike, they talk of the fish, fewer than when the old man was young. It is a scene of work, of scaling and gutting, and so:

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Flashing from the black old knife, the dark sea that swells around them, the dark future where there will be no work, pulled filaments of hot metal ripple down the stanzas: “thin silver/ tree trunks are laid horizontally/ across the gray stones.”

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

I love the transmutation of cold to flame here, such a visceral truth for people of the North, born of the searing frozen seas. That Pinksy was thinking about this poem as he wrote “Shirt,” or at least thinks of them in connection afterwards, the “dark gray flame,” is both surprising and not. Both are about labor, of course, and the dangers of specifically gendered labor—the cruelty of the ocean with its waning bounty, the heat and sweat, the flames and hazard that envelop the garment worker. The old fisherman, too, gets to wear sequins here—gets to fling the coin of his economy, of the ocean, like a profligate spender who already knows his time and the time of his work are short. These sequins burn in the light that sparkles also off the crenellated swells in the Nova Scotian harbor. For Bishop, it’s an atmosphere of truth, where almost-frozen water, searing, meets the light and negates it.           

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and
since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Pinsky talks about the turn at the end of the last line with such deep admiration—the way flowing and flown plays a little trick of allowing us to think they are two past tenses of the same verb for half a second, until the first flows away with the tide, and the second rises, a transmutation of fire, thin silver, stellar at the horizon.

Endangered fish flow and fly, are drawn, in Natalie Diaz’s “How the Milky Way Was Made,” which follows the path of the Colorado River, “shattered by fifteen dams.” The poem transmutes, or rather “saves” the fish whose river it is by lifting them up “from our skeletoned river beds.”

loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

The Venn diagram of poets and sequin lovers meets in the closed curve of this truth: we will not stop seeing the light of distant galaxies everywhere, blurring the path in our wake. We will not stop trying to swaddle ourselves in it, their secret technology, the symmetry, the intermittent blaze. The moment it isn’t there to be seen we find our pens to embroider endless glitter ekphrasis. We pull it down from where it soars and wrap our lack and fear in it. Night skies and freeze-ass waters, glinting syringes and sun-baked nape hairs, brilliant lichens on rotting wood, the kisses in flames of factory fires, Scrooge McDuck swimming in coins, the flowing and the flown, the tips of living feathers, frost on the windshield wiper, tartrates in blah wine, garlands of dew drops on spider’s webs, fractured clouds lit from below, the first dust of pollen on a patent leather pump there’s nowhere to go in.

Everyone turns to poetry in days like these. They, we, turn: dumbfounded, and deep hearted. These days, we are told, when we “work” from home, it is best to dress. To dress is to be human. We put on our hard pants, wash our face, conceal and line, we go on tarring our lashes. Some women, these days, still design clothes, some women still sew and embellish them. Many of these women live in the mills, the factories. More now than ever, they really live there, unable to go home. A ruffle, drawn in New York, under quarantine, is still ordered from China, for now. “I know it’s marigold. Did we see the color in person? Do we need the sample? How few shipments can we get it into? Do we quarantine the box? For how long?” Whose hand touched these fabrics, whose hands finished these flourishes? Are they safe? Are they healthy? Are they furloughed?

When a print crosses over a seam with rigor, with accuracy, it’s called a placed print, or an engineered print. “Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly.” You line up the tail of a cheetah, a rose in full bloom, “across the placket,” over the arc of a shoulder. This is expensive. Fabric is wasted. The effect is pure and intentional. The two-dimensional idea, stitched together to accommodate movement, a body, in sickness and in health. This is what it is like to watch the flames in Pinsky become the sequins in Bishop become the Milky Way in Diaz. This is what it is like to chase every violent glimmer to its last, all the way to god, in the darkest days. 

There are bright hours every day we slide or zoom into distanced sociality. At home, we wake to familiar constellations of freckles, and kiss, if we’re lucky, and then we sign in to do our best. We face time. Do we need each other, on our tiny screens, to show up and be the stars we navigate by? My best clothes aren’t here in quarantine, but the finches are slowly changing color, their plumes so many tiny dawns, and every day we try to make something beautiful, to meet the sky in effort and in awe, whether we are supposed to or not.