A Wonder Closet

Speaking of John Wieners and then dressing rooms—there is a nine-page interlude in A Book of Prophecies inventorying a phantasmagorical fashion catalog:
7. Bill Blass beret out of
the Sorbonne sewer gray
shirt and tunic matching
8. Anginalia boredom
on false fronts
9. Tie and blouse by
Paisley
10. Hattie Carnegie
modeled by Mrs
Burr of Dorset violets
and glasses in cookie
cut
11. Kaspar Kentucky
tweeds jived with
previous dark imposition
Wieners shocks with inimitable juxtapositions—Sorbonne sewer, Burr of Dorset violets, tweeds jived. He’s first of all a voluptuary of syllables. But then he seethes with caste consciousness too:

30. Poncho dress
31. Greek dignity
32. Jumpsuit of
Marseilles beans
33. Hebrew hotshot
lizard belt
34. Donaval tweed
and jersey, a little
shoulder sheltering shawl
high waist with excellent
gold platinum from
Araby
35. Sparkling May
du Bois Adam Charles
36. Piranesi Nuremberg
Bodice and adorable scholarship
37. Berlin peasant politess
Fashion as plunder (taking materials and ideas from every corner of the globe), fashion as cultural collage (drawing liberally from lounge lizards to duchesses), fashion as fascist (that Nuremberg docket, the ill-lit Piranesi prison). He takes it personally, being a working class boy from Milton, but he loves it, and makes it proper to himself the only way he knows how.
In one of the best essays written on Wieners, Benjamin Friedlander wrote,
What is it that happens when I’m drawn, across a widening distance, by the chance of a fleeting encounter, an attraction amid confusion that Wieners stirs in me and that his work so often seems to address, an intimacy I would call, borrowing Wieners’ own words, the chance of my life? Such questions can’t really be answered—or rather, such questions can only find their answer in the experience of reading, in the passage of a language waged against the certainty of loss.
He loves it. And that’s some bag you can’t fake.