Poetry about clothes

A Long Dress

Gertrude Stein 1914

Gertrude Stein basic info

• An avant garde American writer

• She left without finishing her degree as she struggled with expectations and her identity

• She would try to parallel cubism in her work by emphasizing the present moment (often using present perfect tense)

• Would use repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation, being destructive rather than constructive

• Not modest in referring to herself as a genius

• Most famous for championing the cubist art movement, arguing for its Spanish origins

Tender Buttons ( a long dress) style

• heavily influenced by cubism

• The poem is dense, obscure, devoid of conventional logic, syntax and grammar

• It poses question looking lines, but ends them with a period, not a question mark

Tender Buttons (a long dress) basic info

• imagery includes a current that makes machinery, the wind, a dark place with multiple colors:

• White, red, black, yellow, green, blue, pink, and scarlet

Father’s Old Blue Cardigan

Anne Carson 2000

Anne Carson basic info

• praised for her range of poetry

• Mixed poetry with essay, literary criticism, and others

• Prefers to be private

• Answered emails in completely lowercase, with irregular punctuation

• Her father had Alzheimer’s disease

Father’s Old Blue Cardigan basic info

• the poem focuses on Carson’s father’s blue cardigan (a representation of him) and his cognitive detoriation and the feeling of losing him’

• Abrupt reversal of roles as the daughter sees the father as a lost, mad, child

Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits

Liam Rector 2006

Liam Rector basic info

• American poet, essayist, and educator

• Committed suicide in 2007 following a series of health problems

Fat Southern Men in Summer suits basic info

• Describes the imagery of fat southern men sweating in their suits

• The suits are a distinctive party of their appearance