Poetry, Project Runway, and the Avant-Garde
A few months ago, I began binge-watching Project Runway with my husband and couldn’t help but notice the parallels between the fashion world and the poetry world. For those unfamiliar with the show, it is filmed at Parsons School of Design in New York (although one season is filmed at FIDM in LA). There are about 16 contestants vying for 3 or 4 spots at New York’s fashion week and they must undergo a series of insane challenges to produce their garments. Tim Gunn, a former Parsons professor, acts as a sort of mentor and guide during their garment construction process, giving advice and encouragement before the final result is then judged by three permanent judges — Heidi Klum, Michael Kors (who was later replaced by Zac Posen), and Nina Garcia — and one celebrity guest judge.
There are countless instances of the contestants basically having to sew their assigned models into their clothing, and seeing these near anorexic, lithe models reminded me of something Susan Sontag wrote. Regarding this waif-like, dangerously thin, yet blessed with a healthy glow aesthetic, Sontag compares models to those who suffer from tuberculosis and how this has permeated and influenced the fashion industry. She writes, “The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding . . . What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, eventually, the province of fashion as such. Twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” I then began thinking, what is the poetry community’s equivalent of these models? What forms of poetry have seeped into our consciousness and become the standard by which all other forms of poetry are judged? Which poets? Walt Whitman? Billy Collins? Anne Carson? Mary Ruefle? What poets continue to serve as the mold and which poets continue to resist, defy, and break it?
On Project Runway, judges give constructive criticism, but they don’t hold back the barbed comments either. Tim Gunn’s catchphrase to his exasperated designers is basically “make it work.” They have to take the parameters they are given in each challenge, head to a fabric store with a modest budget, and make some magic happen. What or who is the poetry world equivalent of Tim Gunn? I like to think of him as both the poet’s inner monologue and muse, guiding the poet along through what can be a stressful, torturous, and frenetic writing and revision process. Heidi Klum and Michael Kors, on the other hand, fire scathing comments at the designers. Kors, although such fun to watch, has likened some contestants’ garments to looking like “a pole dancer in Dubai” or an “avocado goiter.” Klum is sometimes sweet and other times almost sociopathic in her flat derision of the designers’ looks.
Garcia — creative director for Marie Claire magazine — is most concerned with what can be visually represented in her publication, what can benefit the Marie Claire brand, what will sell. What sort of poetry sells? Does it exist on the shelves of Barnes and Noble or in the warehouse of Small Press Distribution? One form of praise Garcia likes to give a contestant is that their look is very “editorial,” which I assume means classic, well put-together, and timeless. What poetry can be described as editorial? All three judges are sometimes in agreement when they call an unfortunate garment “sad” or “badly executed.” There is nothing worse than a lackluster dress or a lackluster poem or body of poems. However, the judges also discuss if a garment is wearable or translatable in the real world or if it should just exist in a fashion show traipsing down the runway. What, then, constitutes a wearable or translatable poem or collection? This is something that mirrors MFA culture; the academy has cannibalized art in so many ways, but also acts as custodian and historian, and the laboratory — or thin reality TV narrative of growing and developing, strengthening the individual from within the group, and learning wound-licking lessons of do-or-die art survival from the “masters” — happens in the critical workshop classroom. What purpose should these poems serve? Should the poems be able to reach a wide audience — the equivalent of the judges seeing the ability of a garment to be mass-produced as part of a line? Or should the poems exist as experimental works of art, beautiful and fragile, to be appreciated for their splendor and uniqueness? In the later seasons when Zac Posen replaces Michael Kors, Posen tells one designer during auditions that she has not only designed the best thing he’s seen all day, but she’s playing with tradition, subversiveness, and language. This is poetry critical theory at its finest.
There is so much crossover between the Project Runway’s judges and the “judges” in the poetry world. We poets are all scrambling to get our poems out into the ether to have them either accepted or rejected by a cadre of creative judges. I suppose the equivalent to winning New York Fashion Week would be to get a book contract with a major, notable press complete with a sizeable stipend. The equivalent to winning a challenge with a cash prize could be likened to a poet getting their book out on a less-notable press with a smaller prize, and the equivalent to winning an individual challenge would be a poet getting a few poems accepted in an online or print journal — still staying relevant, still staying a name, still staying somewhat en vogue. Who do we “design” for? Ourselves? Those reading and judging our writing? And just who is judging our poems as we send them down the Submittable Runway, in all their strange and diaphanous glory? Who is giving our poems and manuscripts praise and who is insulting and rejecting them? Unlike Project Runway, we poet contestants rarely have the opportunity to know who is judging our work, let alone stand in front of them and receive either harsh feedback or lavish praise.
Speaking of harsh feedback or lavish praise, this fuels the contestants to not only push themselves but engage in a fair amount of infighting and denial, just like the poetry community. There have been contestants who protest their elimination, cry, and claim that it’s unfair. One woman even refused to work in a group challenge with another woman she believed should have been eliminated instead of her. The most acerbic utterances happen in the cutaway commentaries where a good deal of the contestants tear their competitors down as they complete the challenges, make fun of their work habits or their abilities, and demonstrate the jealous and unhealthy side of competition. This leads me to wonder about competition in the poetry community. Why do poets infight and pick on each other? What are our insecurities and jealousies? Whose styles do we wish we could emulate? Who do resent for mass-publication or book deals? Can we separate the good people from the good poets? Many of the fashion designers make such exquisite pieces but are petty, salty, and superficial people. Speaking of undesirables, what about the horrible racism that keeps getting exposed in the poetry community? I thank the Mongrel Coalition for their continued efforts to bring to light and squelch these disgusting iniquities. That collective checks the white hegemonic path, those aristocratic and narrow roots, as an omnipresent roaring voice, that develops and cultivates art beyond the institutions formed by monocultural colonialsm; poetry, like fashion, must not be all aristocratic elitism all the time. Culture within culture within culture moves art, and nothing is just art. Poetry is not poetry, and fashion is not fashion. If people didn’t respond to the acts of the symbolic in art, we wouldn’t be anywhere. We certainly wouldn’t be watching anything. We certainly wouldn’t be reading anything.
Two of my favorite challenges are the unconventional materials challenge and the avant-garde challenge, and these both definitely have poetry world crossover. In the unconventional materials challenge, the designers are given non-fabric, odd, and difficult materials to mold into garments. They get to use some fabric, but the majority of their outfits must use the materials. One that stood out was making clothing from outdated technology such as Polaroids, old laptops, computer mouse pads, and corded phones. In one season, a woman who designed for plus-sized models broke apart all these Polaroids and sewed them onto a dress. Avant-garde challenges usually came with a cash prize and were paired with the brand of makeup used for the show. Contestants have to use a color palette similar to those in new lines of L’Oreal products. Avant-garde is defined as experimental or daring, and several of these contestants pushed the limits excellently. One contestant who barely learned how to sew before coming on the show (and who won that season), used black makeup and a crow (they were assigned birds as inspiration) as her inspiration and came up with a gorgeous dress that was loosely pinned instead of slick, sewed, and zippered. So, what then are the crossovers in the poetry world? What presses and journals and performances strive for the unexpected and the innovative? What poetry strives to make it new? Is this the kind of poetry that is too precious for the masses? Does it belong in just the insular art and poetry zone? I can think of several presses, poets, and journals who attempt to push away from the more expected, stodgy, and dusty poetry. Futurepoem, Fence and Fence Books, Action Books, Lana Turner Journal, DREGINALD, Reality Beach, Drunken Boat (of course), to name a few. In terms of avant-garde poetry readings and performances, the most brilliant reading I’ve seen was Jennifer Tamayo in January of 2015 at the Poetry Foundation performing her Dora piece.
Personally, I favor the more out-there styles of poetry and performance. I know tastes and infuences change, and I might have reacted more favorably to a Jorie Graham poem years ago than a lesser-known poet I come across in a small, experimental online journal. I know poetry is a large umbrella with room for all kinds underneath its arch, and it’s my hope that we continue to evolve and embrace change and let new forms, ideas, and the poets behind them take up the mantle.
