New York, NY: Four Way Books, 2018. 66 pages. $15.95.
In House of McQueen, her debut collection, Valerie Wallace is a master of contents under pressure. In predominantly short-lined, strophic poems, the language crafts a persona and soundscape as shocking and unforgettable as Alexander McQueen’s influence on the fashion industry. “I’ve tried my best to get away / from the Little Black Dress,” Wallace writes in “McQueen’s Bop with the Interviewer,” followed by a question that runs like a stitch through the collection: “How can you trust counterfeit elegance?”. The question is tongue-in-cheek. While literary criticism on “persona” since Plato and Aristotle has belabored the distinction between poet and dramatis personae, Wallace’s use of persona in “Bespoke,” for example, tends to echo early twentieth-century poets for whom a mask granted the poet permission to “invent the narrative cupboard, to be honest beyond costume.” Thus, what is “counterfeit” is juxtaposed by the illuminated runway, which showcases a skirt of “crimson ostrich feathers” and bodice of “stained red medical slides.” Against fragility, uniformity, imitation, and naiveté, McQueen was a controversial figure who worked with “leather, locusts, shells [and] fur,” so the clothes he made didn’t acquiesce. “Here teeth, and nets, / art of armor.” In House of McQueen, “art of armor” comes to mean twice: McQueen’s actual materials textualize the poems’ soundscapes so that both the silhouette of a woman and a poem are reinvisioned as anything but fragile.
Persona poems go beyond the designer to include him as bestiary, the muse through various models’ words, or even the fashions themselves—synecdoche for the whole scene; what exactly is “counterfeit” in the aesthetic realm where designer or poet wants to “cut / a path to / the sacred / tired of / suggestion”? “I’ve cut away the waste,” Wallace writes in “Shears,” hoping to get at something other than the world reflected back to the poet through mimetic theories of representation. Perhaps because of the tragedy of McQueen’s life cut short, the poems foreground history by interrogating the fashion industry’s imperialist past that McQueen’s controversial shows unapologetically combated. Referenced in the “Notes” to Wallace’s collection, shows such as the controversial Highland Rape inspire the sonnets Wallace tugs from a “buried history of England & Scotland.” The point is to be visibly offensive, to offset the sonnet’s traditional formal expectations with some profanation. The reader may expect complete sentences or a centralized speaker. But here forms are “building a new angle, attempting opposite of what was thought / Style could do.” In “Bespoke,” a sequence of seven sonnet-length poems constructed from the words of McQueen devotees, Wallace uses the cut of the sonnet to weave a new fabric for which “the loom doesn’t exist.” In “5. Made out of Björk’s words,” McQueen’s persona—or is it Björk’s?—speaks out of found text:
When I use a cage, it’s so people can see the danger
Of tyranny, like racism, or when nationhood spits
Religion. I want to push people so they stop
Walking past what they feel. Yes, design is manipulation.
“Walking past what they feel” falls at the volta, were this sonnet Petrarchan. “Cage” is self-referential; restraints like the volta are in place to allow for feelings to be heard. How do the poems accomplish something like “full volume, no restriction” without losing their formal precision? Take something like the ekphrastic “[When staggering down the runway wearing tartan over torn lace]”—a fourteen-line poem that exploits the hypotactic syntax typical of the sonnet without resolving it in the way that Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats did:
When obsolete colors, fulwe, sad, vernal, watchet
When sleeveless torn satin & cutaway shorts
When strewn with cigarette butts
When a buried history of England & Scotland
When a man yelling, Have I offended you then?
When the body becomes everything it is given
Obsolete, cutaway, or strewn with cigarette butts—Wallace’s poems are obsessed with shaping and power: who or what decides when something like a color is relevant? For what reasons might fabric be torn or history buried? Protesting oppressive silence, the poems and fashions argue the past persists. It’s stored in Wallace’s obsolete diction and even the remnant of a heroic couplet as this pseudo-sonnet ends; it’s also stored in the balance of the fragment, which remains syntactically unresolved as the half-meaning afforded by the relation between line and syntax. When all of this happens, then what? We don’t know unless we look at the body. The belief that the personal is political in the realm of American lyrics is echoed in Wallace’s last line: a seemingly personal end to a poem about the representation of destruction (human or landscape) through a mode as impractical as fashion.
But fashion isn’t actually impractical in Wallace’s poems about McQueen, also known as Alexander or Lee. Fashion is about being alive, which means that it orchestrates rather than follows suit. “Fashion should predict the time we’re in, not reflect it,” Wallace writes in “Autobiography of McQueen.” The claim reminds one of a poem earlier in the collection titled “Fabrication.” The question I earlier cited—“How can you trust counterfeit elegance”—is anchored to the urge to express, rather than mirror, nature. McQueen is a Romantic in this sense, and Wallace is, too, with poems echoing the young Wordsworth’s awareness of the poet’s need for a more authentic song. But the emphasis on making in these poems is firmly anchored to survival: McQueen’s very life depended on getting outside of his own mind to become “methodical as nature.” We don’t typically think of fashion as “natural,” but this is a designer for whom the skeleton was a starting point. Unlike Wordsworth, McQueen believed resplendence had to be built: “I embroidered / orchards, made damask bloom and fade, / more auroral than the white sun as it sank, / so that s/he could breathe, I am alive.” The genius of this collection is the collaboration between poet and designer, and Wallace’s use of poetic technique—even something as seemingly insignificant as vowel sounds—to show how wearing orchards or the bloom of a damask pattern makes life take shape. This is Wallace’s first collection, but the poet’s understanding of craft is deep and historically-minded enough to dwell with McQueen’s cutting-edge aesthetic. Perhaps the end of “Needles” says it best: “I can’t get over how it all works in together.”
