for Daniel Dutton’s dresses
Kiki Smith, “Butterfly” (2000)
i
Danielle Dutton’s “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read” moves like a mix between a quotation-collage and a spec-fi installation that gathers dresses from readings into a collaborative space called the page. The speculative quality demands a certain kind of engagement from the reader, namely, a creative one. Imaginations are invited to bear on what emerges, or is made to happen, in those interactions. One loves it so much that one pines away in its lineaments.
ii
—One of Dutton’s dresses.
“Biography of a Dress” by Jamaica Kincaid.
iii
Why do these dresses elicit a feeling of recognition for me? What does it mean to “identify with” a dress one has read? Which dresses have I read that did not make Dutton’s list?
Three different narrative approaches come to mind. Three ways of thinking about dresses:
a) a quotation-collage of my dresses modeled on Dutton’s
b) a description of my own experiences with Dutton’s dresses
c) a lyrical enumeration of my dresses in relation to each other, and what they picked out from the world, or what they rendered salient
Obviously, the end should be an appendix that names the dress-makers, themselves.
iv
——A few of Dutton’s dresses that I have worn, with the acknowledgment that the sites where I read them must be designated as spaces in which I, too, was worn by them. Or various loci wherein the book became part of the lived experience.
I read dress 60 in the emergency room of the children's hospital as my youngest mammal lifted each wire attached to her body and demanded to know what it meant. What each line was for. Where it was going. How did this line tell the men in white coats what they wanted to know. Sometimes the syntax got so intense that I had to lay the book near her feet and walk to the door, back and forth preparing a riddle. “Why are the mother and child at the ER at 3 a.m.?” My daughter loves riddles. “To give the vampires who live in the basement eight tubes of blood so that the hospital's electricity doesn't go out.” Leaning to kiss her forehead, I whispered a secret to the stories growing inside it: stay lit, I told them. There was more blood to come. And gawd’s heaven knows life is a cartography of places where you learned how to read that shit.
I read dress 51 through the Romanian summer with seventeen years attached to my name and limp dragging my right leg slightly behind my body. The limp had its own labor; it met prior surgeries at the negotiating table and made bids on the future. I wasn't part of those negotiations. And there was a limp in Rilke's Paris that hounded my steps each time I wore this dress again, each year I could not resist zipping my aging flesh into its strictures. The balm of familiar cuts, the good whir of elliptical anxiety. I would never be a writer, the dress whispered. Dresses know what they know of the best of it.
Late last year, while reading dress 211, I dreamt in orange. And paused at the point when the speaker mentions how Celia Paul ate when her husband was away on business trips: "No candles. No meat. At dinner she'd read Goethe with rice pudding. 'Half of me is still Paul Becker,' she wrote, 'and the other half is acting as if it were.'“ Celia Paul's 'as if' felt like a hinge zipper in dress 21, or maybe it cast a different angle of light on Paul’s interlocutor in dress 31. which remains a complicated and fantastic dress in the epistolary style. The book is addressed to artist Gwen John, or to her ghost. "You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy," Paul says.
I read dress 31 in the week that repudiated the persistent imbecility of my idealisms.
v
218 The buttons run like rivets down the front.
220 Wednesday: White dress or what?
237 Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn / to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen.
280 the douce campagna of that thing!
281 a coat in the barbaric style
289 His white gown and the beige blanket of his bed were wet, scarlet and livid.
290 a gown with a hoop skirt, with a hem of gold
311 causing faint alterations of the status quo
312 liberally and light-heartedly [ . . . ] poeticized at a dainty table
313 swathed in greatcoat
888. I stick a knife in my head
vi
Unnumbered, buried in their beginnings. The others have been worn long enough to develop palettes, textures, and images dangling from their verbs like porn-bots from tweets or beer cans from bumpers carrying away the newly-married. The expectations of luminous whiteness. The first one hangs next to a poem I started and never wanted to finish. A poem I did not want to wear. I left it there. —- The second demands attention; it gives rise to duties. Time is structured by it. Poems get written and hidden, and the white dress participates in this game of being. To be or not be that infamous paraphrase. — I wore the third through so many mornings of breast milk that memories curdle when I permit myself to inhabit it, however briefly. The men are the tools capable of cutting the fabric and shape for the girl’s party dress, and they intrude on tthe dress she is reading until the third dress gets overshadowed by the scissors of fourth, and how their elegant whiskerings destroy me. — I have done abominable things when wearing the fifth; have used this dress to excuse the things I did in it. I would do them again for the pleasure of being so damned.
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vix
In a celebrated biography of Proust (Tadié) is a small poorly reproduced 1907 photo of Proust and Alfred Agostinelli seated in their motor vehicle, dressed for a journey. Proust, swathed in a greatcoat, one leg crossed over the other, looks puffy and already bored with wherever they are going.
—- Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout
211. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton
218. ”The White Dress” by Lynn Emanuel
220. “Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List” by Andrea Carlisle
237. "Party Dress for a First-Born" by Rita Dove
280. “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” by Wallace Stevens
281. “To a Madonna, Ex-Voto in the Spanish Style” by Anthony Hecht
289. “The Unspoken” by David Hayden
290. “The Scissors and Their Fathers” by Paul Eluard
311. “Sentence” by Donald Barthelme
312. “Walk in the Park” by Robert Walser
313. The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
888. “100%” by Sonic Youth