Worth (Kuhl House Poets) - Contemporary Poetry Collection for Book Lovers & Literary Enthusiasts | Perfect for Reading, Gifting & Home Library Decor

In his book 20th Century Pleasures, Robert Hass states that poetic form is "the house, the human indwelling which art makes possible when it makes forms the imagination can inhabit." This metaphor for poetic form recalls the etymology of "stanza," which denotes a dwelling place or a room. In her book Worth, Robyn extends the metaphor further, since many of the poems are literally houses: "The House of Worth," "Maison Cartier," "House of Dior," "House of Versace." And these poems house many things. The "House of Versace," for one, returns us to the vehicle of the metaphor by housing the word "verse" itself. But more obviously and more importantly, these are houses of fashion. This may help explain why the forms, while never merely ornamental, are often so intricate and ornate. Like fashion, the poems are always about both style and function.They are also about fashioning as well as fad, since the intricacy of Robyn's forms shows us how they are fashioned even as they are being formed. This is our most primal sense of form since, as Hass also suggests, "our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation." As for form as fad, the poet Frank O'Hara's gives an apt and applicable sartorial metaphor: "If you are going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you." Here, O'Hara clearly shows us what fashion and poetry may have in common. They both use form to incite in us incendiary and unceasing desire.But to say Robyn's poems are about fad is not to say that the poems are trendy. They speak to America's most entrenched history and literary traditions. As early as 1854, Henry David Thoreau insisted in Walden that "We worship not the Graces, nor Parcae, but Fashion." For Thoreau, it was fashion more than the Furies that revealed something about our culture. Although Thoreau will disparage this fact when he opines that "A woman's dress, at least, is never done," he seems to forget that Penelope at least, biding her time while Odysseus went errantly wandering for 20 years, had good reason for that. It would seem, in fact, that more than a bunch of mythic texts, it is the story of "the woman's dress" that knits the ancient Greek and modern American cultures together. The word "text" after all comes from the Greek "to weave."About fifty years later, in the beginning of the last Century, the great American novelist Theodore Drieser states that "A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes." Like Penelope's weaving, it took awhile. But a 100 years later it was done. And here she is, the writer of that philosophy. It is a truly 21st Century pleasure to introduce to you Robyn Schiff.