Review: Terri Witek's The Shipwreck Dress
David Moody
Terri Witek's The Shipwreck Dress
January 27th 2008 by Orchises Press
Paperback, 96 pages
Isbn: 1932535179
isbn13: 9781932535174
Once, Terri Witek lyricized Edith Sitwell's compulsion to hide aspects of herself behind clothing. Now, in her 3rd volume of poetry, Witek explores clothing as container and compression, focusing her writing on all manners of garb—tunic to dress to kimono—and giving the reader the product of her attention to subtlety, detail, and form: The Shipwreck Dress. In Shipwreck, Witek nods to the etymologic connection between textile and text while giving the reader a tour through the fabrics that contain us. Fans of Witek’s style will enjoyment reading Shipwreck; however, they are in for a surprise. If her previous collection is a step away from artifact-dependent ekphrasis, here she leaps.
In Carnal World, each composition focuses on recreating aesthetic surface for direct delivery to the reader-as-viewer persona. In The Shipwreck Dress, depth is the goal. Witek uses evocative and subtle lines and form to recreate the abstracted artifact as more than visual, but as a tangibly textured. She shows us that cloth can be as thick as a “soul, or a shiveringly colored second gut” or “thin enough to pull light right through the sleeves of a coat.”
Witek ties together Shipwreck with the sliver of narrative, boldly implicated in the title of the first section “Preface: The Thread of the Story.” Such directness is new to Witek, who often opts for hushed implications. These moments can be read in the silent series of kimono poems. These poems are episodic and interspersed throughout the collection. They bind the book, giving it thematic layers heavily present in Shipwreck’s every aspect, from the individual poem to the overall organization. Length becomes depth as each line lies on the other—a visual structure. Pages become a single textile layered, each with its own texture and crease. The layers build onto the expansion of senses, as when “Long Marriage” builds a “two-room house. Then add/ on: scent earns a suite. Then sound.” These poems are lush in their sparse delivery, quiet as silk, yet they define the structure of the book, spaces into which other poems fold. With many of the poems exploring clothing as containment, the kimono-like collection presents Witek’s strongest works to date.
This softer surface of Witek unfastens to reveal beneath a strong core. She does not abandon her subject throughout the course of the volume. Every stand-alone piece is woven into the overall framework. The Shipwreck Dress is focused on fully exploring a core set of images and ideas, relations and sensations. In Carnal World’s "Color Fortunes," she reminds the reader how dull a description of color can be, then re-administers vivacity by way of defining color as "paint[ing] with ears open." In Shipwreck, Witek encourages reading as much with the eyes as with the skin and hands. What readers wear but ignore, she redefines, reminding the reader that even when wearing “a glorious waste” of “six semi-clean skirts…/a loose mantellina (or a sack dress…)”, “how robbed we feel when what once/followed the body falls away from it.”
Variety and rhythm are key to The Shipwreck Dress. The poems are organized to pulse off one another’s tone and content, creating an audible texture, a cyclical swelling and releasing of momentum. Witek’s kimono poems are sequenced episodically, interspersed throughout the book to emphasize their individual moments. These stand-alone pulses hint at a narrative life external to the poems, but not enough to damage their internal calm. Witek follows delicate rules of revelation implicit to kimonos. Moments of direct comment on either the narrative or the “dark silk nude crepe” of the artifacts are “shredded,” negated in the next poem or line: “No one could say, exactly, what the dress looked like.” Linguistic complexity fluctuates also, moving between simple statements and dense formality: “Pick a poison? I choose a bottle/washed clear of all but native color./Memory’s inlet as the tide goes out./Mouth still to my mouth.” Shipwreck’s structures are tactile: gentle unless purposefully rough, intricate, fully functional yet aesthetically appealing.
Witek is aware of her audience and even writes herself in with them by writing about how “we know pleasure’s not/love”, enforcing Shipewreck’s community spirit. In her previous books, Witek played to the readers’ needs when recreating paintings by Vuillard and Hongshou. This choice sometimes limited the depths of her writing. In The Shipwreck Dress, Witek forsakes the “out-of-work dockers, rappellers, spelunkers, and divers” and makes for them an intricate knit of Aristotelian abstraction and moments of concrete images in which to dive through. She gives readers a beautiful task—to try on the dress (“they all wanted to wear it”) and taste the sensuality of the body of work it bottles (“this bottle shakes up its drinkers”). Should they taste it, readers will find later that “they slept naked and moonlight dressed them like brides.” That moonlight is Witek, and the clothing that gives the reader context is The Shipwreck Dress; however, readers should be warned that Witek’s kimonos are not without rough edges.
Absence is present in Shipwreck. It is in part the absence of sheer lack. Witek does not, as in previous works, recreate, but implicate. In “Moon Bottle”, “Love in the Ancien Régime”, “That Summer”, and other poems, Witek investigates that which is lost or unclaimed, those things “she could not name”, “a hole not worth mentioning”, a bottle “none can read”. Any clothing can be empty if not worn, and Shipwreck reminds readers to appreciate the structure of cloth and the ease in which we remove it to find “how close the naked sound in our throats” is to “distrust gentled into the talk of weather.”
Yet in Shipwreck, clothing is a boundary that both cramps and calms. Witek explores the binding of cloth, lets it float, watches it move on. Witek appears to be moving on as well. With her new apparel comes a fresh style. What she gives up to the wreckage is what she claims on the shore: herself. Shipwreck contains contemplative poems at peace in a stasis of contemplation, content without immediate answers. In the hot-cold moments after the cloth falls to the floor, Witek asks readers to “go slowly, slowly” and appreciate the interactive comfort of wearable text.