I managed to get Letters to Jill from the library right before everything closed down at the end of March. I had been looking into the photocopier for the most part of 2020, particularly the Xerox 914 copy machine—Xerox's first photocopier to use ordinary office paper—but only landed on the work of Pati Hill recently after Steiner told me about her over a desk crit. Through my research I learned of the relationship between women and copy machines, a product of a long history of women being confined to mundane office tasks like photocopying.
            Hill worked as a model when she was young and I don't think she was ever an office secretary. She was a writer and photocopy artist best known for her copies of everyday objects made with an IBM copier in the early 1980s. Letters to Jill works as a compilation of notes on working with the photocopier. The title references the correspondence Hill had with Jill Kornblee of Kornblee Gallery, one of the first American galleries to recognize copy art as art and exhibit it. "Copies" meant office documents in the 1960s so there was a lot of resistance in looking at the medium as something other than that. Hill managed to convince Jill and it worked out. Photocopying was more than just documentation.
            Hill wrote of domestic labor and confinement in her work. She wrote three books in her life, one was published through Kornblee Gallery. In 1962 she quit writing to favor housekeeping as a job but she kept a journal. She then began collecting objects too. She'd keep them in a hamper until the pile was big enough for her to go through them. She'd take them to a copy shop, copy the ones she found interesting and throw them all away, keeping the copies. In 1976, Kornblee exhibited Hill's Garments—a series of photocopies of lace, seams, buttonholes and zippers. Hill wrote that she had trouble finishing the exhibition because people started asking "questions like, Does the copier do pressing, too?" Six excerpts of this show were printed by New Letters accompanied by Hill's writing.
            The website this text is found in is a reproduction of this piece titled Six Photocopied Garments. I plan to read the poetry that goes with the images at an online event or a series of online events. I've timed the website scrolling so I can read the words while the corresponding photocopy is on the screen. One can read the poems in their own time by inspecting the code of the website. I reproduce Pati Hill's work to attempt a discussion on gender based roles, domesticity and labor. There is an image of a fur coat reproduced here and I don't like it although I find the writing charming.
            In Letters to Jill, Hill writes about publishing a lot and I really connected with this. She says "publishing a book on your own may be the cheapest and most efficient way in the end." She then goes on to write my favorite line: "Of course, there is still the question of distribution, but books have a life of their own. Some books move, even if you leave them on your back stairs in the boxes they came from the printer's in." This has never happened to me but I like how hopeful it sounds.
A white linen dress—it makes me think of Charlottesville, Virginia where I grew up. A dime was the price of a ride on the streetcar then. If you didn't have one, you walked. My mother often walked to work wearing a dress like this and a straw hat. She claimed that it was unfair the way men got all the jobs and were paid twice as much for everything. People said it was wrong of her to speak like that. They said a woman who divorced her husband with a ten year old child to support was lucky to have a job at all. It used to embarrass me. I wished she would keep her voice down and accept her fate like anyone else. Riding pants, circa 1940 or 50. I found them in the local thrift shop and have hung them on the wall like a landscape full of highways and byways of tiny stitches, irregular suede and cotton fields, ravines, plowings, etc. On second thought, maybe they are more like an airplane, so beautifully tacked together with flaps for folding up or down and stress-points reinforced. I don't know why the vision of a straight jacket has come into my head. I saw one once, but it was a sleazy thing. Clean and white. Pressed as if it had been run over by a van. You felt you could easily find your way out of it if you really tried, whereas a garment like this seems so reassuring you'd hardly bother. Craters of the moon! At 58 my grandmother remarried and moved into a brick house full of pins and cushions. She allowed my new step-grandfather to smoke on the back porch and listen to the radio if he kept the door closed. For birthdays she gave me taffeta and crepe de Chine dresses from Miller and Rhodes. When I ran out of school dresses, I wore them to school. I would have liked this picture printed on pink paper, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. My old fur coat doesn't know me. It lies on my back, a few limp cousins stitched together in my shape. What a rush of grateful recognition I feel as I make my way toward it across a crowded room or in a restaurant. Moths like it, too. There's no saying you can't be well off in another's skin! Jabot is the first french word I learned. It mystified me a lot because you could see it had a 't' at the end—why not pronounce it? I remember when women wore jabots on their blouses. Sometimes these jabots were quite ornate and were taken off when the blouse was sent to the laundry. Then you would find the jabots in drawers and hanging from belt racks like little creatures that hibernated when they didn't have anything to be attached to. Nowadays men seem to wear jabots more often than women. Sometimes the winters were so mild we never got around to using the furnace, but I always wore long underwear. In the spring the legs would be cut short, then the arms would be cut out and finally I would emerge like a new insect.