The Best American Poetry

Haunted by Dead Souls and Lively Angels: Jennifer Homans’s "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century" [by Mindy Aloff]

Mr. B. airborne (left), and in a deep plié during a 1961 teacher workshop. Photograph © Nancy Lassalle

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is generally considered the greatest--and, with 425 known works, the most prolific-- choreographer of the twentieth century, possibly of any century. By the time that Jennifer Homans, his newest biographer (herself an erstwhile professional ballet dancer and the author of Apollo’s Angels, the much-heralded history of ballet) decided some ten years ago to write a book about Balanchine, his life and work had been examined intensely in several languages.

First off, in English alone, there were five critically appreciated book-length Balanchine biographies (by journalist Bernard Taper, whose book was based on his interviews with Balanchine for The New Yorker; by Richard Buckle, the critic and biographer of Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky; by the ballerina Moira Shearer, star of the film The Red Shoes; by Robert Gottlieb, the head of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of NYCB’s board who had programmed company seasons for ten years as a volunteer; and by the music critic and biographer Terry Teachout). Francis Mason’s anthology of memoirs I Remember Balanchine, which runs to six hundred pages, could be considered a sixth biography.  Balanchine himself had (with the editorial assistance of Mason) already published a long autobiographical essay on his career up to his early years in the U.S. and--assisted editorially by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had co-founded both the New York City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet--theoretical essays on music and choreography and on the filming of ballet. 

Kirstein, on his own, had published two books on the history of NYCB plus a personal memoir; and Balanchine had given long, unguarded interviews concerning his thought processes to Ivan Nabokov and Elizabeth Carmichael at Horizon Magazine, to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov, and to essayist and poet Jonathan Cott. Furthermore, scores of his dancers and nondancing colleagues had produced remembrances of him, and biographies and other studies of Balanchine’s collaborators contain extensive information. There were the unpublished memoirs of him (by ballerinas Ruthanna Boris and Karin von Aroldingen)—not to speak of the many studies of his ballets, beginning with historian Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, critic Nancy Goldner’s two excellent collections of essays, and the collected reviews and penetrating essays of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And there is the large section on him in the immense oral history by dancer Frederic Franklin, Balanchine’s choice as ballet master at Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Mr. B worked in 1940 and then again, as the company’s resident choreographer, from 1944 to 1946.

And when Homans was starting, there were already available many analyses of his choreographic process in the video programs that constitute The Interpreters Archive and of The Archive of Lost Choreography, produced by The George Balanchine Foundation. (In these film shoots, currently numbering 75 and counting, the original principals and/or early principal casts of individual ballets, going back to 1925, coach younger dancers to pull from their dancing bodies what Balanchine had asked for when the works were being made.) 

So, when a press release from Random House, the U.S. publisher of Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, and the dust jacket of Granta’s British edition of the book present it as the “first major” biography of its subject, a reader familiar with the literature is brought up short.

More perplexing than that are the covers of the U.S. and UK editions. Their common source is an image by Martha Swope showing a rehearsal moment from Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet Balanchine made for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in 1968, based on the number he’d choreographed for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. On both book covers, Swope’s photo has been severely tampered with, but more objectionable is that they present the relationship of Balanchine and Farrell as a summarizing illustration of Homans’s title, “George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.”

Farrell was a very great dancer indeed, but to encourage the notion that her relationship with Balanchine overshadows his entire career is not only distorting but is also unfair to the book, which diligently attempts to relate his story from cradle to grave. Homans offers enough here for a small monograph about what made Farrell’s dancing unique to Balanchine, viz. that, by choice, she did not use her technique in service of conventional models of perfection, which was fortunate, as Balanchine did not want perfection. Homans is fascinated by how their mutual experiments with Farrell’s capabilities led the ballerina to make impeccably arresting musical choices freshly at every performance and to look beautiful even when her body was violating academic rules of classic dance: That is, Farrell somehow intuited what Balanchine really wanted from dancing and, even more, to his delight eventually taught him what he ought to want.

"One Plkus One" [haiku by David Shapiro]

    it may be too hard
    to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
    I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
    and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
    later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
    but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
    say l962 or
    let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
    more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
    my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember    

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
    lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro,
    September 8, 2008

Schopenhauer & "The Will to Live" (on the day he was born, Feb. 22, 1788)

The Will to Live

“They say that Schopenhauer is pessimistic. That is not saying very much. [His] is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality.”

– Witold Gombrowicz, A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

1. Arthur Schopenhauer was a competitive man
   who felt nothing but scorn for Hegel.
   So he scheduled his philosophy lectures
   on the same day and at the same time
   and therefore Hegel had a packed auditorium
   while only a handful of us – a Polish writer,
   an ex-girlfriend, a few wayward apostles
   and I – heard Schopenhauer’s lectures
   on Descartes, doubt, and the will to live.

2. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Everything proceeds from this proposition.

3. Many philosophers, professional sad sacks,
   make merry with women and whiskey at night.
   Not Schopenhauer. He was logical. Eating
   a delicacy like pressed goose livers with
   a good Sauterne proved only that nothing
   exists except the temporary satisfaction
   of a hunger that will return and a thirst
   without which no liquid tastes good.
   Pleasure is merely the absence of pain,
   not a thing in itself, and the same may be said
   of peace in relation to war. And yet –

4. Look at all the things we need to endure –
   death and pain, struggle and fear –
   in order for the species to survive,
   and so great is our determination to live
   that endure these hardships we do, putting
   a good face on things, hurricanes
   and suicide bombers, the death of adulthood
   and the abandonment of the beautiful
   English language. And yet –

5. One of the apostles asked about suicides.
   What about them, Schopenhauer replied.
   “Don’t they invalidate your theory
   of the will to live?” “Not at all,”
   he smiled for once. “In suicide they prove
   the will to live is greater than they are.”

6. There were two proofs:
   (a) God must exist
   if we can conceive of god
   (b) God must but cannot exist
   if we can conceive of that
   than which nothing greater
   can be or be conceived.
   Therefore,
   God has to exist
   as a logical possibility
   impossible to disprove
   or credit.
   That’s what he said.
   I wrote it down.
   You may think he was
   a world-class pessimist
   but then you didn’t know him
   as I did in Berlin
   a hundred years before Hitler.

– David Lehman (first published in Michigan Quarterly Review)

Happy birthday, W H. Auden

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

-- W. H. Auden

Auden (an Aquarius, born Feb 21) on Psychoanalysis

<<
Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (6 November 1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twenty for 2022 dollars. The devil count remains the same.-- DL

from the archive; first posted February 26, 2011. 

"Coming Soon to a Screen Near You" [by Tom Disch]

 

The soul has its own entertainment industry
as complex as Hollywood's, with premieres
scheduled every night of the week.
The papparazzi have been popping their flashbulbs
since before your first erection. Rival producers
vie to cast Ingrid Bergman as the nun
who proved her love for you by teaching you
arithmetic. But ah! it is the cinematographers
who are our secret masters. How can they trick
a string of neurons into a set
so persuasively resembling cities
we have flitted through heedlessly
before there was even VistaVision?
before we could tie our own ties?
And just as with the movies we've seen
we forget all these wonderful dramas
almost as fast as we can dream them up!
New names appear in the magazines,
teen idols kill themselves, but the glamor
never dies, the glamor goes on eternally.

February 19, 2008

Eliot of Becket (Thomas a) and Beckett (Samuel)

And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

--  Samuel Beckett in Watt, which Erica Cairo believes is a veiled reference to Thomas Becket and his king.

“They know and do not know, that acting is suffering
And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
To an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.”

― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Three Clerihews [by Jim Cummins] (& 3 by someone else)

Sporting Life

Wilt Chamberlain
discovered sin
required a log
to log them in.

*

Pete Rose, brother,
by any other
moniker would stink,
is what I think.

*

Joe DiMag
ruled like the Raj.
But when he passed,
they capped his ass.

Lunch with Tim McCarver in February 1987 [by David Lehman]

Tim McCarver died yesterday at age 81.

Back in spring 1987, McCarver, a terrific catcher who caught Bob Gibson with the Cardinals and Steve Carlton with the Phillies, was calling plays for the New York Mets. He made the cover of Esquire and had a book coming out (wotking with professional sportswriter Ray Ropbinson). I wasn't crazy about the book's title: Oh, Baby, I Love It! but the book confirmed that McCarver was as good a baseball analyst as there was. The Mets had won the 1986 World Series in the most exciting post-season of the decade, and a piece on the book made sense. At Newsweek the editors always preferred a feature to a straight book review, so I proposed flying to Philadelphia, taking Tim to lunch, and writing it up. I got the okay. 

McCarver, who lived in Gladwin, Pennsylvania,  proposed Le Bec Fin, the best French restaurant in Philadephia, for our lunch, and they gave us a private room. It was probably the most expensive lunch I ever charged to the magazine, with wonderful wines, and it lasted three or more hours, with Tim's wife stopping by for a few minutes and a cigar delivered to the room when it was time for espresso. According to my notes I wore a gray blazer with a knit tie and he wore a cashmere sport coat with a blue silk patterned tie and navy trousers.

With unforced pleasure Tim answered my questions and appraised various players and prospects. Tim, who had a lot of opinions and wasn't shy about sharing them, felt that a good sinking fastball made the batter feel as if he were "striking an anvil with sugar cane." Bob Gibson regarded the pitcher's mound "as his prIvate office." Spitballs should be made legal, because "nearly all pitchers throw them."  The "scuff" ball thrown by Mike Scott of the Astros, who gave the '86 Mets a fit, was "more illegal," but the Mets made a mistake in obsessing over it. "Of course if I'd been on the team, I would have probably done the same thing." What was the biggest psychological problem confronting a professional baliplayer? "Fear of failure." Also, "the hell of being alone." Tim agreed with Joe DiMaggio about opening day: "It's like a birthday party when you were a kid."

There was a rumor at the time that the Mets were offering Ron Darling and Mookie Wilson in a trade for the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser. "Ain't ever gonna happen," Tim said. "Hershiser is one of the great pitchers in the game." (This was before Hershiser's Cy Young year when he threw nearly sixty straight innings aithout a run and beat Oakland twice in the World Series, once by shutout.) As a traditionalist, he said "I hate the designated hitter," because it changes the very nature of the game. 

Tim loved Gerswin, Berlin, Cole Porter. When the Mets, tired of being loveable losers, started winning games in 1984, Tim hummed Duke Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" on the air. Who was the best ptcher he ever faced? For sheer talent, no souithpaw could compare with Sandy Koufax. Keith Hernandez was "the most artistic fielding first-baseman" Tim had ever seen. Solidly built, six feet tall, Tim may have been the most artistic play-by-play man this side of Vin Scully.   -- DL

"A bona fide work of art . . ." Copland Dance Episodes at New York City Ballet [by Mindy Aloff]

The "long-footed godesss" Mira Nadon , aloft, and company in ‘Copland Dance Episodes’ Photo © 2023 Erin Baiano

People are talking about Justin Peck’s new ninety-minute ballet, Copland Dance Episodes, for thirty principals, soloists, and corps de ballet members of New York City Ballet. It is a bona fide standing-room only, standing-ovation hit and also aesthetically controversial. Against audiences excited by it as a work of non-narrative theatrical dance are some who register strong objections—or simply dismiss it as bland and inconsequential. I’ve seen it twice; the first time, I was among the objectors; the second time, I suddenly saw its parts anew and its references clearly. The second time, what had seemed blurry and unspecific suddenly snapped into a bona fide work of art, complete with fascinating textual engineering and a haunting visionary subtext. What originally had seemed to be mere repetition had the “mere” swapped out for “meaningful.” Both times, the dancers were thrilling, but the second time they also seemed in service of a statement larger than themselves—a chilling statement about the entire country. The structure of the libretto in the program—twenty-two chapters or sections, each with its own title-- gives a clue that, although there is no declared narrative, the ballet is not storyless. The fact that my second sighting of Copland Dance Episodes occurred the night of the President’s State of the Union address was purely coincidental.

The score for this ballet is derived from four of Copland’s most beloved compositions: the anthemic Fanfare for the Common Man and the dances Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid—in other words, Copland’s most popular music, all richly melodic and dynamically orchestrated and dating from the build-up to World War II and from the terrifying years of the war itself. All are also brilliantly optimistic sound paintings marked by brass and percussion, even Billy, whose drama is tied to the murderous costs of the country’s westward expansion. Justin Peck, a native of Washington, D.C., spent much of his childhood in San Diego and most of his young adulthood in New York. He’s partly a westerner biographically; however, the American West that Copland created was cleared, plowed, and barn-raised from the heritage of American song—“a couple of cowboy tunes,” he once told me in an interview, out west in Portland, Oregon: the kind of music that doesn’t need explanations to make its case with anyone who listens to it, thanks, of course, to its harmonic and rhythmic presentation by a student of Nadia Boulanger. NYCB’s orchestra, led by company music director Andrew Litton, played the Copland sumptuously, with pleasure and commitment.

Peck’s choreography responds to each of Copland’s long musical lines, canonic interludes, and unexpectedly accented phrases with the assurance of a person in his own home. He does not, like Balanchine, set up a conversation with the music; he marries it, registering its emotions and its tonal variety while also creating imagery that invokes “common man” situations, such as horseplay among peers, a romantic couple on a carousel, a trio who share space and light but not interior worlds. Toward the end of the ballet, when we’re listening to the part of Billy the Kid that creates a gunfight through percussion, the marvelously variegated lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker suddenly throws many crossing figures into silhouette (the section is titled “Shadowboxer”), and we’re rocketed out of one couple’s dysfunction into a hallucinatory enlargement--today’s gun-sickened streets of Newark or L.A., Dorchester or East New York. Manipulating light, space, and choreography, Peck effects astonishing transformations. A hand that is tendered in a moment of submission becomes, once grasped, the agent of disunion. A head gently resting on a heart (a detail that Peck has slyly plucked from Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and recontextualized), placed on that heart once too often, lightly yet decisively becomes the lever for divorcement. A section that ends with several male figures Biblically pointing straight skyward is revised in a subsequent section that ends with several female figures pointing forward into the future on a forty-five-degree angle, and that image is subsequently revised by a group of male and female figures seated in a circle, each lifting one leg with the foot pointed (the circle invoking a nocturnal moment in Billy when Eugene Loring’s outlaw is triggered into ruminations by a campfire). Tiler Peck’s variation to the “Simple Gifts” tune from Appalachian Spring does not quite lasso the entire herd of conflicting emotions that animate the Bride of Martha Graham’s frontier-wedding masterpiece, but how charming the analogy is. Peck’s pairing and then uncoupling of the long-footed goddess Mira Nadon and />the elementally mutable figure of Taylor Stanley was, for me, a risk worth taking. Their duet, with its partnered cartwheel and little catch step piquantly sited on the music, is one of the loveliest of Peck’s I know, and the intensity of its communication through dance movement made me think of the works of Alexei Ratmansky, who is about to join NYCB as a choreographer in residence. Peck’s ballet is bathed in color as well as pure light: Greeting the audience is Jeffrey Gibson’s drop, both minimalist in its geometric targets and triangles and maximalist in its multicolored profusion of forms, as he puts it in the program “inspired by indigenous American artifacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.” The program also notes that although Gibson’s painting “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA,” its references “span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history.” The cast is costumed in Ellen Warren’s leotards and tights, each person given a unique combination of deeply saturated, contrasting hues, with no single, overall colors allowed. Welcome to the twenty-first century. In case the audience forgets that’s where we are, the ballet opens on a tableau of the full cast, each person uniquely positioned and wrapped in a transparent tulle-like packaging. Nearly everyone then runs off into the wings to remove the wicked caul of yesteryear and returns in up-to-the-minute living color, bright-eyed with eagerness to, once again, embark on Peck’s westering of their spirits. 

Mindy Aloff's book of essays, Why Dance Matters, was recently published by Yale University Press.

[Editor's note: The New York City Ballet will perform "Copland Dance Episodes" during its spring 2023 season. Buy tickets here. sdl]

The Bennington Diary #2 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Bennington Diary January 14, 1998

Ed. Note: Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. 

Wake up to dismal rain, dropping temperatures, and Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
       Everyone says this has been a quiet residency so far. Nothing yet has happened as dramatic as the fistfight that broke out last June between two women vying for the attentions of playwright Mac Wellman, who was doing a pole dance at the time. (The women fought to a draw.) There is also the fabled Bennington moment when Gretchen (not her real name) stood naked in an uncurtained window for an hour, absolutely immobile.
       Tim O’Brien, who was supposed to arrive tomorrow to deliver three lectures and a reading, has canceled. Liam Rector, our director, asks if I’ll fill in for one of the lectures. I can choose the topic. A second substitute lecture will be given by Rick Moody, following a screening of The Ice Storm, the Ang Lee movie adapted from Moody’s novel. We’re renting the local movie house for the morning. Which morning? Like everyone else here, I’ve lost my time sense, punchy from too little sleep and too many sestinas.
       The time has come to think up acts for Saturday night’s Varsity Show. Amy Hempel proposes a “bad metaphor” contest, with a prize for the worst. Similes are eligible. Classics of the genre include “as tall as a 6’3” tree” and “Bob and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds, who had also never met.” Sven Birkerts has agreed to judge the “pithy summary” contest, with prizes both for the best and for the most authentically bogus summaries of great novels. Lynn Freed will do her Julia Child imitation, and Jill McCorkle will produce, script, and direct something she is calling the Novel SWAT Team. I am in charge of writing a skit satirizing a workshop in which people take turns abusing a sensitive poet until all see the light and burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus” or Johnny Mercer’s “Accentuate the Positive.”

first posted by Slate
Se also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

 

The Bennington Diary #1 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. This is installment #1, dated January 12, 1998

<<<

Today is day four of my semi-annual sojourn at Bennington College, where I teach in the “low residency” graduate program in writing. We -- 88 students, 20 faculty, and assorted staff --  convene here for ten days in January and ten in June; the rest of the work gets done by correspondence, with each writer on the faculty supervising five students in his or her genre.

These residencies are a cross between summer camp and boot camp, saturation experiences. Every hour of every day is filled with lectures, readings, workshops, conferences, and parties. We eat communally. The food sucks. Last June, in the Varsity Show the faculty puts on, the novelist Douglas Bauer took the Duke Ellington standard, “I Got it Bad, and That Ain’t Good,” turned it into “The Food is Shit, and That Ain’t Good,” and sang the new lyrics in the relaxed, sweater-clad Perry Como manner. I doubt that I shall ever be able to hear the words “artichoke bake” and “walnut cheddar loaf” without a shudder in my deep heart’s core. [That's Duke Ellington in a top hat on the left.]

Our isolation on this Vermont campus with its storied past (Malamud taught here, Bret Easton Ellis went to college here, and Donna Tarrt’s “The Secret History” is a roman-a-clay-feet set here) makes it the perfect setting for a murder mystery. There is never a shortage of motives, suspects, and candidates for victimhood. One year, the victim was played by Bob Hornbuckle, a good-natured St. Louis schoolteacher and aspiring fiction writer, who interrupted a lecture by visiting poet Robert Pinsky [pictured right, with David Lehman, in 2013] to argue a point about William Carlos Williams. Hornbuckle maintained that a certain Williams poem would be improved if the lining were changed. “That’s because you don’t know shit about Williams,” Pinsky replied. From then on, the “don’t know shit” locution was in constant use. Hornbuckle didn’t mind; he basked in the attention.

In workshops, the standard M.O. is to dissect a student’s story or poem, heedless of Wordsworth’s warning, “We murder to dissect.” People talk as they do nowhere else: “One thing I kind of objected to and then I fell in love with was the repetition of the word `hood’ in the second paragraph. But then I wondered about the prostitute. What if she were a nun?” Yeats’s “The Second Coming” might fare badly in a workshop. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre”: needless repetition, willful obscurity. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer”: show, don’t tell!

Today’s a rarity in a Vermont winter: a sky of unbroken blue and no snow on the ground, which is, however, soggy from the freezing rain that pelted us for our first forty-eight hours. No heat in my apartment the first night, so I gathered myself into three layers of clothes, my winter coat, and five blankets. There’s a red light in the window, which is supposed to go on when the temperature drops below fifty. The temperarure did and the red light didn't. Not that it matters. On the most sub-arctic of my five winters here, I shared a house with Doug Bauer and the poet Jason Shinder, and the furnace failed on the coldest night. The security man, making his three a.m. rounds, noticed that the red light had gone on, but decided to do nothing about it, reasoning that we were asleep inside and would resent the intrusion.

-- David Lehman

click here for the diary entry of January 18, 1998
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

Recommendation: "Why Dance Matters" by Mindy Aloff [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Raphael Soyer Raphael Soyer (American, b. Russia, 1899-1987) "Dancing Lesson"

I've been reading Mindy Aloff's Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy's dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I've had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet ("A Wedding Bouquet" by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy's observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance. 

About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question "Why does looking at dance matter?" I've often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I've just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here's why, says Mindy:  "If you consider dancing seriously -- as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite -- then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings." 

And later: 

Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance -- the facts of dance action -- is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke -- and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too--requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. 

The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where "the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable."

Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here. 

Dance matters. You already know this if you're a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah. 

She Got Pinched in the Assss. . . tor Bar! [by Stacey Harwood]

[In 2011] I visited my mom for a couple of days and while with her I went through some of her old photo albums.  Whenever I do, I find something that had previously escaped my attention.  This time, I came across this bit of memorabilia from a different age (below left, click to enlarge):

  



The Hotel Astor stood at 44th Street and Broadway, a stunning example of Beaux-Art architecture that was demolished in 1967 to make room for a 50-story office tower.  It was  walking distance from the Milk Barn, the coffee shop where my mother worked as a waitress.  Many of her customers were "garmentos" (as those who work the rag trade are now called) who would on occasion give her gifts of belts (she had a tiny waist) and monogrammed hankies.  I love imagining my mother stopping in at the Astor Bar for a post-work cocktail.  Did she?  She won't say.  But it was quite the place,  made even more famous by Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah/What a Swell Party."  There are many great versions of the song (I like Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's subversive take here. Listen for raunchy lyrics that Porter would have loved) but you really can't beat Der Bingle and Ole Blue Eyes in High Society as rivals for Grace Kelly, who is betrothed to another.

from the archive; first posted on February 14, 2011.

George Gershwin plays "I Got Rhythm"

 

 

KGB Bar: 25 years ago. . .

Below: photograph of Paul Violi and Star Black at KGB Bar; David Lehman and Stephanie Brown; Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez, Michael Quatrrone; John Deming and Matthew Yeager; Deborah Landau and David Lehman; Star Black at the lectern.

About the Series:

Labeled New York's best poetry series by such publications as New York Magazine and Time Out New York, the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series has hosted over 550 poets in more than 300 readings since it was founded in February1997 by Star Black and David Lehman; it  focuses on combining established writers with the most exciting young and upcoming poets.  The list of past readers includes legendary American and international poets: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Jericho Brown, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Mark Ford, Terrance Hayes, Richard Howard, Fannie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Ada Limon, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Katha Pollitt, Marie Ponsot, Tomaz Salamun, Vijay Seshadri, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Anne Waldman, Dara Wier, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young.  Currently, the series is curated and hosted by poets John Deming, Jada Gordon, and Jason Schneiderman. Former curators incluide, besides Black and Lehman, Laura Cronk, Deborah Landau, Michael Quattrone, Mathew Yeager, and Matthew Zapruder.

About the Venue:

A former single-room speakeasy (one of Lucky Luciano's favorites), KGB Bar was transformed into a Ukrainian socialist social club in 1948. To this day, the bar retains original decoration from its former incarnations, including a red hammer-and-sickle flag hanging from the tin ceiling, plus stained-glass Beaux Arts cabinetry, red walls, Soviet triumph posters, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.  KGB Bar is located at 85 East 4th Street in New York's East Village (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). Readings begin at 7:30 PM. There will be one ten-minute intermission. No cover charge for admission. All readings open to the public. Though it is smoke-free, the massive pervasive cigarette cloud that existed as little as twenty years ago (and contributed much to the venue's conspiratorial air) is still easily imagined

"River" [by Stephanie Paterik]

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

Tonight at KGB Bar: Taije Silverman + Sharon Dolin!

Monday, Feb 13th, 2023
KGB BAR 85 E. 4th St. NY, NY 10003
Doors open at 7:00 pm
Readings start at 7:30 pm
Hosted by John Deming, Jada Gordon, and Jason Schneiderman
All readings are free and open to the public!

*****

The Night I Slept with My High School English Teacher

I want to begin this story where it ends.
He drops me at the station in the rain before dawn
and says well, should I kiss you goodbye.
His eyebrows rise into the boredom of his body
the way they’d rise in class when someone
suggested Leopold Bloom was homosexual.
All over New Jersey it’s raining. He is speeding
to the train, thinking if he can get me there on time
he will not have to wait and I do actually mistake
a blurry streetlamp for the moon and nod yes
to the kiss as if he’d offered it. At the end
I’m a helmet of ambivalence. All transparent shield,
all bulletproof bubble, the vast yes and no of pure metal.
In the middle I can’t sleep so I suck on his cock.
It stays limp in my mouth as desire like venom
seeps into the past where I sat on the vast other side
of his desk to talk about my future and his wall
made of books cut a path through the sea back to Ithaca.
Now around us the bodies of sixteen-year-old boys
are asleep on both floors of the dorm and his cock
is a mumbled apology for whatever they did or did not
want from me in the middle of the story as the story
goes: I don’t go to that school anymore, I am as old
as Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, the end
of books. It’s morning, my ticket in hand.

Taije Silverman is the author of two books of poems (Houses Are Fields and Now You Can Join the Others) and the translator from Italian of the Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli. Poems from her new collection have been in The Massachusetts Review, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches poetry and translation.

"The Variable Foot" [by Nin Andrews]

This comic is based on a few lines from the introduction to William Carlos Williams in The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry that made me laugh:

“I write in the American idiom, “ Williams noted, “and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot.” One of the secrets of American poetry is that no one knows what “the variable foot” really is.

from the archive; first posted December 7, 2016

"Ultimately Justice Directs Them" [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Ultimately Justice Directs Them

1.

The soldiers are coming.

The soldiers

   are coming to break America.

The soldiers are dispatched

from America

   and they are landing

their boats on American shores.

2

Why are the soldiers coming?

Not because they believe

in what

they were told

but because they believe

that ultimately justice directs them,

that ultimately

the right thing will happen.

3

We say they are

the soldiers, but they are not:

they have chains and

moustaches

and hairstyles and daughters

and expressions on their faces

that their mothers remember on the faces

of the infants they were.

4

They are coming to break

everything down

to basics: America

has become too frumpy

for its pants.

Its health

care system cares not

for health.

5

Its laws are more paper.

6

Its schools are more paper.

7

Its schools are brick and paper.

8

The soldiers are yellow ribbon.

9

America looks at itself

and sees

itself, not America.

10

Itself looks at itself

and calls

what it sees America.

11

America has begun

calling everything

America no matter what.

12

Now more than ever.

13

Operation America.

Operation With Extra Cheese.

Operation With Fries With That.

Operation No Child Left Behind.

Operation Enduring Cheeseburger.

Operation Regurgitated Eagle.

Operation Prince of Freedom.

Operation All Night Long.

Operation Perhaps.

Operation No Really.

14

——

15

The soldiers are here.

16

Operation Big Time Pause.

17

Operation Please

And Thank You.

18

Operation Paper.

Operation No More Stars.

19

The Solders are wearing

yellow ribbons

in support

of the return

of the regular guy.

20

The soldiers are on TV

right outside

the door.

21

They are knocking——change

the channel.

22

Operation America Go!

Operation Yes!

Operation OK, OK.

Operation Every Man

for himself

and best of luck

to the women and kids.

23

——

24

By part 24 it is

already done.

– from No Tell Motel and The Best American Poetry 2009 [ed. David Wagoner]