The Best American Poetry

"Just Let Me Investigate a Little De-er": Bill Hayward's Latest

(c) Bill Hayward

Two links landed in our inbox last week and I haven't been able to keep myself from returning to their landing pages.  Both links lead to work by Bill Hayward, the brilliant photographer, filmaker, and chronicler of the body whom we've been following since we started this blog.  I love the way Bill captures the raw emotion of his subjects and when I watch his film and dance productions and look at his portraits, I'm aware of tension building in my own body.  It's the kind of tension you feel when a jazz singer sings behind the beat; by holding back the performer creates suspense that doesn't resolve until the singer "catches up" with the music. It's uncomfortable . . . and thrilling. The best classical dancers can do this even though they're working within the constraints of precise choreography.

Forgive my meandering way of saying you must check out these recent publications of Bill's work.  The first appears in the current issue of The Coffin Factory alongside work by Lydia Davis, T.C. Boyle, and Charles Simic, among others. “Postcards” is from “The Museum of Emotions” from Bill's film Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, which we've written about elsewhere on this blog. 

The second link leads to Psychology Tomorrow magazine and Wilhelmina Frankfurt's memoir of George Balanchine.  Bill's photos of Frankfurt illustrate the piece and they're stunning. In her piece, Frankfurt describes her final encounter with Mr. B.  Shocking but not surprising.

-- sdh

Myth(ologies) in the Making in Chicago [by Stacey Harwood]

About a year ago, the Chicago based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:

We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question --  what is it to be human?

David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago.  "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. She sends along this preview video, which makes us wish we could put the production on the road:

Erica promises to send more photos of the performance, which we will share here.  Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website.  You will find Erica's interview with David here.

Congratulations Erica!

"Mythologies" will be included in David Lehman's forthcoming New and Selected Poems (Scribner).

-- sdh

On the Tango and Buenos Aires [by Mong-Lan]

 

Borges' Tango Drawing from University of Notre Dame | Rare Books & Special Collections

Stepping out onto Corrientes, you see the surge of lights, the waves of people, the blaring neon.  Buenos Aires: wind-swept, bipolar, insomniac, histrionic.  Not surprisingly, there are more theatrical shows here than in any other city in South America.

I now find myself here for more than three years, immersed in its culture and people, el castellano (the particular Argentine Spanish), and the tango.  Dancing the tango, singing the tango, painting the tango.

There is poetry in the forbidden, the languid nights, the time spent and misspent dancing the tango to the weeping of the bandoneón and the low sighs of the double bass.

Dancers sway in each other’s arms, on city streets, on choreographed stages, in meat-market milongas, in private homes, in the heady sweetness of a complex mathematics that looks at once simple and elaborate and only sometimes involves the heart.

A poetry of the body, a heightening of the senses that exalts the communication of the body between one person and another, a poetry of the senses overwhelming the five senses of the body — the tango.  The tango was born in the Rio de la Plata region that encompasses Argentina and Uruguay. Some of the great musicians and singers of the tango came from Uruguay.  Much the way Chile made its wines famous all over the world, Argentina made the tango its brand.

The tango is sultry and sensual, not sexual — that is for después.  After 17 years of being involved with the tango and relationships of the flesh and the heart, I have come to realize that every relationship is a tango, every movement between that leads from here to there, if it affects us, if it afflicts us, if it calls to our heart and recalls ancient memories. 

The tango is more than just a movement, or a series of movements — it is that connection between yourself and your partner, between two hearts, two memories, two bodies moving as one.

I have found that more important than the dance itself is the relationship, a relationship.  Give and take.  Not just give, and not just take.  The follower gives of herself, the leader gives. If the energy is just right, there is a balance, and both are refreshed, renewed.  An exchange at once spiritual and sensual, a figure eight that is emblematic of eternity.

Buenos Aires is a city of intense passion, city of song and dance, pot-beaters and rioters of an unstable economy.  Things are taken light-heartedly and explained by “es lo que hay” — that’s what there is.  A city where if you can take the ups and downs and believe whole-heartedly in luck and the lottery, you can remake yourself in body and spirit.  But into what?

Writes Jorge Luis Borges in “El Tango:”  Esa ráfaga, el tango, esa diablura, / los atareados años desafía; / hecho de polvo y tiempo, el hombre dura / menos que la liviana melodía, / que sólo es tiempo.”  (This gust, the tango, this mischief, / the busy years challenges; / made of dust and time, man endures / less than the light melody / that is only time.)

A city caught and trapped in dust and time, while the mischievous tango endures.

The streets Corrientes and Cordoba surround my apartment.  The people are still primal, raw — connected more to the skies, to each other, to the universe than to any technological gadget.  One sees the desperation in the eyes of a child of four, reflected from the eyes of her parents.  

Where the two main roads intersect, 9 de Julio and Corrientes, there rises a great obelisk, an emblem of the city itself. It is a streak of ego and daring into the sky, as if to say:  This is who we are, this is what we aspire to, this is what we were.  If we may but look inside ourselves, to what stirrings this ambition may lead us to . . .

This is the city where Borges masterminded and directed the great library, wielded his pen and the labyrinth of his mind in soaring blindness and darkness.

Where mind must function over matter, making matter immaterial.  Where a song is heartbreak, heartbreak is forever, and forever is longer than a thought.

For every motion, there is an equal and opposite emotion.  For every desire, a non-desire and a lurking fulfillment.  Everything — this too is about to extinguish . . .  this feeling, this emotion, and desire. 

This is the moment I am most alive.  The moment I cross the street to meet you, eyes moist.  All the threads of a life . . .  

Tango que fuiste feliz,
como yo también lo he sido,
según me cuenta el recuerdo;
el recuerdo fue el olvido.

— Jorge Luis Borges: “Alguien le dice al tango,” with Piazolla

(Tango that you were happy,
as also I have been,
following memory’s recounting;
the memory that was oblivion.

— Jorge Luis Borges: "Someone says to the tango," with Piazolla.)

(Translations by Mong-Lan)

Mong-Lan left her native Vietnam in 1975, on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. A poet, writer, dancer, visual artist, singer, and educator, she is the author of five books and two chapbooks, including her book on the tango, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (the bilingual version: Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos). Find a complete list of titles here. Mong-Lan has won the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been frequently anthologized -- in, for example, The Best American Poetry. Visit:  www.monglan.com 

Mong-Lan with David Lehman, Oct 16, 2012

 

On Rita Hayworth's Birthday

"Long Ago and Far Away": music Jerome Kern, lyrics Ira Gershwin: 

Jimmy Cagney and Bob Hope dance on the table top

 

“Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.”

George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that dancing is "the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music." For proof, just watch this Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers scene from the 1934 film "Night and Day."

I love Toni Bentley's analysis of this dance in her New York Times review of Kathleen Riley's The Astaires:  Fred & Adele (OUP): "Put down the Kama Sutra and its impossible acrobatics," writes Bentley. "Rent The Gay Divorcee and watch Astaire seduce a resistant Rogers, transforming her from a feisty, fast-talking, fast-walking, too-good-for-you dame into a dewy-eyed ingénue, slowed and silenced by love."  She continues:

 In the Cole Porter number “Night and Day,” Astaire pursues her about the dance floor with the wit of changing rhythms, sometimes syncopated, sometimes right on the beat, sometimes pausing to breathe the moment. He chases her, coaxes her, mirrors her, challenges her and goes hip to hip with her. He even spoons her, vertically. She isn’t sure, she turns away, she reconsiders, gives a little, gives a little more, then, overcome, bends backward and surrenders completely to the rhythm, the moment and the man. He flips her around, catches her, sends her off spinning alone only to meet her, unexpectedly, when she slows, pulls her in tight and takes her into a thrilling crescendo, then to a fantastically casual ending, as if to say, “That? Oh, that was nothing,” his modesty after brilliance his most disarming charm . . . As “Night and Day” closes, Astaire lands Rogers gently on a steep incline — she’s mesmerized by the magician who just took her on the ride of her life — bends over her suggestively, pulls back and says, “Cigarette?”

Read the full review here.  Buy the book here.  And watch those great Fred and Ginger movies whenever they run on TCM.  My favorite is Swing Time, what's yours?

-- sdh

Are you ready for opening day?

 

"Balding. Can't Sing. Can Dance a Little."*

*Notes from Fred Astaire's first screen test. Something to keep in mind when reading the next rejection slip.

 

 

Gene Kelly teaches English to the French kids (grace aux freres Gershwin)

Demain le bubble gum pour tous! 

 

 

On bad reviews . . .

"It's just a review, it's not a gun."

Mark Morris, choreographer

-- sdh