The Best American Poetry

It's her party and she'll laugh if she wants to [Happy birthday to you, Nin Andrews!]

(c) Nin Andrews. Inspired by Chapter "2000" in The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry 1988-2014 by David Lehman

 originally posted on April 20, 2015.

Introducing Paris Performance Calendar – [by Tracy Danison]

“What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy. There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it one of the first refinements of polished society.” “Certainly, Sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world. Every savage can dance.”                        

                                                                                                                                - Pride & Prejudice, Sir William Lucas & Fitzwilliam Darcy (Chapter 6, the ball at Netherfield)

                                         BEYOND WORDS

 

As for Darcy, as for Paris Performance Calendar “Dance” is the only art that is both intimately local and infinitely global. In this new creation, Totemic Studies, Matthieu Barbin explores totems and the psycho-cultural challenges that face the developed countries. Photo: Totemic studies, Matthieu Barbin © Tourgueniev

Paris Performance Calendar is a regularly updated work-in-progress “dance syllabus”, complemented by essays, articles and interviews from The Best American Poetry and other publications.

The first Paris Performance Calendar, scheduled for the week of 7 May and covering May, June & July, will feature selected performances from the dance & performance festival Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2018, in addition to two contemporary ballet offerings recommended by my friends at DanseAujourdhui. 

                                        VENUES & AGENDA

Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis, which runs from 16 May to 16 June over 13 venues in the Seine Saint Denis department this year, sees itself as a “festival défricheur”, cultivating fresh contemporary choreography that takes a sharp, poetic look at the world around – whether the perspective is that of a young woman from France experimenting Japanese dance forms, established European performers presenting a new creation, or choreographic newbys trying their hands or esthetic-professional-cultural-geographical points in between: Mylène Benoit, Marco Berrettini,  Yu-Ju Lin, Oona Doherty, Daniel Léveillé... Photo: My soul is my visa © Marco Berrettini

Paris Performance Calendar is called a “syllabus” because it is an informed, if selective, listing of live visual performance in Paris, intended as a tool to help my fellow poets better understand and follow (and participate in) the living arts scene. In its Agenda, Performers, Performances and Venues sections Calendar features live (non-word based) dance, performance and visual works, their creators, performers and contributors, along with the management and expertise of local venues or sponsoring events organizations that are associated with these.

                                        PERFORMANCE AGENDA

BLANCHE NEIGE • Angelin Preljocaj (2008) • Grande Halle de La Villette • 5, 6, 7 July, 2018, 20.30h – 8 July, 16h • 90 min Λ “Schneewittchen” to the Grimm Bros., “Snow White” to you, partner, Preljocaj told L’Express that his Blanche Neige reflects contemporary problems of older women having difficulties to leave the way open to the mädchens: “...You just have to look at women between 50 and 60 to see it.“ Well. At least it’s not Disney and, despite the casual pop-psych misogyny, good choreography is good dancing. Ω This production features costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier, such as a leather-bound wicked stepmother, prowling the inflamed airs of Gustav Mahler along with an honest-to-goodness Paris-Opéra-quality set by Thierry Leproust. Photo: Blanche Neige©Jean-Claude Carbonne CMJN

In a world where “all moves and changes always”, “dance” is the word that best points to what moves us in non-word based art (art “beyond words”). 

                                        PERFORMERS

Λ Born in Hualien, Taiwan, Yu-Ju Lin an alumnus of Clould Gate 2, the talent development wing of the Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Theater, the first contemporary dance theater on Taiwan and in Chinese-speaking Asia. Its current artistic director is Chen Tsung Lung, whose dance piece Full Moon played at the Palais de Chaillot, 11 April 2018, as part of the Sydney Dance Company world tour repertory . Ω Lin performed with various notable Taiwanese choreographers before beginning her own career in 2010. While strongly part of the Taiwan scene, some of her creations were featured first in France, including I Am in France (2010) (created during a first residency in the country) and the video work Dry to Wear (2015). Recent choreography includes A Little Naked (2016), Seed (2016) and Being (2017). SPONGE (2017), Rencontres chorégraphiques 2018. Photo: Sponge, Yu-Ju Lin © TAIWAN / National Performing Arts Center-National Theater & Concert Hall / Photo Lee Chia-Yeh

For Paris Performance Calendar, “dance” is a live performance does not require a mastery of any language to enjoy it, considers visual art as a choreography of body, space, matériel, color or sound; “dance” points to “dance”, or “opera”, or “circus”, or “performance” or “visual art”, or, in fact, to any conceivable type of “live visual art” event.

Next Line, Please: Imaginary Trips to Real Places [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's Next Line, Please takes you for a spin around the world. The places are real and the experiences imagined, and yet there's something about this prompt that makes me feel like a tired, excited traveller on a midnight train heading to...

“Montevideo” by Angela Ball

Montevideo mourns in spangles tonight.
In the middle of somewhere, wives fly aprons
from housetops, sit down equally
with husbands wives sons daughters,
beautifully and remorselessly thinking
in the moist old city. Montevideo

in the middle of somewhere
renounces Brutalism in buildings
and roughness of action, endorses
la Dama de la Noche and the shyest
parrots. Lost to stables, roans and chestnuts
circle extravagance. In the middle
of somewhere, Montevideo mourns
in spangles tonight.

...and the wind is whipping and the tourists are buzzing, and as we pull into the following stop on the midnight express train:

Ricky Ray’s “Hawaii”:

The pool blue of Hawaii
haunts me like
the eye of a dog
whose other eye was brown
like the skin
of my father
all day swinging a machete
in the sun,

I want the ungodly
way the women
would watch him work
through his troubles
to feed me,
fat boy who ate too much
because a dog was his mother
and both of them ate the sun.

And so many more! Including un-Finn-ished poems and many more stories from places visited in the imagination.

For next week … how about a poem of twelve to 14 lines, beginning with a one-sentence summary of War and Peace: 

“Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.”

As David Lehman smartly remarks, "The two clauses are perfectly balanced, each one a subject, verb, and object, and the incongruity between the two clauses is very funny." 

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post from around the world, and enter your candidate for next week!

Epigraph of the Month: JA quotes Pasternak on Mayakovsky

Here is the epigraph John Ashbery chose for his poem "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers":(in his first book, Some Trees):

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He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

-- Boris Pasternak (Safe Conduct)

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Ashbery adapted the title of his poem from Andrew Marvell ("The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"). I believe he wrote the poem while waiting for Kenneth Koch, who arrived a half hour late for an appointment.

-- DL