Poets' Jeopardy [by Mindy Aloff]

Prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who inspired Frank O'Hara's "Ode to Tanaquil Le Clercq," pictured here with Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, and George Balanchine, (photo © Irving Penn).

Special Edition: Poetry and the Dance

Question: What do the careers of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones), James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara have in common, apart from the fact that they all wrote poetry in English?

Answer: All of them wrote at least one poem about the ballet, not as a metaphor but as a self-contained art. Many of their ballet poems, in fact, are about particular ballets or named dancers.

Question: What do Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson, and Jay Rogoff have in common?

Answer: All of them were or are known as poets and also as working dance critics.

Question:  What do Théophile Gautier, Jean Cocteau, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline have in common, apart from the fact that they wrote in French?

Answer: All of them wrote libretti or scenarios for ballets. Gautier’s brainchild was the 1841 ballet Giselle. Cocteau, who served Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes (1909-1929), wrote ballet scenarios after Diaghilev’s death as well—most famously for the 1946 Roland Petit ballet Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, which Cocteau also conceived. Céline, a balletomane, wrote several scenarios that he hoped would be adopted by a ballet company in the U.S.S.R., to which he traveled in 1936 to try to get his ideas produced. For some reason, none of them seemed to attract the Soviets’ attention. And, yet, who could possibly resist Céline’s ballet scenario “Scandal in the Deep,” a bit of which goes:

“There he is, Captain Krog, with his spike in his hand. . .with his men. . .on the ice floe. . .massacring a thousand baby seals surprised in their little games. . .the blood of innocent seals runs everywhere on the ice. . .on the men. . .splattering Captain Krog. . .Captain Krog and his men dance with delight!. . .The Dance of the Massacre!” (Thomas and Carol Christensen, trans., Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything, Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 1999.)

Question: In terms of the New York City Ballet, what did the poets W.H. Auden and Lincoln Kirstein have in common?

Answer: They both wrote program notes for the company. (Read those ballet programs! You never know who the anonymous authors actually are.)

Question: Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Arthur Rimbaud, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein were some of his choreographic inspirations. Name the choreographer.

Answer: Frederick Ashton.

Question: What poet’s work provided the title of the Martha Graham-Aaron Copland masterpiece of modern dance, the 1944 Appalachian Spring?

Answer: Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.”

Question: The title of Paul Taylor’s 1990 dance Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun comes from the work of what poet?

Answer: Wallace Stevens’s poem of the same title.

Question: What soloist from the original, 1948 group of dancers for the New York City Ballet—where her culminating assignment a decade later was to serve as a member of the original cast of the landmark Balanchine-Stravinsky Agon—and who subsequently performed as a member of the original company of Jerome Robbins’s Ballets: U.S.A., went on to become a full professor of literature at the City College of New York and an esteemed scholar of Wallace Stevens?

Answer: Barbara Milberg Fisher (author of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, University Press of Virginia, 1990, and In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir, Wesleyan University Press, 2006)

Question: What poem contains the following stanza and who was the poet?

“Can you dance a question mark? / Can you dance an exclamation point? / Can you dance a couple of commas? / And bring it to a finish with a period?”

Answer: “Lines Written for Gene Kelly To Dance To” by Carl Sandburg.

Question: In 1893, the Symbolist poet and occasional dance critic Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in an essay on the American modern dancer Loïe Fuller that her programs using many yards of silk and complicated lighting constituted “the theatrical form of poetry par excellence.” However, a poem by Mallarmé himself became the wellspring for a much more renowned dance artist, by way of the composer Claude Debussy. Name the ballet and its choreographer.

Answer: Debussy’s 1894 symphonic poem for orchestra, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a musical response to Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (“Afternoon of a Faun”), served as the score for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, L’après-midi d’un faune, made for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In Nijinsky’s rendering, the Faun (performed originally by the choreographer) appears to pleasure himself on a scarf dropped by a nymph who evades his advances.

Question: Resolve the contradiction between the following passages:

            “[Mallarmé] believed that his own music was sufficient, and that with even the best intentions in the world, it was a veritable crime as far as poetry was concerned [for Debussy] to juxtapose poetry and music, even if it were the finest music there is.” (Paul Valéry, “Stéphane Mallarmé, Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, 1933; trans. James R. Lawler, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)

            “I have just come out of the concert, deeply moved. The marvel! Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun, which presents a dissonance with my text only by going much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness. I press your hand admiringly, Debussy. Yours, Mallarmé.” (Letter included in the 1940 Debussy biography by Maurice Dumesnil)

Answer: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014

Comments

[Jill Newnham]

Wonderful. Thank you for so much wonderful info and anecdotage.