The Best American Poetry

Easter, and the Christians are at it again, raising the dead. [By Jill Alexander Essbaum]

(Ed note: This post is from the archive. It first appeared on April 6, 2021)
  

If you see me in church this weekend, I’ll be crying.

Wait.  Scratch that. 

I’ll be weeping.

Hmm.  No.  That’s not right either.

Try:  Sobbing.  Bawling.  Engaging in a back-pew sort of break-down best reserved for funerals (and only really, really, really tragic ones at that). 

I know.  It totally doesn’t make sense.  In the fairy tale of Holy Week, Easter’s the happy ending.  It’s the Resurrection!  It’s death undone!  It’s every promise rendered right!  It’s bunnies and chocolate!  Jesus, Jill. Jill—it’s Jesus!   

AND YET: The minute that stone is rolled away I lose my shit.  Crude, but there’s no other way to put it.

Easter fucks me up.*

A digression, not particularly brief. Indulge, please:

Indomitable faith isn’t my strong suit. I’m pretty good at misgiving; doubt’s my specialty. Trust? A habit I’ve unlearned. My conviction is never convinced and what assurance I do have is never, but never blessèd.  Therefore my belief in God comes and goes in the manner of a city train: it chugs from Skepticism as if it were a northern suburb and it runs all the way down to Denial, an outlying town at the end of the line. And while I do indeed disembark at Spirituality Central Station often enough to know which tram will get me to the cathedral without having to look it up in a Frommer’s, at some point I get back on the train.  It’s inevitable.  To do otherwise would to not be Jill.  This is part of the problem. 

But even in doubt, I have always prayed.  I pray, in fact, in the manner that Sugar advises us to write which is like a motherfucker.  I pray like Shaft prays.  Eat your heart out, Roundtree.  Can you dig it?  I pray aloud.  I pray loudly.  I pray all day long, though my self-appointed hour is five am.  I take a pre-dawn walk and speak to the sky.  God’s come to expect me at that time.

(Lest you find me too virtuous for my vestments, I ought to confess it took months for me to train myself to pray for other people beyond ‘andgodpleaseblesssoandsoamen.’  Mostly when I pray I’m thrice a singer’s third syllable solfège: Mi, mi, mi.  Not so proud, not so pious.)

But I pray.  Boldly.  Like how Luther says to sin.  I’m not very nice about it.  I’m adamant.  My most-prayed prayer? What Jacob told the angel. I will not let you go until you bless me.  To which I add: And then, I still won’t let you go.  To which I also add: Dammit.

And so I doubt.  And so I pray.  I’m ok with that.  I don’t think it’s so unusual.  I’m not the only one of us who walks and chews gum at the same time.  This is a tension I’ve held for years.  Tension, you know, is sometimes called for.  A guy-wire must be taut to be of any stabilizing use.  And what this tensity has taught me is that slackening isn’t always safe.  I’m tempted to retell the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, but I won’t.  Except to say: Bridegroom awaits.  Better watch out, not cry, not pout.  Here come da judge.  Here come da judge.

It’s not the doubt, then, that ramrods me at Easter exactly.

It’s Easter’s premise.

You wanna get to Heaven?  Baby, you gots to die.

Brian Swann: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rags and Bones

 

Sorting through his things like a rag-picker

    or the rags and bones man who’d give you a goldfish

       in a jam-jar for the stuff you brought him,

I came across a card in his collection of sayings

    and aphorisms, “Follow Your Heart,” which

        I thought ironic since he died of a heart attack

after a diet including cold beef fat spread on bread

          like butter, which still makes me worry

since I had to clean the plate and eat any fat I

      cut off, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

                                                                    He

          never gave up trying to get the most

out of things, even on his death bed begging

     the nurse for a hand job.

                                                  And as he lay with

         light from stained glass falling over him

sailing through silky white billows as if

      there was still something more, the coffin,

          I thought, could just as well have been

a cradle. He’ll never die.

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Brian Swann’s most recent poetry collection is Imago (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and his most recent prose is Ya-honk! Goes the Wild Gander (Mad Hat Press, 2023). 

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                                      Irving Penn. Rag and Bone Man, London,1950. Platinum palladium print, printed 1967

E. M. Forster on "Jew-Consciousness"

 

"Jew consciousness is in the air, and it remains to be seen how far it will succeed in poisoning it. . . .A nasty side of our nation's character has been scratched up -- the sniggering side. People who would not ill-treat Jews themselves, or even be rude to them, enjoy tittering over their misfortunes: they giggle when pogroms are instituted by someone else and synagogues defiled vicariously. 'Serves them right, really. Jews.' This make unpleasant reading, but anyone who cares to move out of his own enlightened little corner will discover that it is true.. . .To me, ant-Semitism is now the most shocking of all things. It is destroying much more than the Jews; it is assailing the human mind at its source." -- E. M. Forster (1939)

from Two Cheers for Democracy by E. M. Forster

Dustin Brookshire's Barbie Poems [by Nin Andrews]

COVID-19 Barbie

No one removes her from the box.

Lot's Wife Barbie

Mattel told her not to look
back once she left the factory.

We know how that ended.

Never picked first for playtime,
she's a lifesaver when a recipe
calls for a pinch of salt.

 

Red Lobster Barbie

will fuck you up
if you get between
her and her basket
of cheddar biscuits.

So those are just a few of the gems in this chapbook by Dustin Brookshire. Inspired by Denise Duhamel's Kinky, Brookshire has added his own hilarious slant to the Barbie world. His poems are like snacks, like yummy hors d’oeuvres. I only hope he is working on the main course, or his full-length collection of Barbie poems.

" Granada" [as sung by Andrea Bocello]

Granada

 

"Rhode Island is Famous for You" (if You are Denise Duhamel) [by David Lehman]

From the new issue of The Common:

Rhode Island is Famous for You
for Denise Duhamel

The blue forest, chilled and blue, like the lips of the dead,
show life when brought to the public eye in June,
the month of twins who divide their lives in two
or spend hours pursuing the ghost of a lover. Stacey
and I drive to the swimming pool and Blossom Dearie
sings “Rhode Island is Famous For You,” which always
makes Stacey think of Denise Duhamel, born this day
in Woonsocket, R. I.  Other children of June 13 include
Yeats, Pessoa, and Tony Towle, each of whom is a cousin
of yours, Denise, pursuing the arrow of greatness, but of none
of them is it true that Rhode Island, smallest
and possibly most underrated state, is famous for you.
And the lips that were cold and blue when this poem
began have the warmth of June and the charm of a kiss.

6/13/23
David Lehman

https://www.thecommononline.org/march-2024-poetry-feature-new-poems-by-our-contributors/

Literalists of the Imagination on Opening Day

Marianne Moore at Yankee Stadium throwing out the first pitch of the 1968 season. Photo: Bob Olen. Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.

Molly Arden's prose poem, "So Many Literalists," draws a distinction between "literalists" and "literalists of the imagination." The latter is a phrase from Marianne Moore's signature poem "Poetry" (the full-length version, not the bare-bones three-line summary she published, presumably in a fit of literalism, in her "Collected").

J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie : Straining every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

A propos his work in general and his latest work, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie, choreographer François Lamargot told me last year that he works out from the idea our civilization suffers from “a handicap of the heart” that prevents it from recognizing its own destructiveness.

By “heart” Lamargot means the balance between physically hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling and reacting or feeling. Feeling starts with self. He says people have become so absorbed in themselves that they’ve forgotten how to look around to see how they’re affecting the world around (See: François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart).

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

As far as creating dance performance is concerned, Lamargot says that to get his thinking across, he wants to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to bring his audience to “sensibility” of this civilizational handicap, rather than intellectual understanding of it – he wants to get beyond words and work on imagination.

And, it turns out, in the dancing, Lamargot creates a prolonged, delicious thrill, a crowd-pleasing thrill, that leaves a spectator sitting wondering just where they are for a minute or two after the applause stops.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Karine, my companion, who was sitting in the seat just next to me waited a minute before smiling, raising both eyebrows and asking how I’d describe what had just happened. Smiling back, I said something like “Pina Bausch grooving on an Apocalypse Giselle”.  Then, something like, “Flawlessly executed by woke break dance brats from the down-at-heel social club in the trash-strewn lot we call the 21^st-century...” I said, “Exciting”.

Karine laughed and, as she does, puffed out a light raspberry, saying, “‘Post-Apocalypse’, you mean”. Then,   after a few seconds she says, “They sure can dance”.

She’s right.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

Aided and abetted by well-aimed multi-media effects and great sound arrangement (music including Vivaldi, Gloria Patri; Tom Waits, The Earth Died Screaming; and Taku Sugimoto, Spring) Lamargot’s dance performers are as uninhibited as any 80s-style experimentalist free expressionists. But they never romp. There’s not a tic without an elegant purpose. And within the first 10 minutes, the trim, athletic hip-hop trained performers subjugated Karine and I with a “beyond Waltz” that was both professionally knowing and inspired; alone and together, they radiated the noble sensuality of Waltz …

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Cie Poisson/Buffle

This, what, respect for? genre movement and the layers of expression and sense beneath it characterized the whole piece… Honestly, Karine and I agree, the mix and range of dance skill is so smooth and matched to sensibility as to be indescribable.

Lamargot does claim to have turned out his own genre in what everybody these days seems to be calling “hybrid dance” – combining moves and even ideologies from theater, performance, ballet, modern, contemporary and urban dance in a single choreographic piece. Maybe that’s right. And maybe, in reality, all choreographers have always been doing that. Be all that as it may J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie is dance performance with something quite wonderful in it.

____

I saw “J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ à la Folie” at Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar, 4 February 2024, with performers: Anaïs André, Joël Elisée Konan, Alexandre Gastoud, Oscar Lassus dit Layus, Cassilda Marcoulet, Anabella Pirosento and Erwan Tallonneau. Directorial assistance and costuming: Maryse Poulhe. Interactivity, multimedia, lights and scenography: Claudio Cavallari, Allan Hové and Benjamin Lebreton

The Cliff Robertson Quiz

What was Cliff Robertson's most memorable role?

-- as JFK in "PT 109"

-- as the Nixon-like Cantwell in "The Best Man"

-- as the guy who loses Kim Novak to William Holden in "Picnic"

-- as the fellow who falls in love with the same woman twice in "Obsession"

-- as the mentally-impaired bigamist whose wives are Joan Crawford and Vera Miles in "Autumn Leaves"

-- as the clueless CIA guy in "Three Days of the Condor"

For extra credit,

(1) Would you have voted for Henry Fonda or his opponent in "The Best Man"?

(2) Who wrote the American lyrics for "Autumn Leaves"?

(3) Compare Genevieve Bujold, New Orleans and Florence in "Obsession" with Kim Novak and San Francisco in "Vertigo."

From the archive; first posted March 23, 2018

Duct Tape [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

When your whole life was going down

And you had no money in the bank

'Twas duct tape turned your life around!

'Twas duct tape that was always there,

Duct tape to which you owe your thanks,

Duct tape, in an unfair world, was fair!

You're old, but not bent out of shape

When old friends have to walk the plank;

Your best friend is good old duct tape!

"I Tell You This Now" by Daniel Lawless [by Nin Andrews]

Family Photographs: My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965

In a year, Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium.
But for now—how happy you were. To be eleven and unconcerned
For once with school, the Cubs, who punched who.
For a few minutes to be unlearned, to be taught
A new world. O, distant boy, how marvelous
It all must have been, to be turned into a ghoul with your friends,
To spurn the murmur of grown-ups with their highballs and hair
On the deck for a lowering sky burned sepia, orange.
At three o’clock to feel yourself disappear inside yourself —
To cast no shadow. And – so long ago now
how did you put it? —the delicious, insistent thought
What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet
What that yearning meant.

Thus begins Daniel Lawless' stunning new collection of intimate and profoundly moving poems. This is a book not to miss--each poem in it is painfully beautiful, darkly lit, familiar and startling. As Jim Daniels writes: The poems in I Tell You This Now evoke the photos of Diane Arbus in that they might make you want to turn away, but then only to turn back and go deeper, as he does, to find the humanity in this complex, difficult world. He mines photographs both real and imagined to create fresh, startling insights that sustain us, like the small daily joys of "... lumbering the cha-cha as she boiled the green out of Thursday cabbage." 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 27, 2024

Congratulations to Miriam Levine whose book Forget about Sleep was published this month by NYQ Press as winner of the of the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, chosen by José Antonio Rodríguez. This is what I wrote for the book jacket—

Miriam Levine's Forget about Sleep is a love letter to our world, an ode to memory and all she has wistfully stored. “Such terrible things in this world,” it's true, and yet Levine holds on to all that is bright—daffodils, Zebra longwings, victory gardens, the moon, and the sea. Celebratory, clear-eyed, meditative, Levine's poems are mature and honest renderings on our humanness. 

You can read three of her gorgeous poems here:

https://www.ronslate.com/exclusion-in-the-park-and-union-street/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Two ): Trey Moody [by Angela Ball]

The Way to Work

A billboard asks me
if I can name five types of apples.
I am listening to classical radio.
Suddenly, I am driving past the graveyard
and realize I can name only two:
red and green. So naturally I wonder
what, exactly, is wrong with me.
The DJ says there have been explosions
at the Boston Marathon. That’s it.
The graveyard is now gone. Too far
behind me. Stores are trying to sell
office supplies, but they are fooling no one.
Now back to the music. The sun
all around. In ways I cannot touch
and in very gradual increments
somehow brightening the day.

                                                -Trey Moody, from Autoblivion

Trey Moody is the author of Autoblivion (Conduit Books, 2023), winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, and Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, his poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, and New England Review. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, Nebraska.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Two): Trey Moody

Trey Moody’s colloquial and provocative “The Way to Work” illuminates the everyday disjunctions of driving—an activity rare for the original poets of the New York School. It may remind us that “commuting” is associated with just two activities: a trip to work or a sentence. Its first question is asked by a billboard that wants to know if we can name more than five types of apples.

The cheery Food and Wine website reveals that "There are over 7,500 apple varieties around the world (and counting), each with its own unique history. There are heirloom apples that have withstood the test of time, and new types of apples coming into being every year."

The website doesn’t mention the many varieties lost to commercialism: those that don’t travel well, have lumpy or oddly colored skins, are expensive to grow, or just aren’t consumer friendly.

The billboard seems to hold us somewhat accountable for this, especially if we can’t remember five apples. Its message, by necessity brief, is drowned out by “classical radio”—its music differentiated only by type, like the generic apples.

“Suddenly, I am driving past the graveyard” reminds us of human death while the apple challenge, not forgotten, is still being processed. Shades of Eden: “and realize I can name only two: / red and green.” The flatness of the colors is a humorous letdown, as is “So naturally I wonder / what, exactly, is wrong with me.”

The poem’s present tense and mode of rapid-fire reaction to the seen reminds us of Frank O’Hara’s ‘I do this I do that’ poems, especially “The Day Lady Died,” in which the ephemeral—that surrounds us so thickly—is burst by the eternal in the form of a newspaper headline announcing the death of Lady Day: “The DJ says there have been explosions / at the Boston Marathon. That’s it.”

The first announcements of horror are always the briefest, since knowledge, like the poet’s of apples, does not yet exist. “The graveyard,” which may have somehow provided enlightenment, “is now gone.  Too far / behind me.” During the commute there is little time to react. Radio, when there is no more information, must say “Now back to the music.” But the music will not be itself, but a blood-stained thing. The sun that illumines the poem’s close is like the blithe one that illumines the swirling wreck at the end of Moby Dick.

     . . .The sun 

     all around.  In ways I cannot touch

     and in very gradual increments

     somehow brightening the day.

Trey Moody’s “The Way to Work” achieves an ending both immensely understated and simply immense. Like the apples, the sun is beyond grasp. How well and how coldly “in very gradual increments” captures the morning, and "somehow” expresses the poem’s vast bewilderment—not an argument with existence but an uncommuted incomprehension.

Like the poem itself, its title is both modest and expansive. The word “way” has been used in many languages and holy books to advise how to arrive at enlightenment, wisdom, oneness with creation. Here, all that is being arrived at is “work”—so generic (like a “red” apple) that it need not be specified.

Perhaps, Moody’s powerful poem suggests, we—the minions of the ordinary—have created such a quantity of it that bombs appear as agents of transformation—that “what is wrong with me” is wrong with us all. -- Angela Ball

Stephanie Burt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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At the Parkway Deli

 

You can know what you need before you know why.

For example, ten-year-old me, who leans

on the empty cold salad-bar cart along the cold wall

of the crowded dining room at the best Jewish deli

(supposedly, though they’re not kosher) south of Manhattan:

I’m waiting for noon, when the cart

becomes the world-famous pick-your-own-pickle bar.

“World-famous,” meaning

I wouldn’t stop telling my dad how much I liked it:

green sour tomatoes that pop

whenever you cut or bite into them,

intricate as a satellite inside;

sauerkraut in three colors, like some nation’s flag

left outdoors in a storm and shredded, maroon,

not quite white and pale-emerald green;

half-sours and dills, sliced lengthwise like canoes,

curled up at their tips like canoes;

banana peppers the shape

of your tongue if you stick out your tongue,

that also burn your tongue;

jade disks with peppercorns, sugary like tart candy,

yet not dessert, and good for you. How many years

till I found out why trans girls and women crave salt.

Coming out makes your blood pressure go down.

So do spironolactone, and other

similar shots and pills with jawbreaker names

I wanted to change me.  I would tell no one.

I would stand outside until I was 41,

waiting to be let in.  You can know what you need

before you know why: shredded cabbage and mini-cukes

and sodium ions in water, and vine-ripe tomatoes

preserved in mustard seeds, coriander, allspice

and vinegar for no one knows how long.            

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Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her latest books include We Are Mermaids (Graywolf), After Callimachus (Princeton UP), and Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic). Ask her about Taylor Swift!

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                                              Dessert display, Parkway Deli, Silver Spring, Maryland, 14 March 2024. Photo by T. Winch

"Pink Shutters" [by Elaine Equi]

Pink Shutters
for David Trinidad

Pink Shutters — Pink Shutters!
Sixty-three pairs opened wide
in the narrow alley

as if Mao had once again proclaimed
"Let a hundred windows bloom"
— kiss by kiss.

Shocking Pink! Pagan Pink!
Milk of Magnesia and Panther Pink
seductively pulling us into the air

like a harem of wings
in which we desire and are perhaps afraid
to be lost forever.

We who have just left jobs,
families, packages below
while the eye continues to climb —

refuses, in fact, to come down from
this giddy Jacob's Ladder of Wild Pinks,
Wild Pinks ascending!

-- Elaine Equi

from the archive; originally posted September 2, 2009

Pink Shutters
for David Trinidad

Pink Shutters — Pink Shutters!
Sixty-three pairs opened wide
in the narrow alley

as if Mao had once again proclaimed
"Let a hundred windows bloom"
— kiss by kiss.

Shocking Pink! Pagan Pink!
Milk of Magnesia and Panther Pink
seductively pulling us into the air

like a harem of wings
in which we desire and are perhaps afraid
to be lost forever.

We who have just left jobs,
families, packages below
while the eye continues to climb —

refuses, in fact, to come down from
this giddy Jacob's Ladder of Wild Pinks,
Wild Pinks ascending!

-- Elaine Equi

from the archive; originally posted September 2, 2009

Writing urban dance into traditional ecstatics: “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

… And some contrast, comparisons and observations… A Folia (“Folly”) by Marco da Silva Ferreira, performed by Ballet de Lorraine, premiered with Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s Instantly Forever on the same stage on Thursday 7 March at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy, France.

Breathing hard and a little too excited at the end of da Silva Ferreira’s stimulating handiwork, I wanted to call the CaleyJacobssondaSilvaFerreira program a “diptych”.

After all, Jacobsson and Caley chose to invite da Silva Ferreira to Nancy and asked the popular almost hip-hopchoreographer to create a Folia specially for the company they’ve been leading for more than a decade.

But “diptych” would imply “complementarity”, sharing something more than a stage. Or suggest that the same topography of sense is explored, maybe, or, maybe that the same style of approach to movement art is in play.

But the experience of the two dance performances is very different and whatever complementarities my friends at the Nancy ballet might feel, spectator experience is the bottom line. No?

The remarkable reflective black stage floor is shared, for instance. At first look, it seems complementary, but just isn’t. Its choreographic, visual use is too different. For Instantly Forever, it’s a multiplying mirror on a wheeling merry-go-round as against the inviting glitter of a universal urban-dance dancefloor, à la Michele Murray’s Dancefloor, also created for Ballet de Lorraine and premiered in April 2023.

 

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Also, in general, the dominant visual quality of Instantly Forever is saturation, gives a sense of in media res; a Folia is resolutely the sum of its people.

A Folia’s movement is choreographed in the frame of urban dance (hip hop). Urban dance starts as energy and shapes it into dance. Instantly Forever is choreographed in a (free) frame of modern and contemporary dance. Modern and contemporary dance create then shape energy. A spectator feels that difference and the sensibilities that it induces.

Typical in urban dance, the men and women of A Folia scintillate as they gradually fill their dramatic space with loose groups, larger, smaller, individuals. As the men and women find their places in the one large, also loose, group that has taken shape, they become performers – those for whom dance is “performance”, a shaping of their energy as a relationship, I mean.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The rest of da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia choreography also presents pretty much the same as in any urban dance piece: energetic, often duo-ing or coupling or gathering affinity groups, shaping and molding each other, finding unisson (being together). Within unisson, one by one, champions come forward to battle – where a performer shows their moves and interested on-lookers choose “winners” (but not “losers”). For more on urban dance convention, see B.girl, choreographer, member of the jury: Valentine Nagata-Ramos on evaluating Olympic break dance. 

Da Silva Ferreira’s singular attractiveness as an urban dance choreographer is an ability to ignore genre even as he shapes performers and spectators alike around its conventions. In a Folia, as he explains in his notes, he wants to see what ecstasy does and where it gets to (“a folia” (“folly”) refers to acculturated ecstasy dance in Medieval Portugal). In other words, and I’m exaggerating to make the point, if da Silva Ferreira feels he needs to chain together a Krump foot-stomp, a Pina Bausch melodramatic sub-mime and a surprisingly precise grand jété to show out what he wants to show out, he’ll do it.  

An entrancing solo – a real, live New York City Ballet-style solo –  by Céline Shoefs in the midst of a Folia’s kaleidoscope of sets of forms of touching and supporting and showing off underlines my point. No Swan – not Anna Pavlova, not Pedro Pauwels & cie and etc… – ever died with as much spirit in the thing – or as many great moves. En pointe, pirouettes, throw downs and pure expression, elegant and abrupt, assured and modest, Shoefs brings everyone to unisson with her parade. Wonderful work by her.

Ballet de Lorraine, “a Folia” by Marco da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Laurent Philippe

And, another Da Silva Ferreira attractive singularity: while the energy and performance-focus involved in, for instance, a tour de force such as Shoefs’ solo, most often comes out as athletic and power in urban dance performance, Ferreira’s hand turns it erotic. Shoefs solo goes beyond affirming her own qualities, goes beyond battle, she happens, preludesencounter.

A Folia’s soundtrack, da Silva Ferreira explains in the program notes, is an iteration of the Early Modern and now pretty universally shared chord progression called “La Folia” or “Folly”, which, as “a Folia” in Portuguese is also ritual ecstasy and carnival-like sexual turnabout.  

The performance’s musical arrangement in effect has electronic musician Luis Pestana “deejaying” Arcangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor La Folia, Op. 5 N°12 by. Pestana’s sounds first push performers and spectators along with a beat that laps at the vibratory edge of techno-club style heart-defibrillation before embracing all in a stimulating beat from beginning to end of the show. Marco da Silva Ferreira is trying to write urban dance into a History of Dance while in its generated sensibility and references Jacobsson and Caley’s Instantly Forever is about history and the experience and perception of history, small h.

And, all this being said, the experience of a Folia left me feeling dizzy-damn good.

So, Bob’s your uncle. When a Folia’s up against Instantly Forever “contrast” best fits the bill.

Dance performers, Ballet de Lorraine  

Jonathan Archambault, Aline Aubert, Alexis Baudinet, Malou Bendrimia, Alexis Bourbeau, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Mila Endeweld, Angela Falk, Nathan Gracia, Inès Hadj-Rabah, Tristan Ihne, Matéo Lagière, Laure Lescoffy, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Andoni Martinez, Afonso Massano, Lorenzo Mattioli, Clarisse Mialet, Elsa Raymond, Elisa Rouchon, Céline Schoefs, Gabin Schoendorf, Lexane Turc, Luc Verbitzky, Mac Twining

What a swell party this is. . .

 

The year: 1955. Can you identify the people -- and the locale?

"Leonie" by Lucy Dougan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Lucy Dougan’s “Leonie” speaks to the strange charisma that inanimate objects can assume over time when they share our space with us. A sculpture of an anonymous artist’s model, after living with the family for decades, suffering “endless room changes, / the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves”, becomes almost sacred to the speaker. Having borne witness to so much of the family’s life, the “many rows and unkind words” and “also good times, rafts of regrettable TV”, the speaker develops an intimacy with the figure that is itself familial, bordering on the erotic: “If I were rendered blind I would know / your lightly pitted cheekbones, / your brow line, your rough underside”. 

The sculpture is, of course, brought to life not by any innate animation it possesses, but by the memories the speaker and her family have imbued it with, and this artificial nature offers it a lifespan that is greater than their own, meaning that it can be a reservoir for these memories for longer than they themselves can. It is this dual character, at once familiar and extraordinary (the speaker's intimacy with the statue is interrupted by its headache-inducing epoxy resin), that inject these objects with their eerie presence. The figure, outliving the speaker’s parents, becomes uncannily totemic of them: “Stranger, stay with us, / watch over us, / never leave us.”

 

 

“Leonie” is taken from Dougan’s most recent collection of poems, Monster Field (Giramondo, 2022). The title refers to “the mysterious zone surrealist artist Paul Nash’s called ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed, which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past our eyes’.” Monster Field is Dougan’s seventh book of poems. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Dougan lives in Perth, where she is poetry editor of Westerly Magazine.

Leonie

 

Paid artists' model,

your face has lived with the family for decades.

You have suffered endless room changes, 

the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves 

yet you remain sanguine.

Your hairstyle has weathered the years

and the many rows and unkind words you have presided over, 

also good times, rafts of regrettable TV.

If I were rendered blind I would know 

your lightly pitted cheekbones,

your brow line, your rough underside and slight headache-inducing 

scent of epoxy resin in which a finger could snag a glassy splinter 

of what it is you keep inside the void of your cast.

I cannot see you as empty for in your hollow head lives the clamour of us all.

And something else, you still abide with us 

even though our mother and father are dead and gone.

Stranger, stay with us, 

watch over us, 

never leave us.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 20, 2024

Hala Alyan’s The Moon That Turns You Back was published this month by Harper Collins. Alyan is an Palestinian American poet who explores violence, displacement, and loss. She uses a myriad of inventive poetic forms to contain diaspora and resilience in the face of war. 

In “Half-Life in Exile,” she writes:

There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
Was the grief worth the poem? No,
but you don’t interrogate a weed
for what it does with wreckage.
For what it’s done to get here.

For examples of her work, here is a lineated poem “September, a week in” and a fierce prose poem “Habituation” which contains my favorite passage in the book but hasn’t the story already changed because I told it:

https://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/january-2020-hala-alyan.html

Congratulations, Hala!