In Ezra Pound’s 1934 ABC of Reading, Pound cautions: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” In a posting on Twitter, analyze why the poet didn’t take his own advice when it came to The Cantos.
When George Balanchine was the company choreographer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in the mid-1940s, he told Frederic Franklin—the dancer on whom Mr. B. built the part of The Poet in his Ballet Russe work The Night Shadow—that Franklin should do two things: “Read War and Peace and The Sermon on the Mount.” In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, explain why this advice might come in handy for the Secretary of the Treasury, a disgraced ex-journalist, the manager of the New York Mets, and Susan Stroman.
The phrase “Black Swan” has been applied to:
a) the character Odile, the evil enchanter’s daughter in the ballet Swan Lake;
b) the pas de deux that Odile dances with clueless Siegfried in Swan Lake’s third act;
or used as
c) a commonly implied element in philosophical discussions on the fallibility of inductive inferences, as in the comparison of the statements “All ravens are black” with “All swans are white”;
d) the metaphor in “the black swan theory,” advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, to explain why the largest, most unpredictable, and most powerful events in history, economics, and just about everything else always wing in from left field just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water;
e) the exquisite and mysterious title poem in an early collection by James Merrill;
f) a much-lauded and Oscar-nominated 2010 feature film, by Darren Aronofsky, about a ballerina going berserk, which will be remembered by ballerinas not only for the special effect that put the head of the actress Natalie Portman onto the dancing body of American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane but also, even more so, for the fact that the director didn’t mention the effect or Lane’s name in public until after the Oscars were decided;
g) the Cygnus Atratus, native to Australia, and, prior to the 17th century, believed by Europeans to be imaginary. Write a Ghazal that incorporates all these references for a readership who, to understand the poem, requires no more than a sixth-grade education and will be reading it while texting the Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses.
from the archive; first posted on June 2, 2014.