By Sally Rosen Kindred

Waiting for the elevator, you hear
the dark floors chime, you
hand over her pocketbook
and put on your gloves, you try
to convince her to get on
when it comes. You’re with me,
you say, and this is the only way
to get down to the ground .
She doesn’t believe you,
probably because this
is not her blue coat and she knows
she is dead, which you’d know too
if you’d just wake up.
But you go on sleeping
like the fool
you are, folding your body
close to itself under
the heavy sheets, your hand
touching your own
sleeve, understanding
it’s hers, waiting for the doors
to open, waiting
quietly, like she taught you,
to go down and out the lobby
together into the
blue-white city
to see the snow.

By John Hodgen

Suffice it to say we’re all that we have. We’re tagged. We’re it,
despite the occasional monoliths that pop up in Nevada deserts
begging us to believe we host astral visitors or nascent iterations
of ourselves. All in all it’s pretty clear. It’s just us who keep showing
up, and who, given enough time to gather the shards and bits of our
thoughts, are trying, albeit admittedly, intermittently, to figure it out,
the it being this-messy-business-fix-that-we’re-in, this requisite
dog and pony miracle show. It’s in all our next breaths, our Where
did it go?, I had it right here , the it that we’ve lost, that we held so tight
in the palms of our hands the way the prophet Isaiah says we are
held. The it long gone now, like eternity, like Puttin’ on the Ritz,
the itsy-bitsy spider, the Iditarod without snow. Heavy hits there,
though we know (do we not?) that children hold the half-lit world
in their eyes each night, holding out for one more Stuart Little ,
one more peep out of us before drifting off in little candle boats,
planes and canoes, as if they’re in some children’s edition of Casablanca
in Sanskrit, with their letters of transit to infinite, immaculate sleep.

By John Hodgen

Plead with me, pray for the real Émile Dickens, unknown novelist/poet/autodidact, that he be found,
culled, called from the lost regions of the unimagined dead, with all due speed, by acclamation. May he be
remembered for saying that truth and death are a woman disrobing in heaven and also in hell. May he be
hailed as laureate, as Sophie’s last choice. May his every word be revered, his magnum opus rediscovered,
The Chosen One , each word a new child with a soup bowl only asking for more. May he know no shame
nor dereliction. May his ranks never close. May he have all new clothes. May he be lauded for leaving
his bleak house, his hard times, for enduring all of our twists, for exceeding our greatest expectations.
May Death itself die like John Donne, like bloody Keats, hapless Chuzzlewit or faithful Micawber.
May it be that Death’s heartless heart yearns. May Death die in a library sumptuous, vast as Parnassus
among copper fields and forests of urns. May he die hearing there’s no such author as Life, that Life
is pure fiction, a story, a poem, that he must venture alone into a book depository, where presidents
and dreams are killed, where everything burns. May there always be a poet named Emily or Émile,
waiting at a train station, another train coming in, how it chuffs and begins, how one might glance
out a window for just a moment askance to see someone feverishly and forever beating the dickens
out of a poem the way Dylan dropped the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on oversized
hand-lettered cards with Allen Ginsberg standing in an alley in London outside the Savoy Hotel
where words and worlds coincide with everyone we’ve ever loved and everyone who’s died,
carriages pulling up to the station outside, hundreds of them, millions, on which we can ride.

By Rose Skelton

I meet Conor in the spruce forest. He whistles his whereabouts; I return his call. It’s mid-July and a mild summer wind breathes through the trees, a low moan that envelops us in the cool island gloam. I follow the sound and scour the ground for what mushrooms might be growing: summer chanterelle, puffball, deceiver. It’s the kind of forensic looking that I begin in July and don’t give up until the trees are naked and the hills are the color of rust. A fast, careful, sieving of images—birch leaf, tree root, crisp packet, coin—a longrange and close-up searching for the gifts of this Scottish island: the edible, the poisonous, the one in a million. The friend that took me two years to meet, though we lived in the same small town. The mushrooms he taught me how to find.

It is the first year of the pandemic and we have fled Texas where my wife, Nomi, has a job at a university, for the Hebridean island that is—was—my home. Nomi desperately wants a baby, has done for a decade, long before we met. She and I have been fighting about it for four years, as long as we’ve been together. But we are thirty-nine and forty-one now and it is probably too late. What do I want? I want not to argue about it anymore, not to have to go through the high-cost, low-chance medical procedures that I fear will rip us apart. I want not to have to choose sperm from a roster of men who claim to look like Tom Hanks. I want not to bring up a child in America.

By Jeffrey Harrison

That’s my blood, I’d wager, dried
on the white lower panel of the storm door,
having dripped from some small cut
as I came in from working in the yard.
Who knows how long it’s been there,
or how the drop became a mark
more singular and graceful
than any I could have made on purpose,

yet seems (as I bend down
to look more closely) considered
and spontaneous at once—
two quick strokes, one curving up,
the other down, like a figure rendered
by a calligrapher’s brush, with ink
from my own body, as if beauty might come
from even the slightest wound.

By Tim Craven

Rare and degenerative, the condition arrived
without warning: a Tarantula for an index finger,
its swollen mocha abdomen fused to the knuckle
as though the lines embossed across my palm
were the net of its silk-spun web.
Then a Huntsman where I’d last seen
my right thumb. Doctors counted the eyes,
plucked legs for biopsies;
an experimental ointment was prescribed.
I made do with my hands stuffed in my pockets,
opening jars in an elbow’s crook.
I almost forgot my plight until two small Sheet Weavers
busied themselves replacing my pinkies.
Then the Trapdoor, the Wolf, the Brown Recluse.

Why me? Why not the neighbor’s son?
I’d chop off my arms were I able to grip
the necessary instrument.
My only solace comes at night
when the inquisitive pointed fingers
of children are tucked up in bed.
I drink whiskey and ginger through a straw
and telephone a friend whose own suffering
makes me feel as though I’ve won a prize.
She has experts stumped: an inoperable alligator
is wrapped around her intestines and any day now
its merciless jaws will snap shut for good.

By Michael Carlson

The whiteboard was blank, leaning against our elm tree. I uncapped my marker and wrote: “Broke and Craving Pancakes.”

Our red tent had broken zipper teeth. The nylon flap hung open, curled like a sick tongue. I ducked inside, knelt by Shay wrapped in a sleeping bag, and rubbed his shoulder until he woke. Purplish-brown eyes, low-stubbled jaw. Long black hair splayed across a thin pillowcase.

I smoked a cigarette in my rocking chair. Shay emerged into the honeyed light, scratching the back of his head. He took forever with his tan work boots, the gum-soled ones I had lifted from Walmart. Mouth open and laces in hand, Shay watched a robin striking dirt.

“Come on, I’m hungry,” I said, handing him a cigarette.

By Robin Rosen Chang

My memory wanders like a dog,
searching for treats and looking for balls,

but my mother’s memory
never lost track of anything,

like the time I didn’t call her
in the hospital after her surgery
when I was thirteen,

or the time I told her I wanted
to live with my father
and his new wife,

or the time the police questioned me
after someone torched a neighbor’s fence.

I wish I could’ve told her I’m sorry
but her memory slunk away.

My memory fetches old bones, reminders
I strayed. Across a border,
I smuggled dope. I swallowed
unprescribed prescription pills,
was careless with sex.

Is it worse to recollect or forget?

I wonder if this dog will get lost.
Will it skulk from yard to yard
or stand at the fence, yelping
and howling at nothing?

By William Olsen

Driving in rising fog to my fading father, I’m surrounded
as if by a mind of erasure, turning trees into apparitions,
so they look dead in fog, even the young ones, especially
dead-looking are the young ones receding in staked lines
into the absence where still other trees have already receded,
the stubble fields are no more, houses are no more,
no more human memory, and the straightaway road
drops away with the seeming duty of reaching my father—
released are the proximities and distances of eyesight,
yet the usual dread, holding the wheel, is not stopping at all,
a shallows of headlit asphalt always just ahead,
a highway of missing fields, fog risen from the unseen—
too everywhere to have an end or a beginning,
the car lights have no past—no place on earth—

By William Olsen

Walking away after watching over sleep, sleep having claimed my
father, sleep now having the face of my father,
having put on that face all of his life and now
sleep must know that he’ll fall beyond sleep,
father sleep seeming to want more from him,
father sleep will never be happy long,
father sleep that almost never withheld itself and when it
did he’d call us, and forget he ever called us,
he’d call us sixty times in one night
until we stopped answering.

By Craig Bernardini

My husband and I have two neighbors named Carl. One Carl lives in the house next to the house next to ours. The other lives seven houses away in the opposite direction, on the other side of the street. The nearer Carl—Furtive Carl—bikes around the neighborhood on an old Schwinn five-speed with an orange flag clipped to the seat. We’ll hear him coming before we see him, because he likes to ring his bell, as if to say, Carl’s here! He seems to ring it whenever it suits him; we’re never sure if he deliberately rings in front of some people’s houses, but not others’, and if so, what it means.

This bike-riding and bell-ringing would be tolerable enough if Furtive Carl didn’t fire up his excavator in the middle of the night to perform some ambiguous labor in his backyard.

We never see Furtive Carl outside his house except on his bike—never see more than the elbow of his excavator over the fence a house away. Gregarious Carl, on the other hand, spends entire days in his front yard, wearing nothing but Bogs and longjohns, hacking away with trowel or hoe. His work seems to involve the endless, tormented carting of wheelbarrows full of earth between one part of the yard and another. As he grunts and sweats, he caterwauls away to the opera that blares from speakers pushed up against his window screens. If anyone passes by, he calls out, loudly enough that he can be heard over the music, and waves his arms over his head, as if to fend off a buzzard that had mistaken him for carrion.

By Julie Danho

I see him while brushing past—
bird’s-nest blond, raggedy
goatee, the striped hoodie

rough as burlap—but when
I open the bathroom door,
I look at myself and laugh

because I’m forty-five,
and so, somewhere, is he,
and the man-boy out there

with his latte and Nietzsche
must be in his early twenties,
the same as Adam in my dorm

about to play me the Pixies,
holding the disc by the edges
like a diamond, wearing

on his wrist a cafeteria spoon
that matched the one (where
could it be?) he’d just given me.

By Madalyn Hochendoner

I didn’t know what qualityover quantity meant

a buck knife you winat the auction?

skin mount the ten-pointwestern mount the rest

all I knew was I wantedto be endless

stuff me full of saltkeep me on ice

me and my shadowin the alien field

low shrubsand no topsoil

what would it takecall me a coward

stuck between the riverand the lightning

all sky

By Madalyn Hochendoner

in the longstanding practice of readingon the train

and it reminds me of other solo pursuits:

pogo-sticking to the end of the drivewayand back,

buttoning up the front of a shirt, thentucking it in,

ordering the bowl of clams

body popped open

like a compact, like a flip phone

like a hand motioning—blah blah blah

trying to still-life it

to still-love it

By Emma Wynn

My mother-in-law is upside down ⠀⠀⠀⠀in the dumpster
rooting, somewhere ⠀⠀⠀⠀under the urine-soaked towels
and splintered wood there is a magazine ⠀⠀⠀⠀she hasn’t read
a stained jacket three sizes too small ⠀⠀⠀⠀she knows
she’ll wear again ⠀⠀⠀⠀my partner and I have flown cross-country
to shake mouse droppings ⠀⠀⠀⠀out of her blankets
scrape dirt off the floors ⠀⠀⠀⠀with a putty knife, trash
the medicine tubes ⠀⠀⠀⠀expired before I was born
there’s only one twin bed for us to share ⠀⠀⠀⠀no real food
in the fridge just chutneys on every shelf ⠀⠀⠀⠀every room
a warren of narrow passages ⠀⠀⠀⠀walled with books
about to avalanche ⠀⠀⠀⠀and bury the dogs
barreling in and out ⠀⠀⠀⠀the broken doors
the L.A. dust sifts in everywhere ⠀⠀⠀⠀as if the desert
wants to erase us, she says ⠀⠀⠀⠀I want to take everything beautiful
from her ⠀⠀⠀⠀her son, her broken antiques, the organ
in the living room she can’t play ⠀⠀⠀⠀your mind, she says is
a narrow room ⠀⠀⠀⠀shuttered and cold, an artist
would see ⠀⠀⠀⠀how the room of old newspapers
is only waiting to unfold ⠀⠀⠀⠀into a flock of birds and lift off
through the hole in the roof ⠀⠀⠀⠀I see her dying in a fire
and haul them in stacks to the curb ⠀⠀⠀⠀where she’s dumpster-diving
for the treasures she’s lost ⠀⠀⠀⠀my partner staggers down the path
with another load ⠀⠀⠀⠀sneezing black mucus
and spitting grit ⠀⠀⠀⠀and I need them
to set everything down ⠀⠀⠀⠀give me just a breath, see
we’re the precious rubbish ⠀⠀⠀⠀that has been here all along

By Nancy Eimers

Night and the City (1950, dir. Jules Dassin)

Harry Fabian, stop running across the screen and into the distance
made of alleys and doorways, streets crisscrossing streets
of neon signs with their loops of the cold light any city knows—
stop, because you will have to run again at the end of the movie
that ends you by throwing your body into the river and having a cigarette
flicked after it. How traitorous your flapping coat and trousers and
your comical two-toned shoes. And yet you believed them.
Critics say this movie is modern because it is tough on its characters,
Harry having a “slimy glee,” and yet how his horsy teeth protrude pathetically
when he smiles, how his face sweats each time nobody lends him money,
how the dapper suit comes unbuttoned and gapes and dirties as he runs
toward the end and his eyes look horrified as if he’d found himself beneath a bridge
beyond which it is night and the city burning. This man could push his girlfriend down
in the street and leave her there—in the layers of grays and grims, no white—
or maybe terror is pitiable beyond mercy just for a moment,
maybe each alley is a doorway hoping St. Augustine would even now say brother,
let us long, because we are to be filled …. Longing has one ending,
longing has another. In one, the girlfriend is comforted by a friend,
in another the hiss of a cigarette tossed into water has the final say. Could Harry be said
to have a soul, even his clothing tries to make the man, and he inside
now frightened now upbeat, the and in one and two and three and four
has him running a last little while, if only as far as the bridge.

By Maria McLeod

In the weeks and months preceding attempts to rescue me, I had become increasingly despondent. I had developed an urge to dig. It was a fantasy of detachment: asexual, dark, isolated. I took to it the way a person may take to a new job or a new house in a faraway state where they hope to reemerge unrecognizable. I wanted to burrow, to wriggle my way through the murky water table, to traverse the ruins of ancient civilizations, to eat through the slick layers of slate, granite, limestone, and, deeper still, to find the Earth’s hot core, to finally come to rest along the perimeter of that core and to fall into a deep sleep wrapped in ashes, to bake as if in a Dutch oven, a slow kind of smoldering, until my sleep turned into an endless coma, until my flesh melted away from the bones and the bones themselves, thoroughly stewed, went rubbery.

There was no exposed or available land surrounding my apartment, so I went to the lawn of the church next door and dug with my hands. I didn’t penetrate very deeply, but I did dig up enough to fill a rusty lunchbox. The smell of that dirt was the smell of a childhood lived outdoors. My stolen portion—special thanks to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception—included a fragment of Styrofoam cup, countless dead insects of an indecipherable origin (at least to the naked eye), three live earthworms, and a bug which resembled, on a very small scale, an armadillo. And, of course, there was the dirt: black damp topsoil which, when pinched together, stuck. It was the type of soil gardeners of drier states might worship, but it was spring in Michigan, and this was the kind of soil one expected and didn’t think to celebrate.

I kept that dirt in an old Gallo wine jug next to my bed. Things grew, or tried to, but I thwarted their efforts by intermittently shaking the jug, turning the world upside down and back upon itself. I squashed what life I could and tried to keep the bottle out of the sun. Mostly, I used the dirt as an inspiration for my fantasies, as a portal to an unworld, the place I sought, without let up, at every opportunity. Prior to my fantasy sessions, which could be best described as a depressive brand of meditation, I eked a bit of that dirt out, and, like communion, took a dollop upon my tongue, careful not to chew. The first time was a bit shocking and not at all pleasant. I was careful not to include anything visibly living and tried not to think about the possibility of insect or worm excrement. Eventually, I let my saliva do its duty of breaking it down, dissolving and transforming it into a digestible form. That is, at some point, I swallowed it.

By Joyce Schmid

for my husband

The little plumplings strut across the chaparral,now fly off, fast and low.

I haven’t thought of quail for years—
not since the damp December
when your father died.

You’d grown up in that San Francisco house,
a child in the same twin bed he was to lie in
asking “Am I still alive? My heart still beats?”

Afterward, you had a can of quail eggsas a birthday gift for me.

I pictured how you left the bedside,
woozy from the world of dying,
trudged down Noriega to the stores

and saw that jewel-green can
with Chinese characters and quail eggs on it,
luminous as South Seas pearls,

each egg a single cell—instructions to create a life.

The covey lands again,
goes back to scratching in the weeds,
each small head nodding yes with every step.

You say you have no memory of quail eggs.
But you do remember leaving
in the middle of your father’s

dying to findthe perfect present.

By Kelan Nee

It woke me, the high slung
pitch & swoop of sound.
Someone told me once
that a cardinal holds a soul
of someone lost: red, tufting.
& every day for two years
cardinals descended
on the locust tree,
the only one in the backyard.
More than I could count.
& I learned their songs. I
learned how they sing.
Until I moved. Now I know
a man who lost his son.
He rides his bike & sees
his boy in robins. He told me
I don’t believe it’s the spirit
of my son, but I see them
& I think—& I like it.
& there you are today:
careless, sitting on the peak
of the wooden fence, blazing.
The sky today is too blue,
cloudless, for this kind
of stillness. Sometimes
I make your noise
back to you with my mouth.
Most times I watch
the feathers fill & deflate,
count their creases
like a well-worn face.
& today, at least, I like it.

By Charlie Schneider

The Big Man was to walk five iron steps up to the linoleum ante-level behind the curtains; someone was to hold out a cup of water if he was thirsty. He was to turn left, flashing trademark alligator-print sock, then walk three paces into the danger zone near the edge of the camera’s eye, then look at the sign that said PAST THIS POINT YOU ARE ON CAMERA so he could adjust himself in any sense before seducing the millions, or trying to. There is a better world, folks, he was to say, where we meet the crawling deserts with a trillion trees, where we shake hands after work worth doing, where money’s just confetti for the grand opening of a high-speed train-line, where there’s meatless meat on every plate, local and delicious, where guilt is optional, a novelty, et cetera.

Trouble was, I didn’t tape around a single sniveling ruffle of carpet. Did the Big Man trip? He did. Did he fall? He did. Knee fractured, image dented. My job? Way gone. Three months later the primary draws near, and all I’m doing is plundering my savings and rollerblading. I’m the champion of Bleloch Street; I know all its heaves and divots. The larches in my apartment complex’s court- yard whisper: now is the time, get your job back, stop moping, call Tricia, find another candidate, get back in the ring, don’t forget us, call Tricia.

By Ken Holland

I’m waiting for the rain to grow tired enoughto put itself down.

The rivers are flooded with ill-will andshopping carts freed from Walmart servitude.

People stop talking about the apocalypsethe moment it becomes one.

People stop taking out the garbagewhen they see what’s floating in their backyard.

Outside my window, the rivering street riversto the left, while my neighbor across the way

sees the street rivering to the rightand refuses to understand how it could be the same river.

I’m reading a book on the means and methodsof early seafarers.

I’m reading my DNA for trace elementsof Polynesian blood.

My orchid has pinned a tropical flower above its ear.My Persian is stalking the mirage of a dry oasis.

I’ve come to enjoy the mystery of dinneronce the labels have long soaked off,

while my wine still has the grace notesof the last vintage blessed by drought.

My neighbor swims over and asks if he can borrowa cup of mercy.

My neighbor swims back with my gunwhich his lawyer will use to execute

his last will and testament, as a jury is convenedto bear witness that no one’s yet pled guilty

to living in a state of innocence.

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

That house on the corner is for sale
again. Last week it flaunted SOLD

over the gap-toothed retaining wall,
the sparse weeds in the barren beds,

the desiccated hedge. And now
the sign is gone. So are the weeds.

The fallen bricks are balanced back
into the wall, and near the steps

someone has mulched the beds halfway,
as far as a single bag goes.

I laugh, it feels so personal.
I recognize the scramble up

that gravel bank, repair instead
of maintenance—my housekeeping,

my teeth, my spine, my charity,
all after-patched, too little too late.

My mental double-entry weighs
regret against effort and expense,

while sloth and wishful thinking keep
both thumbs on the scale. I have two friends

who silently agreed to let
their house disintegrate, then sold

“As Is” and walked away content.
Bad for a body or realtor, still

I nod companionably at that mulch.
Maybe too little will be enough.

We asked ten writers to comment on the use of dance and dance imagery in poems. The following feature includes:

• Sara Henning on Ross Gay’s “Burial”
• Sarah Nance on Lucille Clifton’s “untitled” (1991), “God send easter,” “spring song,” “homage to my hair,” “my dream about being white,” “untitled” (1996), “the poet,” “from the cadaver,” “amazons,” “in salem,” and “1994”
• Christopher Kempf on Frank Bidart’s “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle”
• Hugh Martin on Yusef Komunayakaa’s “To Have Danced with Death”
• Jesse Lee Kercheval on Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing”
• Jennifer Schomburg Kanke on Annie Finch and The Furious Sun in Her Mane
• Bonnie Proudfoot on Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Spanish Dancer”
• Therese Gleason on Anne Sexton’s “How We Danced” and “The Wedding Ring Dance”

By Sara Henning

My mother never took formal dance lessons, but that didn’t stop her from hanging a large portrait of Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov in our living room. Saturday afternoons, I’d sometimes catch her, bare feet and leg warmers, leaping across the kitchen floor or spinning like a top, MTV blaring. She danced without form or technique and since I, too, was not a dancer, I had neither knowledge nor language for the magic she created with her body: jeté, pirouette . What mattered was that I saw my single mother joyful in the kitchen of our small duplex. I saw my mother—same woman forced to bury my father a handful of years before—exuberant. I didn’t know how important these small moments of joy would be when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59, how I would hold onto them when bilirubin from a failed liver turned her jaundiced, how I would hold them even harder as she was moved to hospice, my desperate daughter’s clutch becoming vice grip as she took her last breath in May of 2016.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I encountered a copy of Ross Gay’s gorgeous collection of poems Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which I devoured in one sitting. It was during this time that I discovered his remarkable poem “Burial,” a poem I would turn to constantly during the throes of my personal mourning.

By Sarah Nance

“when i stand around / among poets,” Lucille Clifton writes in an untitled poem from her 1991 collection quilting , “sometimes / i hear [ . . . ] one note / dancing us through the / singular moving world.” Here, Clifton configures a communal space for poets where some adjoining strand—what she calls a “single music”—transforms their ordinary path through life into a dance. In drawing a connection between dance and poetry, Clifton evokes a long poetic tradition (consider how villanelle , as one example, comes from the Italian word for “dance”) and forges an association she both troubles and expands in other work. Over the course of her forty-five year poetic career, Clifton takes what are on the surface simplistic references to dance—something one does for joy, praise, or worship—and crafts nuanced claims about embodiment, writing, and Black resistance.

In Clifton’s early work, dance is configured at first as a kind of religious ecstasy, such as in “God send easter” from her 1972 collection good news about the earth . There, the poem’s subjects “dance toward jesus” as they:

By Christopher Kempf

The first time I encountered it—in the June 2007 issue of Poetry , alongside work from the late Craig Arnold and Claudia Emerson, and just before I entered the MFA program at Cornell—I understood neither the first nor last word in the title of Frank Bidart’s magisterial long-poem “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle . ”

The former, as it turns out, is Russian ballerina and Stalin favorite Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta for sixteen years from 1944 to 1960.

The latter is the classical masterwork Giselle , a tragedy of star-crossed love between its eponymous peasant girl and a disguised nobleman, its doomed romance steeped in the paranormalia of nineteenth-century Gothic; after Giselle dies of heartbreak, for instance, she is resurrected by an occult fairyhood known as the Wili, the ghosts of betrayed women who avenge themselves by dancing men to death-by-exhaustion. Though Freud likely never saw it, Giselle anticipates those notions of “hysteria” on which he would elaborate, since Giselle’s frantic dancing was perceived at the time as a symptom of silent—and problematically sexualized—madness. Bidart glosses this etiology midway through the poem:

By Hugh Martin

If “America is,” as John Updike wrote, “a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then one might look—though, for awhile, you couldn’t look —at President Bush’s 1991 blanket ban on photographing coffins carrying dead American soldiers. Maybe the ban didn’t ensure “happiness,” but it did conspire to make sure the American public wouldn’t be bothered with images which might, perhaps, provoke unhappiness, or at least some discomfort.

In Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “To Have Danced With Death,” from his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau , the narrator recounts returning alongside other soldiers from Vietnam, and then trying to exit the plane as two hearses arrive. As the speaker waits in line, he describes how their return gets halted, abruptly, when a “black sergeant first class . . . / stalled us on the ramp.” Shattering any warm and fuzzy feelings about homecoming, the speaker quips that this sergeant “didn’t kiss the ground either.” From there, the bleakness intensifies: “ . . . two hearses sheened up to the plane / & government silver-gray coffins / rolled out on silent chrome coasters.” Bizarre as it sounds, these hearses appear to provide brand-new coffins for the bodies of soldiers, probably in body bags or other containers, still on the plane.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing” included in This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984) begins like this:

      In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
      and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
      I have never seen a postwar Philco
      with the automatic eye
      nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
      in 1945 in that tiny living room
      on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
      then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
      my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
      his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
      of old Ukraine . . .

W hen I read this poem I see a child-sized version of the adult Gerry Stern I knew, dancing, spinning in circles. I see him as he was in 1984 when I took a class with him at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his bald dome framed by unruly dandelion puffs of gray hair. He was 59 then, but young in the time he had spent in poetry world. His second book, Lucky Life , the one that turned the world’s eye his way, had been published just seven years earlier in 1977 when he was already 52.

By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

I went to a party once during my doctoral program where I noticed a man weaving back and forth as he chatted up some of the young women in the program. It wasn’t full on creepy, just sort of . . . odd. As I got closer to the group, I noticed that his speech was also a bit off, but in a mesmerizing way. He didn’t seem drunk. He didn’t seem on the make (or at least not more so than many other people there). But what was going on here? When I asked a friend about him, she said, “Oh, that’s his thing. Dude comes to every party talking in iambic pentameter like it’s 1606 or something.”

Was it an intentional flex? Maybe. But another possibility is that it was just the aftereffects of his intense study of early modern English literature. He might have been inadvertently engaged in what feminist poet and critic Annie Finch has called “en-rhythming.” In her book How to Scan a Poem , Finch defines en-rhythming as “the process of accustoming one’s ear and body to the sound of a particular rhythm in preparation for writing, reading, or scanning that meter.” According to Finch, the process can work by reading poems out loud, making music with a drum, or dancing in time with the desired meter/rhythm. Could it have been that all of his exposure to Shakespeare and Donne left those iambs so stuck to his soul that he couldn’t even engage in small talk without the echo of blank verse in the wings?

By Bonnie Proudfoot

It’s a warm spring evening on La Rambla, a street leading from the Port of Barcelona into the main city, a wide avenue lined with trees, shops, and restaurants, thin lanes of traffic, and a center island full of people strolling or dining outdoors. It begins to drizzle as we join a group on a narrow sidewalk. The queue flows forward, bottlenecking at a doorway leading into a foyer, barely wide enough for a ticket-taker and a sandwich-board sign advertising featured performers. We are at Tablao Flamenco Cordobes . Photos and reviews line the walls, and our group heads upstairs into a small, crowded, circular theater, arched stucco walls stenciled with Moorish motifs, rows of wooden chairs arranged between pillars around a small stage ( tablao ). We are offered a glass of sweet, dark sangria. The house lights dim.

And so, it begins. Two male guitarists and two percussionists whose wooden sticks rhythmically strike the floor are seated under an archway at the rear of the tablao . Just out of sight, a tenor ( el cante) begins to sing. His tones rise and fall, stretching out syllables as if his vocal cords merged with the vibrato of a violin, as if he is almost weeping. As the song concludes, from behind the archway, a woman with long dark hair steps forward. She wears a tight, sleeveless, bodice, a fringed, knotted shawl, ruffled skirt slightly raised in the front. In deliberate, high steps, clapping her hands as if to gather both the tempo and the audience, she circles the stage, skirt flaring, boot heels accenting the percussion. It is impossible to look away.

By Therese Gleason

Dance imagery abounds in Anne Sexton’s ouevre, but the waltzes and allusions to fairy-tale-inspired ballets in her poems are characterized by compulsion and madness like that of the girl in “The Red Shoes” whose feet “could not stop” doing “the death dance.” In this and other archetypal tales interwoven in Sexton’s poems, danger—a wolf, a witch, a dark wood—lurks beneath the choreographed steps of the perilous rites of passage to womanhood, especially marriage. As Sexton’s truth-telling, taboo-shattering work attests, breaking destructive intergenerational cycles to chart a new path—symbolized by the amputated feet in the red shoes that “went on” and “could not stop”—is an ongoing, even violent struggle.

In her 1971 collection, Transformations , Sexton reinterprets and revises stories such as “Cinderella,” “Briar Rose,” “Rapunzel,” “The Maiden Without Hands,” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with a personal (and female/ feminist) lens. (Notably, a number of the fairy tales in Sexton’s poems are also classical ballets with famous waltzes, such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake .) Yet Sexton’s preoccupation with these themes transcends just one collection, permeating her entire body of work. In particular, marriage, as an institution—and as a reflection of dysfunctional relationships in the family of origin—is dissected under Sexton’s brutally honest and psychologically astute gaze in numerous subsequent poems, including “How We Danced” (number two of six parts in the poem “Death of the Fathers” ( The Book of Folly , 1972) and “The Wedding Ring Dance” (in the posthumously published 78 Mercy Street , 1978). These mirror-image poems expose cycles of abuse and oppression at the hands of the father (both literal and symbolic), and they articulate the struggle for female selfhood and self-expression.

By Lisa Bellamy

Over decades, the late Gerald Stern crafted an exuberant, talkative, and highly-performative narrator. His first-person narrator’s consciousness—his loves, memories, opinions, and passions (personal, literary, intellectual, and spiritual) —is itself the true subject of the poems. External activities, objects, and other characters, in constant interaction, offer an opportunity for the narrator to react, explore, and reveal himself and his world.

“The Dancing,” like so many Stern poems, is a poem of largesse: very much in the lyric mode, existing outside conventional, linear time. The core scene in “The Dancing” is a family of three simply dancing together, in a spontaneous, joyful moment. It is a scene of heightened, intimate intensity, against forces of evil and inequality.

The narrator’s consciousness broadens past the moment, though: space is elastic, in motion. The narrator is active, mobile, depicting a mother, father, and child dancing in 1945 Pittsburgh, even—as noted with irony, and underlying sadness and horror—there is “other dancing,” thousands of miles away in Poland and Germany.

By Maya Sonenberg

In May 1968, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company premiered Walkaround Time , their homage to Marcel Duchamp, that grand Dadaist. The idea for this work had been ignited the previous winter at the sort of dinner party one can only imagine taking place in the New York City artworld of the time, with Duchamp and his wife Teeny, composer John Cage (Cunningham’s life and artistic partner,), and painter Jasper Johns (the company’s artistic advisor) in attendance. While Cage and Teeny played chess, Johns sidled up to Cunningham and asked if he’d be interested in “doing something with the Large Glass ,” Duchamp’s famous artwork more formally called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even . “Oh, yes,” Cunningham replied immediately, and Duchamp agreed, as long as someone else would do all the work. [1] Johns took on the job of creating the set, consisting of seven clear plastic boxes silkscreened with motifs from The Large Glass . Several of these stood on the stage, while others hung from the rafters. Composer David Berman was enlisted to create the score, titled … for nearly an hour ….

Much has been written about the specific ways this dance responds to The Bride …, and Cunningham himself noted that he placed numerous references to the work in his choreography. In the following, I’d like, instead, to consider how Walkaround Time aligns more generally with principles of Dada visual art and poetry, ideas reflected, of course, in Duchamp’s work and in The Large Glass and, most importantly for this essay, in the poetry of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball.

Poet Lynn Emanuel’s “Blonde Bombshell” meets Café Müller by choreographer Pina Bausch.

By Karen Hildebrand

An elegant light-filled space inside the São Luiz Theater in Lisbon resembles the marble terrace of a palace. A Botticelli style mural fills the wall behind the stage. As I enter, a commemorative plaque catches my eye:

Pina Bausch
Dancou Café Müller
Pela Ultija Vez Em Maio De 2008
No Teatro São Luiz
[trans. Pina Bausch danced Café Muller last time in May 2008 at the São Luiz Theater]

It’s 2017. I’m in Lisbon to attend a literary festival—on vacation from my job in NYC, where I work for Dance Magazine . In a matter of minutes, I will stand on this stage and read my poems—the same stage where the storied choreographer Pina Bausch once performed a dance work I adore. After twenty years of deep engagement with both poetry and dance, it seems I’ve arrived at the literal intersection of my two artistic paths.

By Jocelyn Heath and Joanna Eleftheriou

This essay alternates between Jocelyn’s voice and Joanna’s, beginning with Jocelyn’s and changing after each section break.

I first heard Sappho as an undergrad when Rosanna Warren, our visiting writer, recited a few lines in Ancient Greek for our workshop. I didn’t need to match word with sound to love the insistent, rhythmic press of syllables rising and falling. The fluidity of a waltz with the intensity of a tango. Lines that spoke what I could not yet understand.

Like the odd-numbered beat of the sapphic stanza, 11-11-11-5, I felt at odds with an even-beat, rise-and-fall meter of the world I lived and wrote in. Something felt incomplete, rather like the fragments I would later learn made up our record of Sappho. But something in these ancient rhythms stirred a familiar step, and like Sappho, I knew “I would rather see her lovely step/and the motion of light on her face” than so much else.

By Renée K. Nicholson

It happened well into my thirties, over a decade since I’d last performed, and only a few years from publishing my first full-length collection of poems, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center . I’d said the words thousands of times— En pointe. In French, it means “pointed,” as in, “to make a pointed argument.” It can also mean “cutting edge.” Yet, I’d heard this terminology used by dozens of ballet instructors to describe the action of rising up on the toes in pointe shoes— en pointe —and I’d read it hundreds of times in newsletters and marketing materials from ballet companies and schools all over the world. En pointe . Never once had I stopped to consider whether the term was correct or not; my rudimentary French never prompted me to question it.

I was sitting in Studio Nine at American Ballet Theatre, surrounded by other aspiring ballet teachers, some who had been accomplished dancers, in the cavernous space. We applied, we were accepted, and traveled across the country and across the globe to learn how to translate our experience as ballet dancers into teaching proper technique.  For me, it was easier to get a position teaching ballet than finding one teaching creative writing.

Raymond Lukens, one of the coauthors of the ABT National Training Curriculum and an internationally renowned pedagogue, wasn’t imposing perched on a tall stool at the front of the class. He was often warm and funny. Still, he was intimidating.  He’d traveled to all the major schools, studying the methods of the best ballet teachers in the world.

By Victoria Hudson Hayes

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why, it is love; ^[1]

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, Op. 40, opens with a D struck twelve times for midnight, inviting death to emerge from its grave and dance. ^[2] Its earliest iteration, for orchestra and voice, featured the text of a poem by Dr. Henri Cazalis — Zig zig zig on his violin/The winter wind blows and the night is dark ^[3] — but audiences objected on the grounds that it made them feel weird, so Saint-Saëns replaced the voice with a violin, Franz Liszt transcribed the piece for piano, and pretty soon it was 1929 and Walt Disney’s skeletons were absolutely cranking it all over the cemetery. ^[4]

Danse macabre has since scored figure skating routines, whiskey commercials, and a short scene in the first episode of “What We Do in the Shadows.” You can catch it near the end of Shrek the Third and install it as your vehicle’s horn in Grand Theft Auto Online under the title “Halloween Loop 2.” In 1872, it was an appeal: remember death. Now it’s the quintessential spooky jingle.

but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon’s utmost magic, or stones speak