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?
But what of the movements? Each stressed syllable, a lurch forward, each unstressed a retreat back. His own little unchoreographed dance. I was reminded of him the other day while watching a recording of the dance performance The Furious Sun in Her Mane, archival footage of which was uploaded this last November to YouTube. The performance was choreographed to seven poems by Annie Finch. Originally staged at the Hearst Center for the Performing Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on March 16, 1994, with music by Laura Manning, choreography by Georgia Bonatis, and directed by Finch herself, the 45-minute production features a traditional reading of each of Finch’s poems followed by the poem set to music with one or two women dancing on a sparse performance space often lit only by a single spotlight.
One way of combining dance with poetry is to have the movements reinforce
the narrative of the poem. And there certainly are examples of this in The Furious Sun in Her Mane. One such example is during the poem “Inanna” where the dancers stand motionless except for the rising and falling of their breath while the line “The young goddess is dead, and waiting. The young goddess is dead” is sung at 17:24 in the YouTube video. Another example is when the dancer shakes her head and leaps playfully like a foal during the poem “Rhiannon” at 24:15. It is this poem that gives the performance its name: “A child is ranging, like a young horse; / a child is growing, like a gray mare. / She carries the coastal wind in her teeth / and the furious sun in her mane.” The dances are full of moments like these, such as when Eve grapples with a representation of a snake tied around her waist during the poem “Eve,” but these are not what makes Bonatis’s choreography and Finch’s poems so interesting together. These are the kind of thing that could probably work just as well with any poem set to dance. What makes this piece so special is the way meter and movement are working together.
A winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award in the aughts, Finch has long been recognized as a powerhouse in metrical poetry. Bonatis’s choreography seamlessly highlights Finch’s skill. One way she accomplishes this is by incorporating movement sequences where the most dramatic motions are linked with stressed syllables. This happens often in two of the pieces mentioned above, “Eve” and “Rhiannon.” In “Rhiannon,” each new gambol occurs in conjunction with a stressed syllable. In “Eve,” the dance begins with the dancer seated with her back to the audience. As the poem begins, she stays seated while her arms start to move, flowing during the unstressed syllables and hitting their mark on the stressed syllable.
The choreography is also interesting when it works with the meter and mimics the overall vibes of it. Finch’s recent work with prosody suggests each meter is associated with certain energies. The performance becomes particularly engaging and magical when Bonatis taps into these connections. Though Finch didn’t begin formalizing her thoughts on the matter until this century, the characteristics she describes are still detectable in her earlier work, such as the poems used in The Furious Sun in Her Mane, which later became the basis for her 1997 book, Eve. The most noticeable instance of this is during the “Spider Woman” segment. Though the poem is overall iambic in its meter, “Spider Woman” has enough anapestic substitutions that the willful energy of that meter begins to make its presence felt. The driving staccato of the piano music, coupled with the frenetic whirling of the dancer at the piece’s beginning embodies the powerful, pushing nature of the anapestic rhythm, as described by Finch in her short video “Annie Finch on Meter, Magic, and the Five Directions.” The audience is entranced by the dancer’s movements as she pulls us into the web of the Spider Woman at 8:55.
But what of those moments when the poem stops, but the dance continues, as happens in many of the pieces of The Furious Sun in Her Mane? After the last “a goddess goes down” has been sung in “Inanna,” the chords of the music continue and the dancer twirls with open-hearted power moves. Her movement is in time with the chords. The words of the poem have faded, yet she still seems to be perfectly in sync with its echoes. Was she, like the man at the grad school party was with Shakespearean monologues, writing the rest of the piece with her body? And if so, how? Because of the power of en-rhythming. The dancer (and the choreographer and composer) must have the meter deep inside by then, so that when she hits the pose, both she and the audience are certain that, yes, that is where the accented syllable would be if the poem’s words had continued. What would those words be? The words in the void after the poem has ended. What echoes does The Furious Sun in Her Mane leave in the rhythms of our hearts? This is how both poetry and dance work, when working well, isn’t it? We carry them with us after the fact, altered, en-rhythmed to their beauty and grace.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke is originally from Ohio and lives in Florida. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah. She is the winner of a Sheila-Na-Gig Award for Fiction, and her poetry collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, is available from Kelsay Books. She hosts the Meter Cute Interview series on the Meter&Mayhem YouTube channel.
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