The Many Ghosts of Pomona
By Christopher Kempf
Featured Art: “Wanderer” by Mateo Galvano
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:
The Nineteenth Century did not discover but
made ripe the Mad Scene, gorgeous
delirium rehearsing at luxuriant but
momentary length the steps, the undeflectable
stages by which each brilliant light
finds itself extinguished.
As one might appreciate here, the cultural scope in “Ulanova at Forty-Six . . . ” is sweeping, encompassing Greek classicism, the nineteenth-century occult, and a Cold War context in which “the Russian / government now has decreed we may see Ulanova,” part of a broader “Cultural Cold War” waged through literature and the arts. The poem witnesses powerfully, therefore, to what might be achieved in integrating balletic and poetic forms, alike, Bidart suggests, in their capacity to mediate between past and present, abstraction and embodiment.
“Ulanova at Forty-Six . . . ” was not Bidart’s first foray into the Russian ballet, nor into Freud. In his astonishing “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” published in The Paris Review in 1981, Bidart channels Nijinsky in dramatic monologue, a mode he had developed in earlier psychological portraits of a necrophiliac sexual murderer (“Herbert White,” from his 1973 Golden State) and an anorexic and obsessive-compulsive woman who died by suicide (“Ellen West,” from his 1977 The Book of the Body).
In “Ulanova at Forty-Six . . . ,” though, Bidart uses the occasion of a 1956 stage production—“filmed one act per / night after an earlier public performance,” he explains—not to plumb disordered interiority but to think outwardly, and to meditate in particular on the embodiment of spatial form in linear time. As in mathematical summation—or in a poem, perhaps—each of Ulanova’s gestures “cuts through these other earlier moments to exist as // a new gesture,” Bidart describes, “but carries with it all the others”; before each landing, then, Ulanova has “stepped through // many ghosts,” an allusion not only to her past positioning but to the spectral Wili thronging the stage. For Bidart, the relationship between space and time instantiates itself formally in this poem in the alternation between lineated stanzas and prose paragraphs; while the former emphasize the sprezzatura-like positioning of the balletic body in space, Bidart’s prose relates Giselle’s tragic plot as it unfolds in time, like any narrative. As I suggest below, Giselle arrives at her fate in much the same way that she arrives in Bidart’s life, thereby altering his own fate as an artist. Rehearsing with great care those gestures and positions through which she moves, Bidart reads Ulanova’s particular genius as the cultivation of an abstract formalism, one which evacuates the Gothic romance—and Romanticism itself—of its characteristic expressionism. As Bidart describes,
Ulanova
executes the classic postures of ecstasy, of
yearning for
union, as if impersonally—
as if the event were not at last
again to touch him [ . . . ].
If her classicism recalls the formal properties of Greek drama, though, Ulanova embodies at the same time the abstraction or “medium specificity” of twentieth-century modernism, her positioning not starkly representative, as when Oedipus appeals to the heavens, but empty and non-referential, a sequence of absolute arrangement, faithful only to itself. Giselle’s movement from Romanticism to modernism, in Ulanova’s hands, is marked in turn like a timeline across her body: “Below the waist Ulanova is a strict classicist,” Bidart writes. “[A]bove the waist she alters the shape of classic motions now slightly, now quite a lot, to specify a nuance of drama.” Likewise, what might have been the Wilis’ frantic sexual frenzy appears instead in the 1956 recording as pure form, as “row upon symmetrical row of pitiless / well-schooled virgins, dressed in white.” “Their rigid geometry mocks // ballet,” Bidart somewhat belabors, “as the abode of Romantic / purity.”
More than an occasion for ekphrastic philosophizing, Ulanova’s Giselle plays a paramount role, as the poem relates, in Bidart’s own coming-of-age as an artist. To be sure, “Ulanova at Forty-Six . . . ” pans widely in its historical and intellectual scope, but the most remarkable aspect of the poem, a kind of poetic Künstlerroman in the nineteenth-century tradition, is its severe—indeed, almost vertiginous—narrowing to the radically personal in its last section, quoted here in its entirety:
Ulanova came to Pomona California in
1957 as light projected on a screen
to make me early in college see what art is.
After the poem’s sweeping nine-page fantasia, the lines possess a staggering immediacy, bold in their declarative simplicity. Bidart’s first encounter with Giselle, though, seems no less spectral perhaps—no less haunted, and haunting—than the play itself, as Ulanova wormholes through space and time to appear in Pomona as a kind of prophetic distillate, an astral projection illuminating for Bidart a theretofore dimly perceived future.
With a slight syntactic inversion, moreover, Bidart allows its final four words to function as the poem’s envoi, addressing the reader with imperative urgency. I did in fact “see what art is” by the time I had finished the poem, and understood for the first time the way a poem can move like a balletic sequence through a series of poses or gestures, each of which awaits its fulfillment in the totality of the work. Those gestures were not discrete, I understood, not isolable, but carried entire histories in their train, so that to invert one’s syntax in the final line, for instance, or to observe with meticulous attention “how keen the pointed foot looks in the air” was to enter a tradition that had preceded and would outlive me. Time and space were in fact inextricable from one another.
If Ulanova’s Giselle serves, that is, as a kind of Freudian primal scene for Bidart, pivotal to his formation as an artist, so would “Ulanova at Forty-Six . . . ” prove utterly ineradicable from my own creative consciousness—I am never not writing it. Three weeks after I first encountered the poem, I left for Ithaca and the MFA.
I was to enter there that world of art and culture that had come to Bidart in Pomona thirty years before I had been born, and was to move through its many ghosts like Giselle among the Wili, born as if through some occult influence toward “what you find is beautiful,” as Bidart describes it, “but had not known before existed.”
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021) and Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017), as well as of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
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