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”

Subsequently, we added six essays to an online expansion of this feature. Those are:

• Lisa Bellamy: “‘The Dancing’, by Gerald Stern”
• Maya Sonenberg’s “Dada Dance”
• Karen Hildebrand’s “Blinded by Love”
• Jocelyn Heath’s and Joanna Eleftheriou’s “girls/all night long: (re)constructing sappho”
• Renée K. Nicholson’s “Sur Les Pointes”
• Victoria Hudson Hayes’s “why,it is love”

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 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 . . .

When 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 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