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* summer dancing with Alice Fulton

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment
* Jimmy being told they are out of donuts *

* Jimmy being told they are out of donuts *

At the start of summer we started an old movie kick sparked by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.  James Stewart is a champ in it.

Since then, we’ve done more Hitchcock as well as a few others.  The most surprising was Singin’ in the Rain – straightforward joy and spirit (with a few dance montages out of a really bad acid trip!).

* word to your soft shoe *

* word to your soft shoe *

It made me think of me and Ani’s first summer together.  We took a waltz class with her parents.  Evenings of following each other’s moves and learning something new together made summer feel like spring – in spirit at least.

The waltz became a part of our history that summer.

Alice Fulton’s poem below explores some of the history of the waltz – the real history, what it has meant to people, what all moves between people when they dance.

*

The Orthodox Waltz – Alice Fulton

Courtship, the seamless mesh
under taffeta havocs
of hoop skirt, smoke

hoops from his Lucky Strikes
her words jumped through.
Women dancing had the harder part,

she’d heard, because they must
dance backward.
He kept his ear pressed

like a safecracker’s
stethoscope against
her head, kept his

recombinant endearments
tumbling toward a click.
The lachrymose music,

his clasp and lust-
spiel, displaced her
mother’s proverbs.  How nimble

they were, those girls
gliding by on dollies.
What had her mother said

that sounded wise?  Was it
“Women dancing must be agile
as refugees with jewels

tied to their thighs?”

*

Happy dancing!

Jose

* stepping into the river with Charles Simic

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Charles Simic

*who you calling dim?*

*who you calling dim?*

Since I quoted the man last week in regards to the prose poem, I thought I would share some of Charles Simic’s own work in the genre.

In these excerpts from his book The World Doesn’t End you definitely can catch some of that sense of being caught up and driven to rereading a poem in order to continue grasping what the first reading of it had you start to grasp.

This may be an exasperating way of thinking about reading – you not only read but go over what was read to read into it more – but it’s the kind of thing that poetry teaches you to do and the helps the reading of a poem to be at times both illuminating and, well, exasperating.

Simic himself says in one of his notebooks that poetry and philosophy make slow solitary readers.

I know the feeling.  In the same way you can’t step in the same river twice, so you can’t read the same thing the same way twice.  You change each time.

Stepping into the river with Simic, I always leave surprised.  Here’s more:

***

Things were not as black as somebody painted them. There was a pretty child dressed in black and playing with two black apples. It was either a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. Whatever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside its window had been blackened with a heavy and coarse paint brush. It was all very teleological, except when a child stuck out its red tongue.

*

We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. ‘These are dark and evil days,’ the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.

**

Happy sparking!

Jose