Poet at the Dance

Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.

So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.

Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.

From Rita Dove:

Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.