her back

HOW SIMILE WORKS

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I'm telling her a childhood remini- scence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

Albert Goldbarth

from To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth.
Copyright © 2009 by Albert Goldbarth.
All rights reserved.

desire, the body, and the gaze

"In the years immediately after World War I, several impulses within the German modern dance movement attempted to present the nude body
as a sign of a modern, liberated identity “in the age of mechanical reproduction." Congruent with the appearance of the Nackttanz, or nude dancing, was the discovery, one might say, of modern relations between desire, the body, and the gaze."

Some felt "that to overcome a pervasive fear of the female body one had to gaze at it with the same seriousness that one applied to the contemplation of artworks. [Paul Leppin] argued that eroticism manifests itself most powerfully in conjunction with the expression of intense religious feelings, for ecstasy is always a response to an immanence of the divine. Dance offered the strongest potential for signifying and experiencing ecstasy, but Judeo-Christian dogma had smothered dance in its determination to separate eroticism from great religious feeling. As a result, European dance culture could present nothing more than the feeble, "sweet and decayed" eroticism of the waltz."

Individuality means losing oneself in the formless and the immense without even remembering one's limits.... The time must come which shakes us, which revi- talizes the dormant evil and splendor within us, tremendous powers, doubts, which rumble in our hearts like the thunderstorms of romanticism, oaths, hate, anticipations." [He] implied that serious erotic dance entailed both nudity and rhythmic motions simulating orgasm and sexual intercourse. It was these movements more than any other... that undermined the mechanization of identity imposed on the body by Judeo-Christian dogma and its ambassador, the French-Italian ballet tradition."

Gertrud Leistikow (1885–1948) [was considered] the most tragic and "Dionysian" of all German modern dancers, the figure closest to the primeval concept of dance as an expression of an ecstatic body. [Her] nudity served to expose movements concealed by costume and mask; more important, it revealed the "thousand-fold play of muscles" in the body. Unlike the many prewar female dancers who linked the performance of graceful movements to the signification of an elevating spirituality, Leistikow favored a hard, convulsive, ecstatic, even violent type of movement. The "thousand-fold play of muscles" disclosed by her nudity made her body a radical sign of power and freedom, contradicting traditional inclinations to inscribe female bodily strength in theosophic, exotic, and spiritual terms. Moreover, Leistikow was in her mid-thirties when she had artists document her nudity; it seems quite possible that, because she did not depend on photography to transmit her image, she succeeded in making nudity a sign of modernity without imprisoning that sign within the image of virginal youthfulness pervading female nude dancing in the 1920s."

Gertrud Leistikow had a slender, supple body, but her face lacked charm, elegance, or mystery. She therefore constantly sought to hide her face, partly through suave manipulation of shawls, veils, or masks but also through movements that called attention to the beauty of her body. Her earlier dances tended to project a tragic, melancholy aura, but after she moved to Amsterdam her distinction seemed to lie in her peculiar cultivation of the grotesque. What made Leistikow's dances grotesque was her determination to invest the simplest movements with startling dramatic power, an unsuspected intensity of conflict.

Leistikow's concept of the grotesque was cosmopolitan, so perhaps her grotesque dances constituted a curious evolution of a controlling tragic aesthetic rather than a break with it. Junk suggested that the grotesque dance displayed "more strength than grace" or, "more recently," substi- tuted "the bizarre for the graceful," as manifested through "unusual positions, deformed body structures, and adventurous leaps and gestures" (98). In other words, grotesque dancing did not necessarily imply a comic mood but perhaps made a calculated challenge to aesthetic conventions of "gracefulness" and bodily composure. Brandenburg thought such a challenge led Leistikow into the realms of the demonic and heroic rather than toward any spirit of parody, frivolity, or malicious travesty.

This determination was perhaps most mysteriously evident in Gnossienne (1924), which used as accompaniment Erik Satie's equally simple and haunting piano melody "Gnossienne No. 1" (1889). Here Leistikow stood in a tight-fitting, shimmering gown and faced the audience in a veiled light. She concentrated the dance almost entirely in the hands and arms, which undulated slowly, like waves, horizontally, then vertically, while her face constantly stared straight ahead with Sphinxlike inscrutability (one had to see the dance more than once to make this observation, so strongly did the arms and hands attract focus). After performing a pattern of arm undulations, the dancer took a step forward and turned into profile to repeat the pattern but raised her right leg slightly and held it suspended for the duration of the repetition. Then she turned and faced the audience again and repeated the pattern. The dancer repeated the initial pattern five times, thrice forward and twice in profile. With each repetition, the dancer merely moved forward a step or, while in profile, suggested a step in another direction without actually taking it. The dance conveyed a sense of a body very slowly and hesitantly moving closer to the audience without, in its trancelike state, even seeming aware of the spectators."

[For example, in one dance] A violet spotlight becomes coldly reflected in the pearl ornamentation of the hair. It makes the head of the dancer, with Medusa-like, wide open eyes, perch over the purple shawl which entwines and strangles her throat. The crass red cloth separates head from body, so that the head seems to float in the air, but through constant transformation the little cloth serves the movement of the dance: now it dips and flows like blood, then it throbs and flutters like lightning flashes, then it spreads like an imperial mantel around the shoulders, then it tightened again like a noose around the neck. And the language of the body discloses just as much fear of death as desire for death."

all excerpts from the online book, Empire of Ecstasy, by Karl Toepfer
drawings from here

yellow silk @ 30

thirty years ago today i came home with cartons and cartons of the first issue of my new magazine, yellow silk. cartons and cartons would be piled into my car then unloaded into the middle of my (fortunately large) second bedroom which served as my office. as would become a habit, we threw a fundraiser to pay the printer; harry the baker made a cake that looked like a magazine cover, and bunches of poets came to read their work from the magazine. since the first issue was all women (they responded to a cal for manuscripts more quickly than the guys did), we had the reading at a local women's bar, the long-gone bacchanal. the place has been called britt-marie's for years now, and they've kept the old 'stained glass' B over the door.

a funny thing happened last night. i was reading over the excerpts from the magazine that i had put online long ago, and an amazing thing happened -- i felt really proud. i hadn't read that poetry for years, i guess, and it was like it was all new to me, and i loved it, and i wanted to share it with you, despite the fact that i saw the million typos for the first time too!

so please enjoy some little bits from the 15 years that it lasted.

there are many stories, ask if you want. i just might answer you.

or go see more. Yellow Silk

by the way, please don't order anything on the website. also, to progress from page to page, the easiest way is to start on any given issue. click on any word that is underlined. this will take you to another page with work from the same issue. on that second page, in eensy tiny letters, it will say, 'go to next issue' (or something like that. if there is no underlined word, the 'go to next issue' will be on that table of contents page.

the summer light

from THE LOTOS-EATERS

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown
roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still
waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss
the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

...

Lo! in the middle of
the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out
the bud
With winds upon the branch,
and there

Grows green and broad,
and takes no care,
Sun-steep'd at noon,
and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed;
and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.

Lo! sweeten'd
with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple,
waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days

The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls,
and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

...
How sweet it were,
hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream,
like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other's
whisper'd speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples
on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;

To lend our hearts
and spirits wholly
To the influence of
mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood
and live again in memory,
With those old faces
of our infancy
Heap'd over with
a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust,
shut in an urn of brass!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

the bath, part 4

TEODORO LUNA CONFESSES AFTER YEARS TO HIS BROTHER, ANSELMO THE PRIEST, WHO IS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND, BUT WHO UNDERSTANDS ANYWAY, MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK

I am a slave to the nudity of women.
I do not know with what resolve

I could stand against it,
a naked woman
Asking of me anything.

An unclothed woman is
sometimes other things.
I see her in a dish of green pears.

Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say

Without clothes

Her breasts are the two lions
In front of the New York Public Library,

Do you know that postcard of mine?
In those lions there is something

For which I have in exchange
Only sounds. Only my fingers.

I see her everywhere. She is the lions
And the pears,
those letters of the alphabet

As children we called dirty, the W,
The Y, the small o.

She is absolutely
the wet clothing on the line.
Or, you know, to be more intimate,

May I? The nub, the nose of the pear,
Do you know what I mean?
Those parts of the woman

I will call two Spanish dancer hats,
Or rounder sometimes,
doughboy helmets from the War.

Sometimes they are flat
in the late afternoon
Asleep. Like drawings,

Like a single rock thrown into the lake,
These parts of a woman
an imperfect circling

Gyre of lines moving out,
beyond the water.
They reach me at the shore, Anselmo.

Without fail, they are stronger,
And they have always been
faster than I am.

It’s like watching the lassoing man,
The man with the perfectly circling rope,

Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies,
Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from,

Whoever this man is.
And he is always there.
Everybody knows one.

He always makes his big lasso,
twirling his rope
Around himself and
a woman from the audience

Only I am the woman,
do you understand, Anselmo?
Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman

And me thinking of a woman
Without clothes

Is that man and that rope
And we are riding on separate horses.

Alberto Ríos

from Teodora Luna's Two Kisses. Copyright © 2000 by Alberto Ríos.

are the men who are the capturers, the 'nurturers,' the captured, in fact? in the whole bath series, we have naked women being seen by (presumably) clothed men. i have tried to choose images in which the women are not apparently posing, apparently unaware of being observed. but in fact they are.

i have to admit that i don't exactly know what to make of all of this. when i used to do my magazine i realized that both male and female artists were most likely to feature their nudes female.
i like looking. feel comforted by looking.

so is it sexist? fashionable, yes (at that time, 'bathers' was a de rigour subject), but oppressive too? i just don't know. what do you think? if you are a woman, do you feel you are capturer or captured?
and men -- same question.

the bath, part 3

PLACES TO SWIM

Summer's ambitious project — the beach and its
dark striped rocks,
stone-lined pool at the swim club,

passage where the tide flowed out behind dunes,
left fingers and lips blue,
tea-colored pond of black sticks where kids

jumped off branches of an over-hanging tree,
aqua
 of indoor pool lanes,

the white lines' circling, breaking pattern
interrupted by arms, churns and kicks.

*****

Yellow leaves drift down —
 fish-shaped ovals, flecking slick streets,
light October rain,

almost like swimming, the walk
through wet, late afternoon air.
In town this week, two people found goldfish

balanced in paper cups
in their mailboxes.
Teal blue wool, ten rows

to no- tice the wave reappear

in the cable I'm knitting,
dusk pattern,

 



you bent
over the piano in the kitchen
picking out the lost bars of Satie
(what could sound better?).

Music book left
somewhere — an attic
or with cousins by the lake.

Talvikki Ansel

(how strongly a part of all this was erik satie. how similarly our artists paint the bathers.)

that one, by herself

picture this guy naked. oh-- you'd rather not? that's understandable, and it's also, well, predictable. when are you going to see a guy naked having a picnic?

well, okay, but what about these? they're courtesans, after all. nope. you might see their private bits every now and again, but lying there nude? ain't gonna happen.

until just very recently, you will only see rosy behinds and billowy taa-taas on western women. does this demean us, exalt us, show us as stronger, or weaker? i honestly don't know.

Ueda Akinari

桜さくら散って佳人の夢に入る
sakura zakura chirite kajin no yume ni iru

Cherry blossoms fall
Entering into the dreams
Of lovely women.

Tr. Blake Morgan Young 1

Issa

.ひとりなは我星ならん天の川
hitori na wa waga hoshi naran ama [no] kawa

that one by itself
is my star...
Heaven's River

This haiku refers to a popular belief that each person upon birth is assigned a corresponding star in the heavens.
"Heaven's River" refers to the Milky Way.

year unknown

.蓮の香や昼寝の上を吹巡る
hasu no ka ya hirune no ue wo fuki meguru

over my midday nap
the scent of lotuses
meanders 2