Accident Dancing is a book of poetry by artist and musician Keaton Henson, detailing his life in fragments, from the extreme to the mundane. Accompanied by evocative pencil illustrations, it is an intimate and unapologetically personal insight into this extremely emotive artist. "Accident Dancing is everything the way I remember it; i.e. fragmented, chaotic and often grammatically incorrect. I hope it feels authentically like a memory if nothing else. It was just something I needed to shake from my head." - Keaton Henson
The only book of its kind, this anthology of poems about dance puts forward several interrelated ideas: that poetry is itself a form that resembles dance, that the difficulties of writing about dance in prose are avoided in poetry, and that dance is a "language" that crosses cultures and centuries. Selections include Leonard Cohen's "Last Dance at the Four Penny," Babette Deutsche's "Ballet School," Li-Po's "Dancing Girl," Howard Nemerov's "The Dancer's Reply," Arthur Rimbaud's "Gibbet Dance," Anne Sexton's "How We Danced," and Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Doing the Twist on Nails." Short profiles of the poets and sources for their poems are also included.
In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange’s ability to blend movement with words when her acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf made its way to Broadway in 1976, eventually winning an Obie Award the following year. But before she found fame as a writer, poet, performer, dancer, and storyteller, she was an untrained student who found her footing in others’ classrooms. Dance We Do is a tribute to those who taught her and her passion for rhythm, movement, and dance. After 20 years of research, writing, and devotion, Ntozake Shange tells her history of Black dance through a series of portraits of the dancers who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her to share the power of the Black body with her audience. Shange celebrates and honors the contributions of the often unrecognized pioneers who continued the path Katherine Dunham paved through the twentieth century. Dance We Do features a stunning photo insert along with personal interviews with Mickey Davidson, Halifu Osumare, Camille Brown, and Dianne McIntyre. In what is now one of her final works, Ntozake Shange welcomes the reader into the world she loved best.
Collects a variety of articles on dance by influential New York journalist and master critic Edwin Denby which he wrote for Dance Magazine, Modern Music journal, and the Herald Tribune
This fascinating book explores the history and initial creation of poetry and rhyming texts. It offers an intimate and detailed explanation of the social and cultural impact of poetry and gives arguments for how poetry itself responds to society. Written by influential scholar, translator and linguist Francis Barton Gummere, this book is a well-written and comprehensive discussion of poetry in its many forms and its relationship to the world.
"In this fascinating book, Donna Stonecipher doubles down on the development of prose poetry and the city. Tactically, her sweeping, complex yet meticulous essay engages Baudelaire's sudden--or is it sudden?--incursion from the constraints of verse into the 'roominess' of prose, 'paragraphs of place, ' while linking 'civic horizontality' and 'corporate verticality.' Tracking possibilities, (m)using everything from architecture to landscape to cookbooks, fl neur-like, her essay exuberantly and expertly gathers together rhizomatic threads of thinkers and poets of the last two centuries. Reads like a song." --Norma Cole "This fascinating exploration of the prose poem begins with a question that most other studies have overlooked or taken for granted: 'What, if anything, do cities and prose poetry have to do with each other?' Donna Stonecipher's touchstone for this question is Charles Baudelaire's prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, but her excavation of the relationship between the 'built environment' of prose poem and city moves backwards to ancient Greece and forwards to the new sentence. As Stonecipher unpacks the 'dialogic space' of the prose poem, her essay moves vertically and horizontally, providing histories of the skyscraper and the aesthetics and ethics of vertical ascension, and much else. As she moves nimbly through large swaths of intellectual, architectural, urban, and aesthetic history, Stonecipher engages debates central to poetics and to modernity itself, taking seriously the challenge of considering how aesthetic forms register, respond to, and transform their built, social, and historical environments. An indispensable and enlightening guide that is also a pleasure to read." --Susan Rosenbaum
Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhood and subjectivity.
