Edwin Denby Books

Blaise Cendrars is often considered the great poet of modernity and metropolitanism, and the opening long poem here, 'Easter In New York', certainly grapples with the present, as the starving, despairing narrator wanders through the Big Apple by night, confronted with prostitutes, beggars, deformed musicians, thieves; stared at with hostility by strangers, afraid of his own shadows. The trash-filled seediness of New York, the tense ethnic melting-pot, the spiritual banality of capitalism (in the form of Banks and skyscrapers), the jostling mechanisation of the mob, the roaring subways are all vividly captured. This is largely achieved by the insertion into Cendrars' famously plain style of unfamiliar or violent words that create a sense of wrenching alienation.

What is bizarre is that Cendrars frames this modern narrative with a monologue addressed to Jesus on Good Friday. At first when he bemoans the lack of spirituality under modern capitalism, his visits to dank libraries to look up famous artistic representations of the Passion , as well as books and hymns, we may feel a conservative impulse.

But the more the poet ruminates on representations - rather than manifestations - of Christ, the more we notice that it is Good Friday, the day Jesus died, all the year round; that there is no redemptive resurrecton in this living hell where even suicide is too expensive.

This again mirrors the language's development. The poem's form is a series of steady, regular, rhymed, Latinate couplets, but as the language, images, sentiments become more violent, despairing, urgent, this form begins to burst until the final hallucinatory denial suggest escape. Some of the verses, such as the narrator accompanying God down a nameless street, His side gashed, the houses filling with blood, the occupants withering with sin, have a Wildean savour (I'm thinking of his stories and prose poems) as if to bridge the gap between the ancient and modern.

There is an excellent introduction, by Jay Bochner, to Cendrars' life and art in this book, and the translations (by a practicising poet, Ron Padgett) have been acclaimed by prestigious worthies like the great John Ashbery, but they seem problematic to me. Padgett's attempt to translate the poems as verse results in many distorting omissions and cmpromises, and reduces Cendrars's methodical rhythms to singsong. It's okay for the likes of me, I have enough French to struggle with the original, but English readers might lose something. In one case he translates the word 'aube', clearly meant in the context as 'alb' (the priest's vestment), as 'dawn', its other meaning, used punningly throughout. This makes me fear for the rest of the text's accuracy.

em.. She asking me " I must be find web of Edwin Denby's report! "....... V.SU : o.....k.....a.......y...... ......anybody help me....

The second long poem in this volume, 'Trans-Siberian Express and little Jeanne of France' is a vast improvement on its derivative predecessor, 'Easter in New York'. We can feel beginning the Cendrars mode in full flow, the extended, rhythmic, almost Whitman-like expansiveness.

The poem details a trip by the poet through Russia on the titular train during the 1905 Russian Revolution and Sino-Russian War. It contrasts his vagrant, poverty-stricken life with the inhuman brutlity of war (a foretaste of the mechanistic infernoes of the 20th century); the forward movement of the train with his development as a poet - the poem is as much about the writing of a poem as an historical travelogue.

Cendrars' modernity is apparent in the poem's rhythms, often simulating the thrilling momentum of a hurtling train, as often breaking off, lurching, rattling. His 'plain' imagistic power is at full steam (horrible pun), as much at ease with awe at travelling through a new, alien country, as disgust with the horrors of war (the mutilated arms of soldiers dance in a passing carriage), and the sadnesses of those lives marginalised by great events, such as the little prostitute of the title.

Although deriving much of its energy from nascent modernity, the poem also traces the connection between science and progress with war, barbarity, apocalypse, the forward thrust of humanity leading only to its destruction. But it is in the detail that life affirms itself, and the closing rejecting, melancholy coda cannot quite dispel the rush of the journey.

Cendrars is poetry's perception of our finishing century....when it was starting, for the first half. He brillantly explored modernism, advertising, planes and boats, the cinema, cars, travel and shrinking distances. His language is like jazz. He could be Kerouac's uncle and Dizzie Gillespy's cousin, he could be the world's most original defender of freedom of expression, a peculiar pagnism of the spoken word, from a smallish swiss writing in French while growing coffee in Brazil. Cant wait to read him in English. That couldn't be bad...or could it?

Don't be buffaloed by Times reviewer: Denby's poems are American treasures, not "quaint" in any way; they are densely wrought, large scale beyond their compact sonnet formats, piquant. & yes, as critic, Denby is among the topmost immortals -- meaning he ranks with Diderot, Shaw, Baudelaire. Poems & dance writings both put forth companionable, no-nonsense, strict, generous urbane attitude: "Dance criticism has two different aspects: one is being made drunk for a second by seeing something happen; the other is expressing lucidly what you saw when you were drunk." And: "Actual events are obscure/ Though the observers appear clear."

Denby's Vocabulary

Frank O'Hara wrote of dancewriter Edwin Denby in his poem 'Edwin's Hand', that he was 'Easy to love, but/difficult to please,he/walks densely as a child/in the midst of spectacular/needs to understand.' A glimpse of Denby the man and the myth peek through in a new book of his prose DANCE WRITINGS AND POETRY, Edited by Robert Cornfield, (Yale University Press, $40 hard, $18 soft). Cornfield notes in an introductory short-bio, that Denby had a background in art history, music, gymnastics, theater and began his career in the 20s as a dancer. This is the only book now in print of Denby's influencial dance articles. For almost thiry years Denby's eye was deftly focused on the evolution of dance in this century.

Denby's ability as a dance interpreter has a dramatic authority, if dated abstractness. His encylopedic knowledge of the history and connotations of every type of dance is always evident in his essays. This spectrum, as presented in the uneven 'Dance Writings', builds as a symposia on the world of dance, invovling complete aspects of academic, physical and aesthetic interrogation. And, to credit his anti-eliteism, his work, even at it most studied, has a conversational lightness. It is obvious that his evaluative powers were distinctive and unique. But you cannot help but wonder why he doesn't employ the economy in his writing that he would expect on the dance stage. Or red flag his own indulgences of style, something that he was obviously fond of doing when critiquing other artists.

Denby's mission was to define the terms of dancewriting and make it vital to the art form. To achieve "disentangling the pretensions of a ballet from it achievements." as he put in the essay 'Dance Criticism'. Often his method of dissection reads as too accurate and overstated, like that of a sharpshooter killing a faun and mounting it on the hood of his car. Denby himself sites a great reason for choreographers to be concise in a review of the first mounting of Balanchine's Apollo where he cites lines by Richard Howard on poetry, that advise, "...Always halve the line so that a rest is heard." But frequently fails to apply the tenet himself.

In his time and now, Denby enjoys a reputation as 'the final word' as a dance-theater historian. He was no doubt given broad licence by his editors at his reviewing posts for The Times Herald and Modern Music, among other publications. More theoretical in approach than descriptive, Denby often veers from dance reporting to his own conceptual impressions and emotional responses. Now, completely detached from the performances, his analysis is comes off as obtuse, sometimes even funny. Take for example a description of Martha Graham's company in her piece 'Chronicle', Denby writes, "Even her so-called angularity springs partly from a feat that the eye will be confused unless every muscle is given a definite job. The eye will be confused. But our bodily sense would not. Our bodily sense needs the rebound from a gesture, the variation of hard and soft muscle, of exact and general." Etc. Etc. Etc. I'll attempt to translate- Graham's pained looks and overwrought extentions detracted from her artistry. Denby gets so carried away with his themes that he can't resist stating the obvious, as in this observation, .."the musician exists not only as an instrument but also as a person." Deep.

Still, there is no doubt that Denby is a journalist with potent instincts. You get the sense that he is engaging in a broad discussion of dance as a vital human condition. In Brad Gooch's biography of O'Hara ('City Poet'), he is described as, "soft spoken, reserved and gentlemanly" and "that sitting next to Denby at the ballet felt like sitting next to a lightning rod."

The poetry section of the book is a curious and frustrating inclusion- intriguing, but decorative. Denby's character peeks through in his poems, with at times, a diarist's intimacy. In an introductory essay titled 'The Thrities', Denby describes his process in interpreting painting academically and emotionally. He speaks of the immediacy of a canvas and its after-image- the lingering affect. This quality can be said of many of his poems. In between frequent casualness, forced imagery and veiled homoerotica, unexpected clarity and lyrcism appear, particularly in his 'Mediterrean Cities' poems, demonstrated hauntingly in the sharp-faceted 'Delos'- Glistens a vivid phallus; marsh-born here before At a palm, cleft-suckled, a god he first came Who hurts and heals unlike love, and whom I fear; Will he return here? quickly we pluck dry flowers The sailor blows his conch; Delos disappears

With all of its faults 'Dance Writing and Poetry' still has great value as a reference for dance students, artists and writers. Read selectively, Denby can render a kinetic reality to the performance and performers with provocative imagery. And the essays about ballet history, neoclassicism, Nijinski and, most pointedly, the Balanchine revolution, remain invaluable contributions.

Lewis Whittington