The Young Ballerinas

grooveamatic

The young ballerinas
Who take over my town
Each summer
(there's a camp at the local college)
Are listless frail things
Who down the long slide to death
Are well on their way
(not unlike the rest of us)
Slinking round the quad
On toothpick legs
Smiling prim and pulled smiles
Toiling at the world's most fleeting
Unrecordable art form;
O young ballerinas
(younger than I ever was)
Don't you feel the sun on your backs
(see the willows by the stream)
Or the bowl of apples on the hotel wall?
I can assure you my thin dears
That those things exist
(are immensely recordable sometimes edible things)
O most untouchable dancing youth
Parading round my summery town
(Death they are dancing for you)

CoffeeHound

it's a darker poem for you, groove, but written fantastically. Inventive.

Why are the young ballerinas such symbols of death? Is the narrator simply jealous of their youth? hmm. hard to say. this poem raises questions. very nice. very very nice.

FinsburyParkCarrots

I liked the earlier draft as well as this. The egotistical attitude of the speaker is fine because in overreaching to make his point - a momento mori for the ballerinas - his voice seems deliberately constructed as unreliable and ironic, and he does appear implicitly to envy the dancers' ability to make that choice at their age between life and death. The speaker, who was never as young as these ballerinas, has long embraced nothingness and despair, and regrets what is perhaps the irresistible pact between youthful beauty and death (that we see in Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, or in the lives of Chatterton or Keats).

I'm not sure the parentheses really work entirely but they do add to the poem's conversational register, which is just right for a piece on such a profound topic.

Being Enlightened

This is a haunting piece, groove. I see a man, looking out his window, seeing the ballerinas back again and just thinking these thoughts. I thought that the idea of their thinness, their unobservant nature, their artform being a dance of death and unrecordable was fantastic. Then, to make mention of the "bowl of apples on the hotel wall" and to state that they are recordable and even edible was awesome! I've read it through a few times and I like it more and more each read.

grooveamatic

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

I liked the earlier draft as well as this. The egotistical attitude of the speaker is fine because in overreaching to make his point - a momento mori for the ballerinas - his voice seems deliberately constructed as unreliable and ironic, and he does appear implicitly to envy the dancers' ability to make that choice at their age between life and death. The speaker, who was never as young as these ballerinas, has long embraced nothingness and despair, and regrets what is perhaps the irresistible pact between youthful beauty and death (that we see in Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, or in the lives of Chatterton or Keats).

I'm not sure the parentheses really work entirely but they do add to the poem's conversational register, which is just right for a piece on such a profound topic.

I think you've truly nailed my speaker here, Fins. Which elates me, because that means I very well nailed the speaker, which I wasn't sure of.

Having seen both drafts, which version of line 11 (the line about the smiles) works best? I originally decided on "smiling the smiles of childhood" almost entirely for it's phonetic qualities. Later I thought that perhaps this line contradicted their "listless and frail" nature and also revealed too much of the speaker: it made him blunt. Was I wrong?

As for the parentheses, I can't seem to stop using them! They've become an inextricable part of my style. I think of them in two ways: often, they function as a comic-relief style Greek chorus, interspersing non-sequiters and obvious absurdities into the body of an otherwise serious poem--forcing a re-evaluation of subject matter and speaker. Which is not so much the case in this poem. Secondly, a tone shift is necessary when reading the parenthetical material--reading it aloud will make this clear. Vocally (or even in one's head) the words sound different; I like the cyclical push-and-pull that this implies, as a lot of my stuff is about the nature of time and mortality. Cycles--the "gyres of history"--or even your run-of-the-mill changing of the seasons--course through everything, are everything, really. So I enjoy the minute subtextual way that this is reflected in the paced, returning sounds of the parentheses. I'm still working on the pacing of them that sounds best.

grooveamatic

Being Enlightened wrote:

This is a haunting piece, groove. I see a man, looking out his window, seeing the ballerinas back again and just thinking these thoughts. I thought that the idea of their thinness, their unobservant nature, their artform being a dance of death and unrecordable was fantastic. Then, to make mention of the "bowl of apples on the hotel wall" and to state that they are recordable and even edible was awesome! I've read it through a few times and I like it more and more each read.

I couldn't be more appreciative of your remarks, BE....thanks so much for reading and thinking about it!!!!

FinsburyParkCarrots

grooveamatic wrote:

Having seen both drafts, which version of line 11 (the line about the smiles) works best? I originally decided on "smiling the smiles of childhood" almost entirely for it's phonetic qualities. Later I thought that perhaps this line contradicted their "listless and frail" nature and also revealed too much of the speaker: it made him blunt. Was I wrong?

I think you were right to change line 11, and I think the ideas of forced smiles and weariness could work if you could bring out further that the former causes the latter.

As for the use of chorus and polyphony, spatial typography would work (though it's hard to represent in vBulletin code).

Cheers,
Richard