[6]

Like a party where everybody acts nice,
it is no fun seeing a dancer dance
smack on his Gebrauchsmusik; he
looks as dramatic doing it as a
man riding an electric camel. The
little faces green from the farewell
parties, how ravishing they looked,
the bodies delicious to watch in their
unconscious young feline assurance.
Civilization is really a great pleasure,
a panacea against absurdity—your
sharpened eye and limberer imag-
ination lead you to discoveries elegant
but annoying, they flew up into the sky.

__

[7]

But annoying, they flew up into the sky
showing him that other persons have been
faced with similar difficulties. The energy
remains latent. The correct soaring
leap is a technical trick any ballet
dancer can learn in ten or fifteen years
if he or she happens to be a genius.
There is a sense of discomfort
that would make this savage detail
interesting. Intelligent dancing vivifies,
and in love we all know how dramatic
such a moment of understanding is.
The method has an air of modesty broken
by the punch of the hyperactive showman.

__

[8]

By the punch of the hyperactive showman
the trick was perfected, the moment of
airy repose on one toe. But a facile
and casual irony doesn't suit the quiet.
Not the imaginative radiance, not
from the central impulses—sex,
war, the South, money—American
writers to be sure very often use
this device. Artists lose their vitality
when they cannot feel around them
an atmosphere of artistic connection.
Even as a comic foil, like a doctor's office
in a Hollywood fantasy, there is a difference
between self-effacement and courtesy.

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[9]

Between self-effacement and courtesy,
I was ready for a new idea, as
full of personal life as an ancient
town on the Mediterranean on a
holiday morning in the bright sun.
It is not the critic's historic function
to have the right opinions, but
to have interesting ones. Dancing
produces few masterpieces and
those that it does are ephemeral.
The dance critic's wits have to be
all the sharper; he has to use
household wrinkles and aesthetic
common sense to help out.

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"The Denby Sonnets" are centos transforming language found in Edwin Denby's dance criticism, collected in his [Dance Writings and Poetry, Robert Cornfield, ed., Yale University Press, 1998].