By Emily Gordon and Robert L. Fouch

Imagine this scene: In a packed ballroom, hundreds of women edge closer to the dance floor, angling for a chance with that handsome fellow with the brilliant smile, the one who moves with such power and grace. Never mind that the man is 85 years old. This is the legend of lindy, the king of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in its heyday, who danced for royalty and has sidestepped old age as he would another couple on the floor. This is Frankie Manning, and as the song begins to swing, the women clamor to be one of his 85 partners—one for each of Manning’s remarkable years.

Swing dancers, musicians and jazz and dance lovers from all over the world will descend upon Roseland Ballroom tomorrow night to celebrate the man who helped create the lindy hop—the dance Life magazine once pronounced “this country’s only native and original dance form,” which has hooked a new generation on partner dancing.

Manning, as any young swing fanatic can tell you, was a member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a celebrated ’30s swing performance troupe that performed at Radio City, the Moulin Rouge, the Royal Albert Hall. Manning also choreographed movies of the era, including jaw-dropping scenes in “Hellzapoppin’” and the Marx Brothers’ “A Day at the Races.”

Perhaps Manning’s most famous legacy, though, is the invention of the air step—or, as it’s now called, the aerial. “You have to remember that those were the beginning days of lindy hop, that everything that was created was ours, was new,” he says. “So a person could never say, ‘That’s wrong.’” When he told Frieda Washington, his partner, “Get on my back, roll over, come down in front of me,” what was her reply? “Just think of this,” he says now, “something you’ve never seen, don’t know how to do it, your partner don’t know how to do it—and she said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ Brave girl, very brave.”

The Savoy in the ’30s was the place to dance. It was New York’s only integrated club—unlike, for instance, Roseland, where Manning and some friends were once turned away at the door. At the Savoy, “They didn’t care what color you were. All they wanted to know is, ‘Can you dance?’ … Clark Gable walked into the place and somebody’d say, ‘Hey, Clark Gable’s in the house!’ ‘Oh yeah, can he dance?’” Manning knew the legends—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie. He played point guard for Cab Calloway’s basketball team.

Today’s swing dancers speak with awe about Manning’s career. “Frankie’s stuff is so out there,” says Janice Wilson, who teaches lindy and won the 1999 Dancesport International lindy hop championship with her partner, Paolo Lanna. “When you see the old films, all of [Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers] were phenomenal dancers, but you have a really hard time looking at anyone else.” But those days would soon end. Manning was drafted, and spent five years fighting in the South Pacific. When he came home to New York, they were playing bebop, and the lindy hop was passé.

So Manning took a job at the post office, where he stayed 30 years. He still danced—“If I wasn’t dancing, I don’t think I would be here”—and when they played rock and roll, “I learned how to do those dances, too.” It seemed that Manning, and the lindy, had had their day. But not quite. In the ’80s, rockabilly and swing bands grew out of a retro subculture. Erin Stevens, co-owner of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association, and her dance partner, Steven Mitchell, set out to track down the finer points and pioneers of lindy hop. They had the old films but, Stevens says, “we didn’t have any names”—African-American dancers and choreographers at the time often weren’t credited.

Finally, they came across Manning’s name, and found him in Corona, Queens. He eventually agreed to teach them, and thus, says Stevens, “we learned the heart, the soul, the feeling, the basics, from Frankie Manning.” It wasn’t long before Manning was coaxed out of his living room and into the studios. For Manning, swing is as much about socializing as it is about dancing, and now, he says, “People want to get back together again, they want to be friends, they want to talk to each other.” And that’s what Manning preaches: affection and respect. “A lot of times if I get a class of beginners … I say, ‘OK, now you’re going to have to put your arms around the lady.’ For some ungodly reason, they are very reluctant. I say, ‘Fellows, touch the girl, she doesn’t mind. Do you mind, ladies? No. See there?’” He always tells them: “Make sure you treat her as if she’s the queen, and you’re just a jester in her court.”

Given that their teacher has 71 years of dancing experience, his students tend to listen. Manu Smith, webmaster of yehoodi.com, New York’s central swing website, says, “You look at Frankie and you think to yourself, OK, you’re teaching us this step. You might have invented it. When you look at Frankie, he is lindy hop … You feel honored to be corrected on a step by Frankie.” Manning seems to breathe the dance, as another student, Katherine Lewis, puts it. “Instead of counting out the steps the way other teachers do, he just scats. ‘Be-dop-a-oody-ah-be-doby-yonk-ah!’—and you’re like, oh, that’s it! All of a sudden, you feel it in your body.”

For his part, as is obvious from Manning’s gigantic grin when he watches his students, the swing revival has given as much to him as he has given to it. “I see some of these young kids get out on the floor, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re doing, but I see something that I say, ‘Oh, wow. Yeah, I can do something with that.’ … They’re creating also, just like when I was young.” Some of modern lindy hop’s best will be performing at tomorrow’s birthday bash—dancers from Sweden, London, Singapore, California and New York. Manning chose the bands: Grover Mitchell’s Count Basie Orchestra and George Gee and His Make-Believe Ballroom Orchestra—“That’s one of the swingingest bands in the land,” Manning says. His old friend Buster Brown will tap dance. More than 100 couples will dance the Lindy Chorus, a routine Manning choreographed.

Lindy-hop teacher Laura Jeffers is counting on being in the lucky 85. “He has this dance in him. You can watch him and listen to him talk about it, but you can get so much of the dance from just being near him. He is the most goodwilled person I have ever met in my entire life, about people and the world—aside from everything else. It’s like a gift.”

—Published in Newsday: May 25, 1999

Poetry Without Pain: National Poetry Month roundup (Newsday)
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love With Poetry, by Edward Hirsch
How to Read a Poem…And Start a Poetry Circle, by Molly Peacock
A Grain of Poetry: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them Part of Your Life, by Herbert Kohl

Poetry Anthologies After September 11 (Newsday)
Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians
110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, ed. Ulrich Baer
Poems of New York, ed. Elizabeth Schmidt

Speaking From Memory (Newsday)
Handwriting: Poems, by Michael Ondaatje

Above an Abyss (The Nation)
Meadowlands, by Louise Glück
Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, by Jane Kenyon

Pollitt, Poet (The Nation)
The Mind-Body Problem: Poems, by Katha Pollitt

Obituaries:

Ted Hughes (Newsday)
Iris Murdoch (Newsday)

By Emily Gordon

HOW TO READ A POEM: And Fall in Love With Poetry, by Edward Hirsch. Harcourt Brace, 352 pp., $23.

HOW TO READ A POEM…And Start a Poetry Circle, by Molly Peacock. Riverhead, 209 pp., $22.95.

A GRAIN OF POETRY: How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them Part of Your Life, by Herbert Kohl. HarperCollins, 175 pp., $23.

Otherwise sensible people are always going around saying they don’t like poetry. Not “Emily Dickinson perplexes me” or “haikus give me the heebie-jeebies”; nope, they tried it, and it didn’t agree with them. “It’s just not my thing,” they say with inexplicable pride, as though staking a claim for verbal democracy. Often, these are folks who savor words and delight in the pleasures of reading. Yet somehow they can justify dismissing a whole genre of literature, which spans thousands of years and countless phases of human creativity, out of hand. You don’t hear anyone declaring that they’ve never really seen the point of paintings, or “This Gustav Mahler—why doesn’t he just come out and say what he means?” So why is poetry so scary?

For one thing, it’s being taught that way. A generation or two ago, poets were literary figures who would be on the final exam; learning poems, often by heart, was a standard feature of public education all through school. While this hardly guaranteed appreciation, hearing poetry and speaking it aloud repeatedly meant that, for many students of those eras, the words could and would come back to them at unexpected—sometimes desperate or rapturous—moments or even decades later. Accustomed to poems, people worked them into their heads, and because the words themselves were musical and had meaning, the poems stuck there.

These days, on the other hand, the dread Poetry Unit tends to be administered during a few weeks of high school English as a painful but necessary dose, like a vaccination, or presented as an awesomely intricate equation to be broken down with stern, deadly precision. When poetry is snipped from the fabric of basic learning and, hence, daily life, what gets lost is not only the passion of the person who created the thing, but the idea that it can produce passion (or pensive reflection, or sudden epiphany, or sharpened observation) in the reader, too.

Nevertheless, among the cute cameos of public-transportation verse, Shoebox doggerel and, of course, Jewel, there’s the poetry that considerable numbers of people write in private and, in some cases, even publish. The annual “Poet’s Market” adds scores of entries for poetry journals to each new edition; graduate poetry-writing programs are multiplying; spoken-word poetry had a big commercial revival after years of urban-fringe momentum; Dylan (Bob), Morrison and Cobain are in lots of people’s canon; current poet laureate Robert Pinsky—a frequent charismatic presence on radio and quoted even more frequently than Joyce Carol Oates—is something of a rock star himself.

And yet poetry largely remains a public embarrassment, a disagreeable chore, for even the most avid literary enthusiasts—as everything from the threadbare state of most poetry organizations to dwindling NEA grants for poets to the dearth of poems in major magazines vividly attest. Not to mention that assorted cranks make a biennial announcement of the Death of Poetry, to wit: MFA programs are the work of Satan, and the Only Authentic Voices Are Out There on The Mean Streets Outside the Ivory Tower, Man. No wonder, then, that in this last National Poetry Month of the 1900s, writers are attempting to reconcile the steadfast poetic impulse in the human spirit and the icky, panicked feeling it seems to produce in so many.

Toward that end, two poets, Edward Hirsch and Molly Peacock, have published books titled “How to Read a Poem.” Peacock—author of four books of poetry and a memoir—takes the hand-holding route; her aim, as stated in her subtitle, “…and Start a Poetry Circle,” is to coax readers toward feeling comfortable, and then release them into the world. She takes 12 poems by both classic (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Li Ch’ing-chao) and contemporary writers (herself included)—each on a different theme—and discusses them in turn, examining everything from the poet’s likely state of mind to the poem’s formal makeup.

Hirsch’s book, with the less imperative subtitle “And Fall in Love With Poetry,” nonetheless has similar goals; the essays that make up the book are, like Peacock’s, organized around larger ideas: initiations, Polish poets, desolation, form. Instead of addressing one or two poems per chapter, though, Hirsch (who also has four poetry books to his credit) uses numerous excerpts to explain each point, which makes for a denser, more meditative and considerably longer narrative.

Hirsch’s mission reflects that of the poets he most admires, to whom he defers with exuberant conviction: “I am completely taken by the way that Whitman always addresses the reader as an equal, as one who has the same strange throb of life he has, the same pulsing emotions.” Or, quoting Paul Valéry: “A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” Throughout Hirsh’s tour of the rhythms, layers, contradictions, history and personalities of the poetry available to us in English, he turns “the poetic state” inside out, offering it to us carefully and considerately. His critical views are assured and emphatic—he remarks that Christopher Smart “was the least jaded of poets…. I believe he believed everything he said. He would not be dissuaded from saying it, either, though his testimony imperiled him and put him on the far margins of society”—yet he also leads us deliberately enough through them, line by line, that we stay with him all the way to their conclusion.

In short, reading Hirsh’s “How to Read a Poem” is like a very long evening with a learned and perceptive friend who keeps leaping up to his bookshelf for more and better illustrations, and finding ever more connections and revelations. Whereas—to return to the other guidebook of the same name—Peacock’s chumminess comes across as forced. Comparing two poems about fathers, one by Yusef Komunyakaa, the other by Michael Ondaatje, Peacock writes:

“But why am I assuming that these writers are writing about their own fathers? Couldn’t it all be fiction? I make the assumption because of the pure electricity of the currents of emotions in the poems and because poets (even fiction writers who are poets) write poetry because they are pointing to emotional or spiritual or intellectual truths through language—through letters—and not through plot or character development or the course of ongoing prose. Perhaps I am hopelessly over-identified with these poems because of my own father. I feel free to be openly subjective at the same time as I spy the grammatical and musical structures that underpin—or overthrow—my whirligigs of interpretation.”

Twelve such indulgent whirligigs end up being more exhausting than Hirsh’s much lengthier reflections. Still, as a first introduction to the impulses and architecture of poetry, Peacock’s “How to Read a Poem” could be illuminating for fledgling poetry circles, particularly if they use her last chapter (which plugs the National Network of Poetry Circles) as a handbook.

Finally, Herbert Kohl’s “A Grain of Poetry”—which puts the how-to part second—demonstrates brilliantly that it doesn’t always take a poet to teach poetry. Kohl, a “teacher-educator,” writes in a direct style that, while simpler, is no less lyrical than Hirsch’s. “Expectations of what poetry has to sound like or talk about come from old school memories of rhyme and meter,” he writes. “It is easy to avoid or resist freshness in language because it can be so disorienting.” Kohl has an unusual, and affecting, way of stepping around a poem to look at it from every angle; he overturns it for inspection, then picks it up and puts it down next to another one, which then completely changes the look of the first.

He also has a remarkable field of vision. Here’s a sequence of excerpted poets, in a few pages of a single flowing point: George Herbert, Ron Padgett, Robert Creeley, Czeslaw Milosz, Jane Hirshfield, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Juan Delgado, Martin Espada, Sherman Alexie, Charles Simic. There’s nothing faux-inclusive about this lineup; every poem or piece of a poem clicks satisfyingly into the next, and as he reminds us, “It is a mistake to put poets in boxes and cut yourself off from poetic voices that might come from different perspectives and cultures than your own. A poet is not a preacher or a politician.” And Kohl isn’t holding any of these poems at arm’s length—he reaches right in and rearranges them, highlighting words in bold type or shuffling line breaks so that what he’s explaining will be unmistakable.

Kohl also lets poets speak for themselves, including their thoughts on their own work at some length. If Hirsch is entreating us to walk alongside him through endlessly rewarding terrain, Kohl is holding his breath: “Read it, silently at first, then out loud,” he suggests before a poem by Janice Mirikitani. “I’ll save my comments until after you have a chance to enter into the poem.” And elsewhere, he writes: “Poets have the power to merge opposites, imagine the unimaginable, break all of the usual rules of language in the service of their sentiments and dreams, and rethink the ordinary ways in which language serves us.” As Keats used to say, that’s all ye need to know.

—Published in Newsday, April 25, 1999

By Emily Gordon

Dame Iris Murdoch, a novelist whose mastery of the English language was equaled by her confidence in the world of ideas, died Monday in Oxford, England, at the age of 79.

In his recently published book, “Elegy for Iris,” critic John Bayley, her husband of more than four decades, confirmed that she had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the past five years.

Murdoch, who wrote more than 30 books - including the novels “The Sea, the Sea,” which won the 1978 Booker Prize, and “The Green Knight” (1994) - had lost contact with her intellectual faculties, though she and Bayley continued to be, as he wrote, “fused together.”

Murdoch was born in Ireland on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents, and grew up in the suburbs of London. She had a sparkling career as a scholar; educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, she studied for a year with disciples of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein before going on to a lifetime of teaching philosophy at Oxford University. She also produced a legion of highly charged, intricate, sometimes comic novels, as well as poetry and plays. In 1987, Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood for women.

Murdoch’s novels stand apart from anything written during her lifetime, in part because her style developed without sway to literary trends. Her earliest work is informed by existentialism; while working for the UN after World War II, she met Jean-Paul Sartre and the French writer Raymond Queneau, whom she considered an inspiration.

In her books, intensely thoughtful people are wracked with intellectual and moral struggle, which often requires the searchlight of an even greater mind for the relief of some understanding. Her themes are love, freedom, metaphysics and even enchanted mysticism. This often lends her scenarios and her characters a radiant quality that is both recognizable and utterly strange. Yet they cohere, because, as she told the Times of London, “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

As Bayley lovingly describes her, Murdoch was a contented eccentric, unconcerned with conventional standards of female allure or housekeeping; their home in north Oxford was a sea of books, papers and a collection of stones. She refused most editing, even of punctuation, and wrote every book - which she conceived in full before penning a line - in longhand, eschewing even manual typewriters. She and Bayley had no children. She once said, “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

Yet it seems, in both Murdoch’s published interviews and through Bayley’s searing portrait of her both before and after the fog of Alzheimer’s surrounded her, that she had found that fortune in her own life as a writer, scholar and companion. She wrote: “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”

—Published in Newsday, February 9, 1999]]> tag:emdashes.com,2014://2.4044 2013-06-25T08:10:08Z 2019-11-07T19:31:05Z