The Beautiful Odette
there's no need to conceal her name but I'm not telling, if this ballerina were American, not Soviet dancer, she would be a household name forever, if Andy Warhol lived a few more years, he saw her in NY or LA tour or PBS program, he would do a lot of block prints on her. For most artists, poets, scholars... anyone wants to learn, or gain, the trick is looking for the good material, the gold mine, the secret cave that stowed treasure troves, the original manuscript, the ancient buried scroll... so to open sesame:D
I do a screen capture prints series to honor this Odette/Odile ballerina. In poetry, the music is in the flow of thought, so the wordsmith razzle-dazzle is not true art, an illusion; dance, the music is in the body movement, the energy. to measure a poem, just translate whole body of the text to colloquial/plain language, so the writer cannot cheat, to deceive by using his dictionary short-cut. to see a dancer, just kill the music and give her a mask, so everything is in her body, movement. often there are just too much noise, people can't focus, they are tricked. Words are not communication tool anymore, become emotion; the body need not follow the music, becomes that music. Often, poets, writers meditating on some feeling of thoughts, honing their lines and words to fit that precise emotion, so even poem composed in native tongue is a form of translation, the 2nd language, same as musicians they have been singing their melody silently for some time when they put on paper; and dancers hearing the same piece music for 500 times, or even more, basically they can hear it in their sleep, some classic ballerinas hear Tchaikovsky since 7yr old to 17 to 27 to 37... to the point that they don't truly hear the music when they perform, and they need not to check their technique since they throw 10 years or more to all the movement and pose... so what they all really do then?
Expression of their Emotion. Their Emotion, their own emotion, not Shakespeare words or lines from the Bible, or the songs, lyrics, or old idioms and cliches, not music composer's feeling and thought anymore, not interpretation of others, but their own. so many dancers still dance in other's music and step their coach's movement, so they don't really let it go, it's still imitation, just as many writers, a lot of them even the big names, you can read 5 lines you know they don't write their own thing, they still follow the books formula they picked up thru MFA or some great ancient writers, even they sound really modern and 'innovative', but they are just stiff in their lines and movement. there's old Chinese saying about writing composition: Read 10,000 volume books, one composes naturally. In the end, one has to give up all that reading so he can write his own.
Poem Examples:
Kiss me, my love, kiss me
Your lips are sweet as wine.
- The Song of Songs, OT
(The greatest poem line that can't be copied)
--- --- ---
Mixing memory and desire
stirring dull roots with spring rain.
- Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
(No academic poets can top this, yet, miles away)
