I wrote this when I first began accompanying ballet classes.Not quite a Haiku but close.


At the barre,
how the curve
Of an arm
Echoed a young girl's smile.
Everything turned out beautifully.



Is anyone aware of poems with ballet as their subject matter?

I enjoyed the image -- quietly joyful -- ass well as the multiple meanings of "turned out."

This is a good question. Ballet has inspired visual artists. How about poets?

Les Sylphides by Louis MacNeice

Life in a day: he took his girl to the ballet;
Being shortsighted himself could hardly see it--
The white skirts in the grey
Glade and the swell of the music
Lifting the white sails.

Calyx upon calyx, canterbury bells in the breeze
The flowers on the left mirror to the flowers on the right
And the naked arms above
The powdered faces moving
Like seaweed in a pool.

Now, he thought, we are floating--ageless, oarless-
Now there is no separation, from now on
You will be wearing white
Satin and a red sash
Under the waltzing trees.

But the music stopped, the dancers took their curtain,
The river had come to a lock--a shuffle of programmes--
And we cannot continue down
Stream unless we are ready
To enter the lock and drop.

So they were married--to be the more together--
And found they were never again so much together,
Divided by the morning tea,
By the evening paper,
By children and tradesmen's bills.

Waking at times in the night she found assurance
In his regular breathing but wondered whether
It was really worth it and where
The river had flowed away
And where were the white flowers.

At Kamin’s Dance Bookshop (from Lunch Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.)
by Frank O'Hara

[Dedicated to Vincent Warren, one of the important loves in O'Hara's life, and a dancer for the New York City Ballet.]


Shade of Fanny Elssler! I dreamt that you passed over
me last night in sleep

was it you who was fast asleep or was it me? sweet shade
shade shade shill spade agony freak
geek you were not nor were you made of ribbons but
of warm moving flesh & tulle

you were twining your left leg around your right as if
your right were me

I’ve never felt so wide awake
I seemed to be wearing tights entwined with your legs
and a big sash over my crotch

and a jewel in my left ear for luck
(to help me balance) and you were pulling me toward
the floor reaching for stars

it seemed to me that I was warm at last
and palpable not just a skein of lust dipped in the
grand appreciation of yours

where are you Fanny Elssler come back!

"Tributes: Celebrating Fifty Years of New York City Ballet," is a handsome coffee table book, published by William Morrow and Company, Inc. in 1998, which contains poems by Robert Lowell, William Meredith, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Koch, Amiri Baraka, Elise Paschen, Nikki Giovanni, and James Merrill.

Does anyone know the title and year of the Kenneth Koch poem about New York City Ballet? Arlene Croce quotes three lines from it in Going to the Dance:

...the blue-white sea
Outside the port-hole: Agon, or Symphony in C.

The Kenneth Koch poem, from 1998, is called "To New York City Ballet" and is from the Tributes book.

Oh dancers of New York, arranged by Balanchine,
You are more beautiful than groves of evergreen!
You have aesthetic distance, like the blue-white sea
Outside the porthole--Agon or Symphony in C!
And how the image lasts, with houselights going on,
Of the prince standing gazing at the disappearing swan!
Is it Odette? Was it Odile? The two are so the same,
But every smile or gesture seems to give away the game.
There's only one who brings this honest beating of the heart:
George Balanchine! Of all the kings of choreographic art,
Great Balanchine, who lifts us, with his dancers
As if there were no stage at all, to tell his stories there.

Odile? In Balanchine? Huh?

Or am I reading too literally?

Poetic license, perhaps.

...Suzanne Farrell, perhaps.

If you are willing to think of novelist Jack Kerouac as a poet:
From his Journals, 1949, after seeing a performance of Ballets Russes at the Met: