![]() ![]() Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and Lincoln Center brought together “as magnificent a mix of the art and dance worlds as ever gathered in New York,” the Ballet Review noted. ![]() ![]() As O’Hara wrote, Denby’s crystalline intellect had a way of illuminating “he ballet, the theatre, painting and poetry, our life accidentally in co-existence,” offering “an equation in which attention equals Life, or is its only evidence.” When Denby died in 1983, three consecutive evenings of tributes at St. This example of collaborative looking-of Denby through O’Hara and, as “To Edwin Denby” confirms, vice versa-brings the two New York School poets, one canonical and one not, into focus together as a way of calling for renewed curiosity about Denby’s poetry, dance writing, and immense interdisciplinary influence. Though the Russian company’s Swan Lake had “no poignancy,” Denby noted that he “grew to like the individual dancers better and better.” As if seeing through O’Hara’s eyes, he singled out Plisetskaya: “ outdid anybody in the world.” Denby’s admiration seemed to emerge as much from the dance itself as from his friend’s experience of it, O’Hara’s feeling becoming a fact of Denby’s egalitarian prose. Recalling the scene a decade later-and three years after O’Hara’s death-Denby acknowledged, without judgment, that his experience was different from O’Hara’s: “I thought at the time, ‘what’s Frank thinking about?’” Denby seized the moment to reassess his own perceptions his review of the Bolshoi program shows a trace of his exposure to O’Hara’s feeling. O’Hara, though, suddenly burst into tears while watching the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Already familiar with the Bolshoi from watching the company perform in Moscow in the late 1920s and disappointed with their opening night performance of Romeo and Juliet, Denby saw a dance style without momentum. As yet in me unmade.” O’Hara’s reverence for Denby and his poetry-work he described as “modern and intrinsic, sensitive and strong”-was unparalleled.ĭuring that night’s performance, however, Denby’s attention was on what O’Hara might see and hear. As O’Hara wrote in the introduction to Denby’s second collection of dance writing, Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets (1965), “He sees and hears more clearly than anyone else I have ever known.” The clarity of Denby’s vision is also the subject of O’Hara’s 1955 poem “To Edwin Denby,” which concludes “And I see in the flashes / what you have clearly said, / that feelings are our facts. O’Hara often attended the ballet with Denby, just as painter Elaine de Kooning had in the 1940s and poets Alice Notley and Jim Carroll would in the 1970s. By the late 1950s, his dance writing was recognized as a revelatory, instructive, critical record of American neoclassical ballet and modern dance. ![]() It was the Russian ballet company’s first tour of the United States, and Denby was reviewing the performance for The Hudson Review. I also collect a lot of vintage Italian glass which I primarily source from eBay, Etsy, and travels.In April 1959, the poet Edwin Denby accompanied his younger friend Frank O’Hara to the Bolshoi Ballet performance of Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. I am also a very active bidder on eBay, where I found two new Regina Andrew porcelain flower lamps that I absolutely adore. Facebook Marketplace was also a dear friend, and the algorithm has a knack of serving me exactly what I might be interested in. We approached it with a flexible, “can do” attitude and tried to figure out how we could put very eclectic pieces sourced from everywhere together in a way that worked. We found that the Industry City outlets (Design within Reach, West Elm, and more) in Brooklyn were great, as well as sample sales from stores such as ModShop (where we picked up a custom-made enamel buffet that a customer had rejected upon delivery - I fixed two to three small scratches with a bit of matching nail polish) and France & Son (where we picked up a gorgeous white buffet with slight scratches on top - easily resolved with a strategically placed vase). Our largest challenge was finding furniture to fill our home with, because every retailer had a six-month+ lead time due to the supply chains. I moonlighted as an interior designer at night. Biggest Challenge: 2,000 square feet is a lot to design when you own no furniture, and we did it ourselves while working full-time jobs. ![]()
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