Poetry and Dance for National Poetry Month
"Movement expresses feeling, while words express thought. Movement feelings cannot be translated into words," Barbara Mettler wrote, in her book The Nature of Dance as a Creative Art Activity. Maybe it is this distinction that draws them into the space of partnership over and over again. Do they each beg to be understood and felt by the other? If you're interested in learning about the relationship between poetry and dance, here are some books to choose from.
That Way and This: Poetry for Creative Dance
by Frances Baldwin and Margaret Whitehead
This anthology of poems was created with the dance educator in mind. Carefully selected poems that elicit movement and mood are presented for different themes and ages along with a beautiful introduction outlining the reasons why poetry can be a valuable springboard for movement education.
The Dance, the Dancer, and the Poem; An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Dance Poems
by Jack Anderson
If you’ve ever been intrigued by the mention of a famous dancer in a poem or the kinetic movement of a poem’s parts, you will appreciate this edition of Dance Perspectives from 1952. Edited by Jack Anderson with drawings by Howard Hussey, it is divided into three parts: poems that describe dance or dancers, poems where the words seem to carry one along a river of movement, and poems where the writer uses dance as a metaphor for a quality of life they are attempting to describe.
Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early 20th-Century Dance
by Terri Mester
In this critical analysis of the roles that dance played for modern writers, Terri Mester lets us experience dance through the eyes of these artists, while guiding us through their poetic expression of the medium ever so gracefully. Her postscript also gives the reader a concise historical summary of this time of cross-medium pollination.
Dance Writings and Poetry
by Edwin Denby
This collection of dance reviews and essays written by the great dance critic, Edwin Denby, begins with 19 pages of his poems. If you’ve been moved by the beginning of Spring weather here in New York City, you might just love his poem "First Warm Days"!
Dance in Poetry: An International Anthology of Poems on Dance
compiled by Alkis Raftis
This labor of love encapsulates his desire to expose the reader to the international and multicultural appreciation for the joy of dance. Arranged alphabetically instead of thematically, the reader also gets to hop in and out of different perspectives and styles as they go.
Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages
by Seeta Chaganti
For those familiar with or intrigued by the Middle Ages, professor Seeta Chaganti will entrance your intellectual curiosity, as she brings us back to a society where dance was so much a part of social life that its very experience was to be expected when encountering text. You will leave this book with a clear understanding of concepts unfamiliar to the modern mind.
Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico
edited by Susan Homar and nibia pastrna santiago
The newest addition to our circulating collection, this book tells the stories behind the development of experimental dance in Puerto Rico. Gleaning different perspectives from several generations of artists, the role of poetic expression is woven throughout but especially in Part IV, entitled “To Inhabit, To Write, To Move.”
