This Still Moment: Poetry and Dance

The newest volume in the beloved ekphrasis series focuses on dance and poetry through the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest critics

＂I am interested at the moment in recalling to you how it looks when one sees dancing as non-professionals do, in the way you yourselves I suppose look at pictures, at buildings, at political history or at landscapes or at strangers you pass on the street. Or as you read poetry.＂ --Edwin Denby

After starting his career as a dancer with companies and troupes in Germany and Switzerland, Edwin Denby moved to Manhattan, where he formed friendships with prominent members of the New York School, including Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and artists such as Rudy Burckhardt. In his critical writing, he brought his experience as a dancer to the page along with a poet’s sensibility, distinguishing himself as an authority through delicate observation and illustrative prose. This collection of writings highlights Denby’s interdisciplinary scope and range of expression, as well as his sharp, singular voice and empirical sensibility toward all works of art.

This Still Moment pairs Denby’s landmark essays on dance criticism and portraits of major performers, such as Vaslav Nijinsky, with selections of his poetry that are long out of print. The writer and editor Cal Revely-Calder further contextualizes Denby’s life and work in his insightful introduction.

The modernist poet, dancer, and critic Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was born in Tientsin, China, and spent his childhood in Shanghai before moving to Vienna and later Detroit. Initially interested in psychoanalysis, he attended Harvard and the University of Vienna before studying modern dance at the Hellerau-Laxenburg School in Vienna. He performed as a company dancer for several years, returning to the United States in 1936. That same year he wrote Horse Eats Hat in collaboration with Orson Welles, an adaptation of the 1851 French comedy The Italian Straw Hat. He then began his career as a dance critic by writing for Modern Music magazine from 1936 to 1942, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 for his scholarship. He is the author of the poetry collections In Public, In Private (1948), Mediterranean Cities (1956), Snoring in New York (1974), The Complete Poems (1986), and Dance Writings and Poetry (1998).

Cal Revely-Calder is a writer and editor from London. He works on the arts desk at The Telegraph. In 2017, he won the Frieze Writers’ Prize.