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Almost three centuries ago, in his youthful "Essay on Criticism," Alexander Pope perceptively observed: "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance." He here supplements the traditional comparisons—which he certainly also knew well—between the sister arts of poetry and painting, and between poetry and music, and he then goes on to praise the "nameless Grace . . . beyond the reach of art" that constitutes the highest achievement in all aesthetic activity. The best practitioners make the difficult look easy, the deviant look normal. Everyone learns to walk and talk; dancers walk, and poets talk, better than the rest of us.
So how come there aren't more dancing poets? The title of Rita Dove's new volume promises a little more than the contents deliver, but one should be grateful for what lies within. Her earlier Grace Notes (1989) showed Dove's interest in those delicacies of thought, feeling, and expression that decoration adds to artistic enterprises. American Smooth continues its author's commitment to integrating the ornamental, the nominally "superfluous," into the weight of serious subject matter. As a kind of epigraph, she quotes two definitions from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (of "American" and "smooth"), before producing her own titular definition: "American Smooth" is "a form of ballroom dancing derived from the traditional Standard dances (e.g., Waltz, Fox Trot, Tango), in which the partners are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and individual expression." Dove is taking (understandable) liberties here, but that's what a creative artist does. As anyone knows who has been put through his or her paces in ballroom instruction, there's only minimal room for improvisation in the waltz and fox-trot, but as with sonnet writing, strict limits sometimes make for innovative, liberating gestures. Dove's take on dancing has consequences for, and parallels in, her poetry.
