George Balanchine once described dancers as "poets of gesture." With that evocative line in mind for our 19-20 Season, we invited a group of poets to explore the ways in which the stage and the page unite in a series of commissioned poems, including this piece inspired by Lauren Lovette's The Shaded Line, from poet Brenda Shaughnessy.

Brenda Shaughnessy has authored five books of poetry including her most recent, The Octopus Museum. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and served as a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Read our exclusive Q&A with Brenda on the process of writing this poem, below.

What exposure have you had to ballet in the past? If you haven’t attended a ballet before, what did you know about the art form?

Ballet always struck me as such an extreme artform in so many ways–extreme formality and tradition, extreme athleticism and rigor, combining to create the ultimate expression of grace and artistry. Sometime in the 80's in Los Angeles, I was a young teenager in the age of the brand-new MTV, and I saw the film White Nights, which led me to beg my mother to take me to see Mikhail Baryshnikov in Romeo and Juliet at the Shrine Theater. In this way Classical music, theater and dance found its way into my life. 

Beyond later structuring the ballet you saw into a poem — into language — what was your immediate visceral reaction to it?

I was stunned to see a ballet that so overtly and fearlessly critiqued gender roles/norms in ballet/life. I felt an absolute rush of recognition and identification–and astonishment that Georgina Pazcoquin's beautiful dancing could so eloquently and powerfully articulate Lauren Lovette's gender critique in The Shaded Line.  I had never seen a passionate ideology choreographed nor danced with such nuance and pathos. I was electrified! Part of me inwardly shouting "yes, yes!" and part of me wondering, "but *how* are they communicating this so clearly?" 

What was your process for this particular assignment? Was there anything different or surprising about that process?

It was difficult to get my thoughts organized to write a poem line-by-line. If my art form were, say, a mandala or a sculpture it would have been easier–something less linear and more physical than a poem. The dance piece made my thoughts explode, and not in word form–more like fractals or fronds or fireworks. So, piecing together words felt painful, even redundant. Lauren Lovette already articulated it all so perfectly through Pazcoquin and the cast. I didn't want to write a poem like it was a review. It was an uncomfortable process–but it taught me. 

Balanchine described dancers as “poets of gesture.” How does that line resonate with you given this assignment?

I've long puzzled over this phrase. I think it means that poets write truth (emotional or lived or narrative truth) in a form that tries to make words "be" beauty. And that dancers similarly communicate using beauty, embodying beauty, by making the body speak truthfully what needs to be said, and to "be" truth. The gesture is a form native to both poetry and dance—it's a physical action that communicates; it is being and speaking at once. Dancers use the body (and the body uses music) to deliver their truth/beauty spectra, and poets use words (and music carries, as a body carries, those words) to deliver ours.