[1230] Nude Descending a Staircase

Guest poem sent in by Ivan Krstic <ccikrs1@>

Breaking with Minstrels convention, I'd propose the readers take a look at
Marcel Duchamp's painting, 'Nude Descending a Staircase', before reading
Kennedy's poem.

The painting can be found at:
http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/nude2.jpg
How the two relate is explained after the poem.

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh.
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

	-- X. J. Kennedy

This poem, the first I've read of Kennedy, captures with unique elegance the
seemingly crass sensuality of Duchamp's painting. Marcel Duchamp
(1887-1968), a dadaist and cubist, painted the Nude in trying to capture
continuous motion with overlapping cubist figures. Highly unorthodox at the
time, the painting evoked quite a flurry of emotions at the 1913 famous New
York City's Armory Show.

X.J. Kennedy, faced with the comparably easier task of conveying continued
motion in words, nevertheless had to evade the trap of losing Duchamp's
rough cubist figure overlap in his poem - and succeeded. In line 4, the
short pause between "nothing on" and "nor on her mind", accomplished with a
full-stop between the two sentences instead of a comma, accentuates the
briskly cheerful, worryfree poise of the woman descending the staircase. The
final two lines of the second stanza, possibly my favorite bit of this poem,
evoke a very unusual image: though we don't usually think of air parting as
we walk through it, Kennedy makes the image very accessible; it becomes easy
to imagine air, entranced by the woman just as much as the "spying"
narrator, making way for her to pass.

The last stanza (specifically the last 2 lines) relates very closely to the
painting, alluding to one's almost unconscious expectation for Duchamp's
overlapping figures to collect into a definite shape.

Ivan

Some links:
 X.J. Kennedy home page:
  http://www.xjanddorothymkennedy.com

 More of Kennedy's poetry:
  http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/2003/Feb03/kennedy.htm

 Kennedy, alternative biography:
  http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C000008

 Kennedy, various links:
  http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/poetry/kennedy.htm

 Information about Duchamp's painting, owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
  http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/modern_contemporary/1950-134-59.shtml

 Duchamp information:
  http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/marcelduchamp.html
  http://www.marcelduchamp.net/

 Duchamp, various links:
  http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/duchamp_marcel.html


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1230.html
To subscribe, send a blank mail to <minstrels-subscribe@>.

From: Mark Gresham <mgresham@>

Greetings,

  "...accentuates the briskly cheerful, worryfree poise of the woman 
descending the staircase."

  ...except that the nude in Duchamp's painting is male.  That's an 
interesting aspect about the poem, though most people do assume 
Duchamp's nude is female, so I can't say I blame the poet (and we 
otherwise might not have had this lovely poem, at least in its present 
form).
  There is a musical setting of the poem by Allen Shearer, for six part 
male vocal ensemble.  Originally intended for the King's Singers (who 
decided it too scandalous for their audiences), it found its way to 
performance and a recording by Chanticleer (out of San Francisco). 
It's on their "Out of This World" CD.  See http://www.chanticleer.org 
for more info about them and their CDs.

Cheers,
--
Mark Gresham, composer
mgresham@ http://www.markgresham.com/
Lux Nova Press http://www.luxnova.com/
LNP Retail Webstore http://www.luxnova.com/lnpwebstore/