In a PBS documentary, from a drawer
the ballerina pulled a love poem
penned by the late choreographer
who told of his "disper,"
a Russian accent transliterated
in a tearoom, blinis
followed by impossible desserts,
but better digested than his "disper,"
disappearing, dispersed in paradisio,
spurned by baby katydids
like inhuman Pavlovas, who
according to a biographer
preferred "some form of oral sex"
to what penetration might do
to her grand jeté.
"A cloud in pants," said Mr. B.
of himself, but clouds do not
eat jelly donuts, nor set
Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze
for dancers like wild horses
of Hans Baldung Grien.
That anist, that composer didn't mean
to throw themselves in a river, either:
It was just "disper."
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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