review: Yvonne Rainer's Poems
October 21, 2011
Renaissance woman Yvonne Rainer, seminal choreographer, art filmmaker, and writer, has a first book of poetry. Poems is hot off the Badlands Unlimited press. Kitchen director and scholar Tim Griffin, who wrote the introduction, introduced Rainer at an October 18th Kitchen reading where she read nearly the entire book in a calm cadence. Her dry wit brightened its dead-seriousness. The poems are as matter-of-fact as her dances. This weekend Rainer revives her most famous 1966 dance Trio A, originally a sweet demonstration of her famous (and poetic) NO manifesto.
Rainer published texts about her dances over the years. Poems reflects on them in a simple accessible form (think e. e. Cummings) that's aligned with her stated outreach effort. "Trio A" illuminates the widely performed signature dance. "no ritual here / the weight of the body / is material proof / that air is matter / and mind's married to muscle"
Poems is a handy collection in the tone of Rainer's oeuvre—at once brazen and soft. Like her autobiographical Feelings Are Facts (the title tells all), it is tough-skinned, hints at deep feeling, and dares us to meet its challenge and connect. Poems reveals what's necessary. It's alive and intelligent, like the Mona Lisa's eyes that follow us.
"(forget food stamps)" writes Rainer in "The Words," where the personal and the world's problems share the page. Acknowledging the later, she minimizes the former. If Poems confirms the existence of the suffering artist we hoped was mythical, it also places that in perspective. Nevertheless, she writes the reality of the many struggling. It hits home, even as it is a journalistic narrative about YR—in the kitchen, in the bedroom, at the post office, at Socrates diner, on a European trip. She wrote the poems in the late 1990s during a hiatus between filmmaking and her recent dancemaking.
The "enhanced" e-book is currently a mere $1.99 at iTunes. Ian Cheng is behind it, while Paul Chan designed the physical book. iPad and poetry, particularly Poems with its short lines, go together. The enhanced feature is audio; Rainer reads "Seville" and the darkly funny "RainerO in the Post Office." A color illustration hits the mark as artifact and insight into her choreography. Rainer's torn-out news photo of soccer players celebrating a goal, inspired her 2011 dance Assisted Living: Good Sports 2.
Griffin's introduction gets at the kernel of Poems. Somehow they are not about, but they are "The effort of parsing / memory / into logic" (from "Seville next day").