The Art of Gravity: Poems by Jay Rogoff (review)

Jay Rogoff's fourth collection divides neatly into two parts. The first section, consisting of twenty-seven poems, turns numerous poetic variations on dance as an art form, a social matrix, and a metaphor. Rogoff begins the section with a wittily double-riddled narrative poem about "the young woman / you're trying to conceal you're studying studying / with you this Degas . . ." in a museum, a poem that introduces a number of the themes that will resound throughout the section: the relationship of art to life ("so you haul / your attention back to the work / of art from the work // of art"), the fascination of visual artists (and particularly Degas, who appears in at least four poems) with dance, the social contexts of art (the "you" and the "young woman" are not at a performance or in a rehearsal room, but rather in a museum—a public place ostensibly dedicated to something other than dance), dance as a metaphor ("the dance / must go on, her exit, your entrance / this absurd chasing from to room"), and the male gaze ("seeking a crux / and disappearing / into the short / shade of her black skirt"). The section continues with a number of elaborations on these basic themes: there are, of course, poems about rehearsals and performances, as well as ample praise for the dancers themselves, but also poems about dance lessons in a high school gym, about a drunk couple nearly destroying their hosts' chandelier with a high-spirited, "high-stepping" living-room performance, and about a former lover who happened to be a dancer. In a collection this focused, a poet risks monotony, but Rog-off surprises the reader again and again with the variety of his rhetorical approaches, poetic forms, and meditative aims.

For this reader, the poems most successful—or sometimes most interesting, which is not necessarily the same thing—are those that explore the social dimensions of dance or use dance as a metaphorical means to a separate meditative end, while the least successful poems are those depicting (sometimes in an embarrassing, foot-fetishy way) male appreciation of the female form as it is embodied in dance. In "Dance Class," for example, a group of "working girls" study dance with the hope that it might transform their lives:

In the mirror, out the window, church spiresor factory chimneys bless the escapefrom convent, power loom, or street—these whoresof art, these drudges manufacturing dancelike cloth, these nuns, these brides, these gaslight saints.

Yet the catalogue at the end of the poem makes us aware that they have escaped one kind of drudgery, one manufacture of goods, for another. "Valedictorian" presents a speaker remembering "the senior prom" and the titular character's "geometric pace / around and around the gym floor," and we might think that the prom justifies the poem's place in the book, but there's more:

Inside a head mopped with a blond thunder-storm, lightning danced, blazing with calculus,waltzing him into a world of forms. Princetonopened opulent arms to him that fall;he scaled the summit, clambering to the topof the math building. One calculated stepperfect as a pinpoint, and he danced onair, elegant and breathless as an angel.

The semantic relationships between the slant rhymes here—"top" followed by one more "step," or "fall" leading to "angel"—remind me of the intense structural role rhyme played in the poetry of Yeats, and Rogoff's ear ("opened opulent") serves him well.

As for those less successful moments, one might illustrate the point by quoting "Making a Fool of Myself Over Maria Kowroski."

God, I've bought a pair of your satin toe shoes,battered, hardened, stripped of their ribbons, nude pink,    ragged with pointework,

shoes your feet have danced in, where sweat-conductedcontacts sparked to generate light, divine toescrammed in boxes signed by your hand. My hands now    fondling your footsteps,

hear me out, Terpsichore, on my kneebones:drive me crazy, cripple my days...