Nijinski Dancing by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects “Nijinsky Dancing.”

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure—in my giant, golden book Nijinsky Dancing. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book assembles a photographic record of his motions. I was taking adult-beginner ballet classes and reading the New York School poet and dance critic Edwin Denby’s writings on dance. In his essay “Notes on Nijinsky Photographs,” he observes Nijinsky’s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the “variability” of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince. 

It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn’t get his face right. I kept erasing it and drawing new faces over the half-erased marks. He looked askew, covered in charcoal smudges. It wasn’t the single photograph that was the beginning of this poem, but the shifts between his figures across the photographs and the shifts between his faces and the erased faces I drew. In his roles, Nijinsky “disappears completely,” Denby writes, and remains “detached” from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist “independently of himself, in the objective world.” I wanted to write a poem that would work toward this technique. Was it possible to write a poem in which my face completely disappeared? 

What were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this?

My friend gave me a copy of Nijinsky’s diaries, written in the months before he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to an asylum in 1919. I read the diaries aloud to my friend, and they terrified him. But I couldn’t stop. Of my unsteady drawing hand, Nijinsky assured me—“I know that jerky handwriting means kindness of heart.” Nijinsky had written down his theories of life, death, and feelings, and I believed every word. “Every person has ‘feeling’ but they do not understand what it is,” he writes. “I want to write this book in order to explain what feeling is.” His method of transmitting this theory required a direct syntax—“I write quickly but clearly.” The language produces a disjunctive melody, jumping between emphatic claims—“Love will destroy the need for governing,” “I am not Schopenhauer. I am Nijinsky,” “I can write in a trance, and this trance is called wisdom.” They choreograph agony and are sometimes cruel. I felt I was reading my own strange and forbidden thoughts. 

I was also reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry alongside Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness, Wilhelm Waiblinger’s account of his visits with Hölderlin. (I wrote the poem “Poetry and Madness,” which also appears in this issue of the Review, soon after “Nijinsky Dancing.”) Like Nijinsky, Hölderlin had also been treated in an asylum for acute schizophrenic psychosis, before he was taken into the care of a carpenter whose tower he lived in for thirty-six years. In his observations of Hölderlin’s life in that tower, Waiblinger writes, “He scribbles on any pieces of paper that he can get hold of, covering them with phrases which make no sense.” But those scribbles produce sense, just like the scribbles of Nijinsky, who insisted that even though his letters were “scattered,” his thoughts were not nervous—“They flow calmly not stormily.” “I am a madman with sense,” Nijinsky writes. Neither artist’s poetry retreats from sense but instead composes a clear and direct involvement with it. In his study “The Language of Schizophrenia: Hölderlin’s Speech and Poetry,” Roman Jakobson writes that readings of Hölderlin are often limited by the prejudice that the “poetry of a lunatic” can be interpreted only as evidence of “linguistic degeneration.” But the central tension in Hölderlin’s work, Jakobson writes, is the contradiction between the poet’s difficulty in conversing with other people and his talent for “effortless, spontaneous and purposeful improvisations.” Although Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, wrote that Nijinsky was retreating from those around him and into his diary, his writing produced a spontaneous involvement with the world. He embraced human life with love. “I am a madman who loves mankind,” Nijinsky writes. “My madness is my love towards mankind.”

Where did you write this poem? Can you share photos of your workspace, or workspaces?

I wrote the poem in Berlin last summer, where I was studying German. Every morning I would read Nijinsky’s diaries on the train to German class, which was held in a former Soviet building in Alexanderplatz. From my limber German teacher, Olga, I didn’t learn much, but to her I loved to repeat, “Ich habe keine Kinder”—I have no children. As soon as I finished reading Nijinsky’s diaries, I wrote the poem on the balcony of the apartment I shared with my friend Isaac. We would write alongside each other, and I would read aloud my poems to him as soon as I had written them. Across the city we acted out our ideas for a movie we imagined making, where we would play each other’s long-lost twin. Isaac grew up dancing ballet. He is my own private Nijinsky. 

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

I had spent so much time inside the rhythms of Nijinsky’s prose that by the time I sat down to write the poem, I was in what felt like a hypnotic trance. How would I snap out of it and write a poem of my own? I discovered a new kind of trance, a trance not of hypnosis but of play. To transform the language I had gathered from his diaries, I needed to break out of his repetitive syntax, which was sometimes painful to endure. I remembered why I love poetry—lineated verse generates the spatial possibilities of flight. I took pleasure in the poem’s leaps. I took pleasure in my attachment to Nijinsky, even though it wasn’t quite to Nijinsky but to myself combined with him, and to the dancing man I wanted to become. I didn’t know if he would be angry at me for writing the poem. I am prepared for him to punish me. To his blunt and devastating language of feeling, I had become apprenticed.

What was the challenge of this particular poem? 

The challenge wasn’t in assembling the poem but in the formal predicament that accompanied it. I didn’t want to write a dramatic monologue that imitated or inhabited one discrete speaking voice. What I had encountered in Nijinsky’s diaries was not a speaking voice but a language that performatively undermined the ego and unhooked voice from the body. I set out to write a poem that would perform not a stable persona, nor reconstruct a determinate psychological state, but rather would elaborate the formal movement of the photographs—a metamorphosing figure in plastic motion, one whose face could not be pinned down. This week I visited Nijinsky’s grave in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. On the tomb sits a statue of Nijinsky as the puppet Petrushka, in a jester’s hat. 

Denby writes that in the photographs, you can recognize Nijinsky’s “civilian face” only in the role of Petrushka, when “he is most heavily made-up.” Nijinsky’s face layered in makeup became an apt figure for the poem I wanted to write—one in which a “civilian face” could be recognized only through its effacement. Hölderlin abandoned his name and signed his poems with a new one, Scardanelli. He was attempting, as Jakobson writes, to “eliminate his ‘I’ from conversations,” and from his writing. I didn’t forgo the word I. But by choosing the name Nijinsky, I was working to eliminate my “I” by performing a figure who, like the poet, was always changing costumes—“I like to change I don’t like to look the same.” 

Hannah Piette is the author of the chapbook Screen Memory and an assistant editor of The Yale Review.