{"id":174075,"date":"2026-06-17T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T14:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174075"},"modified":"2026-06-16T14:22:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T18:22:53","slug":"making-of-a-poem-hannah-piette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/17\/making-of-a-poem-hannah-piette\/","title":{"rendered":"Making of a Poem: Hannah Piette on \u201cNijinsky Dancing\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Nijinski Dancing<\/em> by Lincoln Kirstein. All photographs courtesy of Hannah Piette.<\/p><\/div>\n

For our series Making of a Poem, we\u2019re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they\u2019ve contributed to our pages. Four poems by Hannah Piette appear in our new Summer issue, no. 256. Here, she dissects \u201cNijinsky Dancing<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was tasked in a drawing class to draw a figure in space. I knew at once where to find the figure\u2014in my giant, golden book <\/span>Nijinsky Dancing<\/span><\/i>. Although we cannot watch videos of Nijinsky dancing, the book<\/span> 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\u2019s writings on dance. In his essay \u201cNotes on Nijinsky Photographs,\u201d he observes Nijinsky\u2019s technique only through photographs and writes that Nijinsky discovered how to control the \u201cvariability\u201d of a face, as his face transforms from role to role. I chose a photograph of him leaping, in the costume of a prince.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was one of my first drawings of a person. I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u201cdisappears completely,\u201d Denby writes, and remains \u201cdetached\u201d from the imaginary characters that take his place, and who exist \u201cindependently of himself, in the objective world.\u201d 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?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What were you listening to \/ reading \/ watching while you were writing this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t stop. Of my unsteady drawing hand, Nijinsky assured me\u2014\u201cI know that jerky handwriting means kindness of heart.\u201d Nijinsky had written down his theories of life, death, and feelings, and I believed every word. \u201cEvery person has \u2018feeling\u2019 but they do not understand what it is,\u201d he writes. \u201cI want to write this book in order to explain what feeling is.\u201d His method of transmitting this theory required a direct syntax\u2014\u201cI write quickly but clearly.\u201d The language produces a disjunctive melody, jumping between emphatic claims\u2014\u201cLove will destroy the need for governing,” \u201cI am not Schopenhauer. I am Nijinsky,” \u201cI can write in a trance, and this trance is called <\/span>wisdom<\/span><\/i>.\u201d They choreograph agony and are sometimes cruel. I felt I was reading my own strange and forbidden thoughts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was also reading Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s poetry alongside Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin’s<\/em> <\/span>Life, Poetry and Madness<\/span><\/i>, Wilhelm Waiblinger\u2019s account of his visits with H\u00f6lderlin. (I wrote the poem \u201cPoetry and Madness,\u201d which also appears in this issue of the <\/span>Review<\/span><\/i>, soon after \u201cNijinsky Dancing.\u201d) Like Nijinsky, H\u00f6lderlin 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 H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s life in that tower, Waiblinger writes, \u201cHe scribbles on any pieces of paper that he can get hold of, covering them with phrases which make no sense.\u201d But those scribbles produce sense, just like the scribbles of Nijinsky, who insisted that even though his letters were \u201cscattered,\u201d his thoughts were not nervous\u2014\u201cThey flow calmly not stormily.\u201d \u201cI am a madman with sense,\u201d Nijinsky writes. Neither artist\u2019s poetry retreats from sense but instead composes a clear and direct involvement with it. In his study <\/span>\u201cThe Language of Schizophrenia: H\u00f6lderlin’s Speech and Poetry<\/a>,\u201d<\/span> Roman Jakobson writes that readings of H\u00f6lderlin are often limited by the prejudice that the \u201cpoetry of a lunatic\u201d can be interpreted only as evidence of \u201clinguistic degeneration.\u201d But the central tension in H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s work, Jakobson writes, is the contradiction between the poet\u2019s difficulty in conversing with other people and his talent for \u201ceffortless, spontaneous and purposeful improvisations.\u201d Although Nijinsky\u2019s 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. \u201cI am a madman who loves mankind,\u201d Nijinsky writes. \u201c<\/span>My madness is my love towards mankind<\/span><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Where did you write this poem? Can you share photos of your workspace, or workspaces?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote the poem in Berlin last summer, where I was studying German. Every morning I would read Nijinsky\u2019s 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\u2019t learn much, but to her I loved to repeat, \u201cIch habe keine Kinder\u201d\u2014I have no children. As soon as I finished reading Nijinsky\u2019s 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\u2019s long-lost twin. Isaac grew up dancing ballet. He is my own private Nijinsky.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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?)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had spent so much time inside the rhythms of Nijinsky\u2019s 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\u2014lineated verse generates the spatial possibilities of flight. I took pleasure in the poem\u2019s leaps. I took pleasure in my attachment to Nijinsky, even though it wasn\u2019t quite to Nijinsky but to myself combined with him, and to the dancing man I wanted to become. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What was the challenge of this particular poem?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The challenge wasn\u2019t in assembling the poem but in the formal predicament that accompanied it. I didn\u2019t want to write a dramatic monologue that imitated or inhabited one discrete speaking voice. What I had encountered in Nijinsky\u2019s 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,<\/span> nor reconstruct a determinate psychological state, but rather would elaborate the formal movement of the photographs\u2014a metamorphosing figure in plastic motion, one whose face could not be pinned down. This week I visited Nijinsky\u2019s grave in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. On the tomb sits a statue of Nijinsky as the puppet Petrushka, in a jester\u2019s hat.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Denby writes that in the photographs, you can recognize Nijinsky\u2019s \u201ccivilian face\u201d only in the role of Petrushka, when \u201che is most heavily made-up.\u201d Nijinsky\u2019s face layered in makeup became an apt figure for the poem I wanted to write\u2014one in which a \u201ccivilian face\u201d could be recognized only through its effacement. H\u00f6lderlin abandoned his name and signed his poems with a new one, Scardanelli. He was attempting, as Jakobson writes, to \u201celiminate his \u2018I\u2019 from conversations,\u201d and from his writing. I didn\u2019t forgo the word <\/span>I<\/span><\/i>. But by choosing the name Nijinsky, I was working to eliminate my \u201cI\u201d by performing a figure who, like the poet, was always changing costumes\u2014\u201cI like to change I don\u2019t like to look the same.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hannah Piette is the author of the chapbook<\/em> Screen Memory and an assistant editor of <\/em>The Yale Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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