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Thread: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

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    Featured Member Tourdefranzia's Avatar
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    Default Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    Dancing

    Margaret Atwood, 1939





    The world is full of women
    who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
    if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
    Get some self-respect
    and a day job.
    Right. And minimum wage,
    and varicose veins, just standing
    in one place for eight hours
    behind a glass counter
    bundled up to the neck, instead of
    naked as a meat sandwich.
    Selling gloves, or something.
    Instead of what I do sell.
    You have to have talent
    to peddle a thing so nebulous
    and without material form.
    Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
    you cut it, but I’ve a choice
    of how, and I’ll take the money.

    I do give value.
    Like preachers, I sell vision,
    like perfume ads, desire
    or its facsimile. Like jokes
    or war, it’s all in the timing.
    I sell men back their worse suspicions:
    that everything’s for sale,
    and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
    a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
    when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
    are still connected.
    Such hatred leaps in them,
    my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
    hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
    and upturned eyes, imploring
    but ready to snap at my ankles,
    I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
    to step on ants. I keep the beat,
    and dance for them because
    they can’t. The music smells like foxes,
    crisp as heated metal
    searing the nostrils
    or humid as August, hazy and languorous
    as a looted city the day after,
    when all the rape’s been done
    already, and the killing,
    and the survivors wander around
    looking for garbage
    to eat, and there’s only a bleak exhaustion.
    Speaking of which, it’s the smiling
    tires me out the most.
    This, and the pretence
    that I can’t hear them.
    And I can’t, because I’m after all
    a foreigner to them.
    The speech here is all warty gutturals,
    obvious as a slab of ham,
    but I come from the province of the gods
    where meanings are lilting and oblique.
    I don’t let on to everyone,
    but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
    My mother was raped by a holy swan.
    You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
    That’s what we tell all the husbands.
    There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

    Not that anyone here
    but you would understand.
    The rest of them would like to watch me
    and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
    as in a clock factory or abattoir.
    Crush out the mystery.
    Wall me up alive
    in my own body.
    They’d like to see through me,
    but nothing is more opaque
    than absolute transparency.
    Look--my feet don’t hit the marble!
    Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
    I hover six inches in the air
    in my blazing swan-egg of light.
    You think I’m not a goddess?
    Try me.
    This is a torch song.
    Touch me and you’ll burn.

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    Default Re: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    Wow that is great! What book is that from? A simple google search mostly came up with a book of short stories call Dancing Girls.

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    Default Re: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    This poem is actually titled 'Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing' and it's from Atwood's book of poetry titled "Morning in the Burned House" (:

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    Featured Member Tourdefranzia's Avatar
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    Default Re: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    Quote Originally Posted by hini View Post
    This poem is actually titled 'Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing' and it's from Atwood's book of poetry titled "Morning in the Burned House" (:
    Thank you! Someone posted this in my Facebook news feed this morning. I thought the members here would enjoy it.

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    Default Re: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    I love Atwood! Was she every a dancer actually? I know very little about her personal life, only that she lives in Canada and likes nature.

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    Senior Member cortana's Avatar
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    Default Re: Dancing, by Margret Atwood 1939

    This is great. I've read a few of Atwood's novels, and now I appreciate her even more!

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