It’s a photograph that’s given me my inner picture of Denby, though not one of Burckhardt’s. I think of him by way of the portrait taken by Peter Hujar in 1975, when the poet was 72 years old, and published the following year in Hujar’s book Portraits in Life and Death. Which kind of portrait is Denby’s—in life or in death? In between. Not exactly like Candy Darling on her deathbed in what might be Hujar’s most famous single image—not in the moment of transition. It’s a different kind of in-betweenness. With his eyes closed, rumpled bedsheets and pillows behind him though he does not appear to be laying down—sitting up uncomfortably as if roused by a bad dream from which he has not yet quite awakened, just as his rough-hewn, wrinkled face seems to have just emerged from an unfocused background—he seems to inhabit an otherworldly place, a troubled hypnagogic inscape that is larger than anything we can possibly envision.

The bed where we see Denby must have been in Hujar’s studio, but it reminds me of Edith Schloss’s recollection that “everyone”—all New York’s postwar cultural notables from John Ashbery to Kurt Weill—eventually made their way up the stairs to Denby’s loft at 145 West 21^st Street, where, she says, “Edwin sometimes received in bed, a purring cat under his arm.” Who or what is he receiving in Hujar’s photograph? I also owe to Schloss’s posthumously published memoir The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly—Portraits and Sketches 1942-2011 a view of his “tall, narrow bookcase with rows of works by Greek and Roman historians, playwrights, and poets” as well as “many volumes of Defoe, Proust, and Gertrude Stein; a great deal of poetry from throughout the ages; and some ballet and music reviews. Apart from a Jane Bowles novel, I don’t think I saw many other novels or contemporary English writing.” Oh yes—and the works of Eugène Labiche, the once immensely popular nineteenth-century farceur whose Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie Denby had in 1935 translated for Orson Welles as Horse Eats Hat.

Ron Padgett, however—speaking about a later period in Denby’s life—recalls a different canon:

Edwin kept very few books on his shelf. In fact, his personal possessions in general were few (though more than Gandhi’s!). Katie Schneeman told me that among his few books were Dante’s Commoedia; Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata; Don Quixote (in English); The Faerie Queene; The Poems of Emily Brontë; Apuleius’s L’Asino d’Oro; Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book; Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur; and a Greek-English dictionary. There may have been a couple of others, which he gave to Bill MacKay before he died. Edwin kept only one copy of each of his own books – in a closet!

But as Padgett records in his  Introduction to the 1986 edition of Denby’s Complete Poems, “The book he read the most in his last years was The Divine Comedy (Purgatorio and Paradiso—not Inferno) in Italian.”

Schloss also recalls Denby’s his voice: “sibilant, gurgling; he spoke in a hesitant undertone because of his reserve and the need to think clearly.” “His New Yorkese,” she observed, “did not sound quite natural, but rather put on, and when he used slang words he had learned from the young and the people he liked to meet in diners and bars, they stood out as if in quotes.” This artifice of the colloquial, the collision of tradition-drenched formality with streetwise argot, plays as large a part in Denby’s poetry as it did in his conversation, providing what Cal Revely-Calder calls the “fussiness native to Denby’s style.”

He’d come by that formality honestly. He was born in in 1903 in Tianjian, China, where his father was the American consul—his father’s father had been an ambassador, and an uncle, Secretary of the Navy. (For Denby’s biography, I rely mainly on Padgett’s Introduction to the 1986 edition of The Complete Poems.) In 1908, the father’s diplomatic career took the family to Vienna. That came to an end with the war. His father went into the automobile business, and young Edwin was sent to a New England prep school, and from there went to Harvard, which he left after two years. In 1923 he returned to Vienna, and it was there that he began studying modern dance, and also underwent psychoanalysis with Paul Federn. He joined a dance company in Germany and in the June 1926 issue of Poetry, published three poems, as I’ve mentioned.

Leaving Germany in the fateful year of 1933, Denby remained in Europe for a bit; in Basel, needing a new passport photo, he called on Rudy Burckhardt and began their lifelong friendship, which for much of the time was also a love affair—until, as Schloss reports, Burckhardt “discovered that ‘girls are like kittens, they are cuddlier, softer, and sweeter.’ Edwin stepped back.” In New York from 1935, living with Burckhardt in the 21^st Street loft, he became involved in the worlds of music and theater—writing libretti and translating plays, collaborating not only with Welles but with the likes of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson, and (at Copland’s suggestion) writing dance criticism for the renowned quarterly Modern Music, not to mention the poems that would make up In Public, In Private, which was castigated by Dudley Fitts in the Partisan Review for showing “neither taste, nor ear, nor control.” He quickly became renowned as a dance critic; according to Lincoln Kirstein, his writing in this field could only have been achieved by someone who was both a dancer himself and a poet. His second and last book of poems, Mediterranean Cities, came out in 1956. Apparently it received only a single review, but that was Frank O’Hara’s gorgeous appreciation in Poetry the following year, which also retrospectively acknowledged Denby’s success in his first book in “establishing a specifically American spoken diction which has a classical firmness and clarity under his hand” and recognized in the second one an infusion of Romantic sensibility—“the pervading melancholy which overcomes the poet when he unites with the inanimate”—that finally lends the later work “a kind of Mallerméan lucidity.” Years later, Denby would tell Ann Waldman that, “as a poet, some days one feels like writing severely classic things, and some days one feels like writing shapeless romantic things.”

Finally, The Complete Poems includes some forty “late sonnets,” that is, ones subsequent to Mediterranean Cities, but according to Padgett, Denby’s last two decades were relatively unproductive. In 1983, fearing the onset of dementia, he took an overdose of sleeping pills.

While Denby’s second book of poems was, as its title indicates, a book of cities, it is not the book of streets that the first one was. The scope of vision is wider, more expansive than that. In a poem datelined, simply, Attica—the region around Athens—the poet notices how, “Spaciously outdoors of cafes Greeks put chairs / Set way across a square or a bare road, roomy / As if huddling weren’t the point of architecture”—as if—while in Athens itself, “we reach a flat slum / A desolate vacant lot,” still, “Colonus is seen / Past factories, rising stony from the plain.” Where the crowded but often closed-in character of In Public, In Private, evinced an Expressionist bent toward brief explosions of raw feeling, Mediterranean Cities is the work of poet who smooths nothing over even as he perceives things with greater equanimity; certainly he earns the astonishing final couplet of the sequence, the envoi from Ciampino, Rome’s old airport: “For with regret I leave the lovely world men made / Despite their bad character, their art is mild.”

I don’t want to comment on Denby’s dance criticism because I am not qualified to do so, but I do feel qualified to say that the prose in which that criticism is framed is of a rare excellence (earning Frank O’Hara’s comparison of Denby to Lamb and Hazlitt) that convinces me that its insights into this art of which I know so little must be profound. And I think that planted within the criticism are clues to the aesthetic of the poetry. For instance, what he says about rhythm and form in classical ballet in relation to its music, “the stresses of dynamics, of melody, of harmony, of timbre, of pathos. All these stresses offer their various support to the steps. They are like a floor with various degrees of resilience to dance on. The steps step in some places and not in others. They make a choice of stresses.” O’Hara wrote that Denby’s criticism has “a broad, general applicability, moral as well as esthetic,” and this means, I think, that it is widely applicable to life or what O’Hara calls “society,” and to the other arts and especially poetry. It has to do with the necessity for disequilibrium if a new equilibrium is to be found. In an essay called “Forms in Motion and in Thought,” Denby observed, “In dancing one keeps taking a step and recovering one’s balance. The risk is part of the rhythm. One steps out of and into balance.” And in the imbalance is at least half the pleasure.

This fundamental fact about dancing is also fundamental to Denby’s poetry. What can make it seem odd or difficult, and made it repugnant to a reader such as Fitts, is just how unbalanced he is willing to let the line become before another allows for a new but transitory balance that a third line will undo. It’s like watching a dancer whose steps never predict which direction the following step will take. All the stranger that he typically does this in the form of the sonnet—rhymed or half-rhymed though not metrically regular. No purling pentameters here: Denby’s eccentric rhythms create a festival of surprises, full of starts and stops that nonetheless keep the reader moving inexorably forward, as in the opening lines of his sonnet from Venice:

She opens with the gondola’s floated gloze
Lapping along the marble, the stir of swill
Open to night sky like in tenement hallways
The footfalls, and midstream a bargeman’s lone call;
Sideways leading to her green, like black, like copper
Like eyes, on tide-lifted sewers and façades

Reading that, I want to stop at “floated gloze” and just linger there in wonderment but can’t; the implicit collaging of perceptions and memories (how did that New York tenement with a broken skylight over the hallway get in there?) contains a lurching but unstoppable energy. And the immediacy! Schloss reflected that “Edwin taught me to use the near and not the far for poetry,” but in Mediterranean Cities, Denby brought the most distant histories near, and lent intimacy a rare grandeur. Re-reading these poems now, I realize how much of what they achieve is what I’ve aspired to in my own poetry. It’s strange; although I’ve admired Denby’s poetry since I first read it in the late 1970s, I’ve never thought of him as one of my “influences,” as I think of Mallarmé and Reverdy, Williams and Stevens, Celan, Levertov and Creeley, Spicer and Ashbery…and yet he has been as consequential for me as any of them.

Denby’s Collected Poems were published in 1975, and a Complete Poems appeared in 1986 but has not managed to stay in print. Still available from Yale University Press is Robert Cornfield’s 1998 selection of Dance Writings and Poetry, and as I write this, David Zwirner Books has just issued a smaller but similarly mixed selection under the title, That Still Moment, edited by Cal Revely-Calder—I quoted earlier from his introduction to that collection. To choose one poem as a representative of a life’s work is a miserly task, even with a poet whose oeuvre is so small (about 170 pages) but today, the one I can’t get out of my head is “Segesta”—though apparently it’s not one of the entries from Mediterranean Cities that most struck either Cornfield or Revely-Calder, since it’s not in either of their edited volumes:

Winter’s green bare mountains; over towns, bays
And Sicilian sea. I sit in the ghost stones
Of a theatre; a man’s voice and a boy’s
Sing in turn among the sheepbells’ xylophone;
From a distant slope sounded before a reed pipe
Sweet; a goatherd, yellow eyes and auburn down
Smelling of milk, offers from a goatskin scrip
Greek coppers, speaks smiling of a lamb new born;
Doric tongue, sweet for me as to Theocritus
The boy’s mistrust and trust, the same sky-still air
As then; so slowly desire turns her grace
Across the years, and eases the grief we bear
And its madness to merely a powerful song;
As the munching boy’s trust beside me is strong