Feelings Are Our Facts

In April 1959, the poet Edwin Denby accompanied his younger friend Frank O’Hara to the Bolshoi Ballet performance of Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It was the Russian ballet company’s first tour of the United States, and Denby was reviewing the performance for The Hudson Review. By the late 1950s, his dance writing was recognized as a revelatory, instructive, critical record of American neoclassical ballet and modern dance. O’Hara often attended the ballet with Denby, just as painter Elaine de Kooning had in the 1940s and poets Alice Notley and Jim Carroll would in the 1970s. As O’Hara wrote in the introduction to Denby’s second collection of dance writing, Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets (1965), “He sees and hears more clearly than anyone else I have ever known.” The clarity of Denby’s vision is also the subject of O’Hara’s 1955 poem “To Edwin Denby,” which concludes “And I see in the flashes / what you have clearly said, / that feelings are our facts. / As yet in me unmade.” O’Hara’s reverence for Denby and his poetry—work he described as “modern and intrinsic, sensitive and strong”—was unparalleled.

During that night’s performance, however, Denby’s attention was on what O’Hara might see and hear. Already familiar with the Bolshoi from watching the company perform in Moscow in the late 1920s and disappointed with their opening night performance of Romeo and Juliet, Denby saw a dance style without momentum. O’Hara, though, suddenly burst into tears while watching the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Recalling the scene a decade later—and three years after O’Hara’s death—Denby acknowledged, without judgment, that his experience was different from O’Hara’s: “I thought at the time, ‘what’s Frank thinking about?’” Denby seized the moment to reassess his own perceptions; his review of the Bolshoi program shows a trace of his exposure to O’Hara’s feeling. Though the Russian company’s Swan Lake had “no poignancy,” Denby noted that he “grew to like the individual dancers better and better.” As if seeing through O’Hara’s eyes, he singled out Plisetskaya: “[she] outdid anybody in the world.” Denby’s admiration seemed to emerge as much from the dance itself as from his friend’s experience of it, O’Hara’s feeling becoming a fact of Denby’s egalitarian prose.

This example of collaborative looking—of Denby through O’Hara and, as “To Edwin Denby” confirms, vice versa—brings the two New York School poets, one canonical and one not, into focus together as a way of calling for renewed curiosity about Denby’s poetry, dance writing, and immense interdisciplinary influence. As O’Hara wrote, Denby’s crystalline intellect had a way of illuminating “[t]he ballet, the theatre, painting and poetry, our life accidentally in co-existence,” offering “an equation in which attention equals Life, or is its only evidence.” When Denby died in 1983, three consecutive evenings of tributes at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery and Lincoln Center brought together “as magnificent a mix of the art and dance worlds as ever gathered in New York,” the Ballet Review noted. John Ashbery celebrated Denby as “American poetry’s best-kept secret.” Arlene Croce, who founded Ballet Review “under the sign of Denby,” called his Looking at the Dance (1949) “the most universally admired book of dance criticism in American publishing history.” Speaking to Denby’s generative aura, artist Mimi Gross described how he “shared that mystic sense, the religion of art, and without ever saying it in words could plant it in another person to grow.” The image of “Saint Edwin,” as critic David Vaughan described him in 1965, was even endorsed by the city of New York. A representative of then-Mayor Ed Koch appeared at Denby’s memorial “to say officially as well as personally that New York City recognizes Edwin Denby and feels his loss and joins in remembering and appreciating him.” Denby was “part of the intellectual history of New York,” as Croce wrote, nearly coincident with the city itself. From his loft at 145 W. 21st Street in Chelsea, where he lived for nearly 50 years, Denby intimately accompanied the shaping of 20th-century art.

Born in China in 1903, the son and grandson of diplomats, Denby grew up primarily in Vienna until World War I brought his family back to the United States. After a few fragmented years at Harvard, during which he once gave a reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a hotel in Manchester, Vermont, to earn travel money, Denby moved to New York City “to write poetry instead of staying in college.” He soon returned to Vienna where he met a young woman traveling to the Hellerau-Laxenburg School for dance. She showed Denby the school catalog, which startled him with its modern curricula: “The student will have the experience of time and space.” “[W]hat nonsense is that,” he said, “everybody knows what time and space are!”

Though he was more interested in writing for the theater than in dancing, Denby was curious enough to visit the school, where he enrolled in 1925. He graduated three years later, specializing in a lyric modern style that was a mixture of dance movement and gymnastics. “The idea,” he said, “was a lot of pliancy.” Photographs of Denby performing in Germany with his “brilliant” partner-choreographer Claire Eckstein show his thin, nimble frame in remarkable positions, sometimes tucked into the air in a compact comedic leap, sometimes spread across the stage floor in a dramatically backlit sinewy repose. Dance scholar Karl Toepfer noted that Eckstein “constantly played with Denby’s image by outfitting him in wigs, eccentric makeup, extravagant paddings, and whimsical accessories such as a monocle,” giving his figure a theatrical “comic intensity” that Denby later replicated for his roles in Rudy Burckhardt’s underground films.

Though Denby’s last performances as a dancer were in the early 1930s—the rise of fascism in Germany made him, a gay man and a nontraditional dancer, a potential target—the practice never left him. The poet Bill Berkson wrote that during the 1960s

I remember Edwin breaking off from getting dressed for an evening out and suddenly going into one of his German dance-theater routines, twisting dramatically between bits of furniture in his underwear. As in his dance criticism, he seemed fascinated by whatever transformation any type of movement might make for oneself.

Denby first began writing about dance for Minna Lederman's magazine Modern Music in 1936 and served as the dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune between 1942 and 1945. His writing helped describe and distinguish American dance in an era before New York had a permanent ballet company. After Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet in 1948, Denby became the leading critical voice championing Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography. His writing made the experience of seeing ballet a fizzy, indispensable aesthetic encounter. As he wrote about Igor Stravinsky’s Agon, choreographed by Balanchine, “people came out into the lobby, their eyes bright as if the piece had been champagne. Marcel Duchamp, the painter, said he felt the way he had after the opening of Le Sacre.” Denby regularly published dance criticism through the mid-1960s in publications such as Dance Magazine and Ballet Today as well as in avant-garde magazines such as Evergreen Review and Kulchur. His lived familiarity with the energies of modern dance traditions made him a perceptive, generous critic. Merce Cunningham praised Denby’s “rigorous eye, the wonderful compassion he had for dancing and for the dancers … [that] added to and elevated the event.”

Though Denby’s eye was trained through dance, it was also trained by long, intimate exposure to painting, photography, and film. In 1936, he, photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, and artist Willem de Kooning became the nucleus of what Edith Schloss called New York City’s “loft generation.” Denby met Burckhardt in 1934 in Switzerland while looking for someone to take his passport photo; they became lovers and lived together in Chelsea. De Kooning ended up being their neighbor and brought Denby into constant proximity to his paintings: “Seeing the pictures more or less every day, they slowly became beautiful, and then they stayed beautiful,” Denby said. “I didn’t think of them as painting of the New York School, I thought of them as Bill’s pictures.” Between all-night conversations that spilled between greasy-spoon cafeterias and lofts and into the streets, Denby talked with de Kooning about art. In his extraordinary essay “The Thirties,” Denby recounted “walking at night in Chelsea with Bill during the depression, and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon-light—neon-lights were few then—and I remember the scale in the compositions was too big for me to see it. Luckily I could imagine it.”

Burckhardt also stimulated Denby’s imagination. His photographs framed the city as a living palimpsest of patterns, people, and light. “I learned a lot, maybe all that I know about New York from Rudy Burckhardt’s photographs and movies,” Denby said. “Because I got very interested in them, the way you can study them and know what the texture of light and air is all about. I wanted that in my poetry.” Studying Denby’s poetry, it turns out, is inseparable from studying Burckhardt’s photographs. His first two poetry collections—In Public, In Private (1948) and Mediterranean Cities (1956)—are interspersed with Burckhardt’s photographs, some of which Denby used as visual sources for his poems. These photographs suggest “the shutter of a camera is open forever,” he wrote in “Mid-day Crowd,” allowing the “light and air” that fill street-level city life in Burckhardt’s images to appear in his poems. In fact, references to air and streets recur throughout Denby’s poetry, from the opening sonnet in In Public, In Private—“I myself like the climate of New York / I see it in the air up between the street” (“The Climate”)—to his series of “Later Sonnets,” in which daily momentum rushes readers to “Subway or street, glances smiling / Move close, turn aside, beguiling.” The way lines such as these trace the rapid and sporadic yet elegant dance-like movements that structure urban space is one of the joys of Denby’s poetry. The city’s immense, overlapping scales, as he wrote in “Snoring in New York—An Elegy,” could be hospitable for a gay writer whose “private life” required anonymity and shelter:

Nervously I step among the city crowd
My private life of no interest and allowed
 
Brutality or invisibility
We have for one another and to ourselves
Gossamer-like lifts the transparent city
Its levitating and ephemeral shelves

The simultaneously public and private city of Denby’s poems is also the intellectual and aesthetic backdrop of some of his most eloquent dance writing. In the essay “Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets,” written as a lecture in 1954, Denby advocated for looking “at daily life or at art for the mere pleasure of seeing, without trying to put yourself in it, without meaning to do anything about it.” It is worth quoting from the essay at length to show Denby’s far-reaching structural imagination and descriptively ecstatic prose style:

Daily life is wonderfully full of things to see. Not only people’s movements, but the objects around them, the shape of the rooms they live in, the ornaments architects make around windows and doors, the peculiar ways buildings end in the air, the water tanks, the fantastic differences in their street facades on the first floor. … [I]f you start looking at New York architecture, you will notice not only the sometimes extraordinary delicacy of the window framings, but also the standpipes, the grandiose plaques of granite and marble on the ground floors of office buildings, the windowless side walls, the careful, though senseless, marble ornaments. And then the masses, the way the office and factory buildings pile up together in perspective. And under them the drive of traffic, those brilliantly colored trucks with their fanciful lettering, the violent paint on cars, signs, houses as well as lips. Sunsets turn the red-painted houses in the cross streets to the flush of live rose petals. And the summer sky of New York for that matter is as magnificent as the sky of Venice. Do you see all this?

The comparison of New York to Venice speaks to Denby’s capacious neoclassical rather than strictly avant-garde sensibility. At first glance, his poetry can appear antiquated, even doggedly unexperimental. But the way he allows words, phrases, and lines to “pile up together in perspective,” especially in his “curiously disjointed sonnets,” as David Shapiro describes them, shows the extent to which Denby’s poetry opened new vistas. For instance, the associative, combinatorial method in “The Silence at Night”—which seems to anticipate poems by both Ashbery and O’Hara—turns overheard speech into a mix of Steinian exposed revision in a clash of tones and contexts:

So honey, it’s lucky how we keep throwing away
Honey, it’s lucky how it’s no use anyway
Oh honey, it’s lucky no one knows the way
Listen chum, if there’s that much luck then it don’t pay.
The echoes of a voice in the dark of a street
Roar when the pumping heart, bop, stops for a beat.

Each line hovers just above a sonnet’s traditional measure while manipulating the form’s rhyme scheme into a clunky loop that unwinds in the volta’s elegant syntactical twists. What dance critic Robert Cornfield said about Denby as a critic—“he shows Balanchine’s classicism to be revisionary and his sophistication a revolutionary stance”—is also true of how Denby’s poems reimagine classical forms. As his friend the artist Alex Katz noted, “to Edwin there really wasn’t much difference between old things and new. … His idea that classicism was, in a sense, big and impersonal rather than something constrained and linear was, for me, a very exciting idea.” In other words, to Denby nothing could be more contemporary than the ballet or a sonnet, the form in which the majority of his work was composed. Such an attitude was completely natural to a poet who cited Gertrude Stein and Dante as his favorite writers. (Denby is said to have regularly reread Stanzas in Meditation and always carried a copy of Paradiso in his jacket pocket.)

As his neoclassicism suggests, Denby’s poems are often bound up in concerns about time and temporality, what O’Hara calls his “classical gift for giving, in the present tense.” In “Elegy—The Streets,” for example, one of his longest poems, the word time appears in each of the poem’s first three lines, triggering a set of temporal leaps. Though poets of the past “wandered to a wood grown green / And seeing a day turn grew less depressed,” those poets “long are dead and their woods too are dead— / Like them I walk, but now walk streets instead.” In Denby’s city, “The public streets, like built canals of air” are filled with the choreographic movements of running children, pets, pedestrians, and cars. Readers see the graceful liveliness of “[c]lose-stepping girls” and the “jerky” movements of “men of affairs” as if dancers on a stage. Then, like O’Hara’s poems more than a decade later, “Elegy—The Streets” becomes a “lunch poem”:

The lunch-hour crowd between glittering glass and signs
Calmly displays the fact of passing time:
How the weight changes, now swells now declines,
Carried about for years beyond our prime.

More than physical weight, read “[h]ow the weight changes” as the swelling and declining of the body in a dance phrase, movements arranged by “the fact of passing time” just as the steps of the crowd are arranged by their lunch hour. This weight is about labor, too, as the city becomes the landscape in which the burdened, habitual movements of work are staged daily. Denby certainly has labor in mind in the poem’s final lines, writing that “money thrust us close, and sunder,” a description of how the machinations of capital bring together and break apart the city’s movements. In contrast, “Verse makes less noise and is a human wonder.”           

Though Denby tended to be modest and even self-effacing about his work, acknowledging that “literature as a profession was never a part of my life,” his verse is central to an unexamined lineage of American sonnet writing. Denby introduced to the sonnet, O’Hara argues, “a specifically American spoken diction which has a classical firmness and clarity under his hand.” Vincent Katz noted that Mediterranean Cities shows Denby renovating the sonnet so that “the classic structure provides an inevitability of scale rather than a strict set of limitations.” In his “Later Sonnets,” written in the 1960s in his New York loft and a shack on the dunes outside Provincetown, Massachusetts, landscapes that appear in the poems, Denby added an astounding agility to the form. Embracing more associative musical patterns, loosening his syntax, and cutting the phrase against the line at surprising, abrupt intervals to generate collage-like rhythms, the 40 poems in “Later Sonnets” are an underread masterwork of the New York School. (The untitled sonnets were first published together in Snoring in New York, with an expanded series appearing in Denby’s Collected Poems in 1975.) These poems even address the New York School directly, as in the sonnet that begins “Alex Katz paints his north window,” in which Denby praises “New York School friends, you paint glory / Itself crowding closer further,” and in a poignant elegy for O’Hara in which, reading his dead friend’s poems late at night, Denby is overwhelmed with reverence and sorrow: “One’s own heart eating undestroyed / Complicities of New York speech / Embrace me as I fall asleep.”

O’Hara had been one of Denby’s most devoted readers. Reviewing Mediterranean Cities in Poetry in 1957, O’Hara praised Denby’s earlier work and placed him in a lineage of modern gay poets for whom New York City was an aesthetic crucible. “In Public, In Private,” O’Hara wrote, is “a kind of ‘Poet in New York’ with its acute and painful sensibility, its vigorous ups and downs and stubborn tone.” Like the site-specific sonnets of Mediterranean Cities, “the remarkable city-poem, ‘Elegy—The Streets’” is the type of work that shows “the emergence of the poet’s being from his feelings in ‘the place.’ The poet himself eventually is the place.” Though O’Hara has been dubbed the quintessential “city poet,” Denby was his unacknowledged model. As noted above, even Denby’s dance criticism evinced his adoration for the city, as in a gorgeous portrait of Manhattan written in 1952, after returning from four years abroad, to celebrate his first visit to the New York City Ballet:

I hadn’t expected so intense a pleasure, looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie.

“New York was always heavenly to me,” he said in a 1982 interview, and Denby embraced his absorption in the substance of the city. “At midnight on his sixtieth birthday,” recounts Mimi Gross, “Edwin lay down on Fifth Avenue on Twenty-ninth Street, right in the middle of the avenue, and said, ‘Happy Birthday, New York.’”

In 1963, just as Denby was celebrating that same birthday, his inventiveness as a poet was beginning to influence a new generation of writers. His poems folding city life, art, oblique and direct references to queer male desire, and splashes of media and politics into compressed, prismatic forms gained an avid audience, especially in the underground arts culture on the Lower East Side. The fourth issue of Ted Berrigan’s little magazine C: A Journal of Poetry appeared in September 1963 dedicated entirely to Denby’s work, including poems from his first two books, the long poem “Snoring in New York—An Elegy,” and reprints of O’Hara’s review of Mediterranean Cities as well as his acrostic “Edwin’s Hand.” Though Denby’s sonnets did not directly influence Berrigan’s The Sonnets (1964), Ron Padgett noted that “Ted’s discovery of Edwin’s work confirmed Ted’s interest in working with the sonnet form.” Certainly O’Hara’s claim that Denby “seems to have lifted William Carlos Williams’ famous moratorium on the sonnet” would have read to Berrigan as a wonderfully permissive precedent for his own experiments. When Berrigan gave Alice Notley a copy of Denby’s then-unpublished “Later Sonnets,” it led to a personal and formal breakthrough that resulted in the sonnet sequence that became her first book, 165 Meeting House Lane (1971). Certain poems of Denby’s, she wrote, “I wore as an amulet.” As in this “Later Sonnet,” Denby’s rapid shifts of image and scale around the self created a dense, idiosyncratic music that echoes with Notley’s early work:

These, those, each so different from I
Imagination in and out rushes
Vulture stranger, aswoop the sky
Drunk on champagne in the street we
Throw snowballs, embraced shout for soup
Quarrel, vanish, brilliantly speak
Each as close to death as a dope
From a birthday go to my bed
Which unpresentable is spread

Due in large part to readers such as Berrigan, Padgett, and Notley, Denby’s poetry continued to be treasured and shared by the community of writers associated with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Critic John Gruen’s description of the admiration young artists and poets had for Denby in the 1950s—“Edwin Denby was our private celebrity and intellectual leader”—was equally true in the following decades. In the last 10 years of Denby’s life, his work was published entirely by the now-iconic small presses of the New York School: the libretto Miltie is a Hackie was published by Z Press in 1973, Snoring in New York appeared in 1974 from Angel Hair Books and Adventures in Poetry, followed by his Collected Poems from Full Court Press in 1975. His poems also regularly appeared in Bernadette Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s United Artists magazine, and an “Edwin Denby Issue” of Mag City was published in 1983. Denby reciprocated the interest. He often attended readings at The Poetry Project and, in 1981, edited the one-shot magazine Aerial featuring work by a litany of New York School poets, including Eileen Myles, John Yau, Clark Coolidge, and Maureen Owen. Just as Denby told Anne Waldman that one’s eye could be “refreshed” in seeing the work of Balanchine, Denby’s vision was consistently refreshed by his contact with young avant-garde poets, painters, choreographers, and filmmakers.

In his poem “Grace After a Meal,” Berrigan wrote in homage to Denby, “By his presence he offers us leads, and / his graciousness adds to our courage.” Reading his poems, one finds that Denby’s grace comes as much from his civilized, nuanced joys as from the anguish, the “acute and painful sensibility” O’Hara identified, that gathers on the surface of his work. “Day, night rotate,” he wrote in a “Later Sonnet,” “immensely slowed / All we survivors within float.” Denby struggled with suicidal ideation for many years earlier in his life, describing it as “one of my preoccupations,” and survived—numerous artists and friends did not. That agony never leaves his poetry, from “Elegy—The Streets”—in which he wrote “I hate how rare it is to stay near friends”—to his later works, such as these lines from a sonnet about the painter Franz Kline’s death from heart disease:

No one Franz didn’t like, Elaine said
The flowered casket was loathsome
Who are we sorry for, he’s dead
Between death and us his painting
Stood, we relied daily on it
To keep our hearts on the main thing
Grandeur in a happy world of shit
Walk up his stoop, 14th near 8th
The view stretches as far as death

Denby’s bitterness seems to emerge from memorializing the person, whose death is inevitable and, like the Manhattan “view,” always “as far” as it is near, over their artwork. The seamless shifts between expressions of disgust and care capture the unresolved complexities of grief. Art like Kline’s was one of the ways Denby endured the painful contradictions of living in a “happy world of shit.” Another was by reading poetry, as these lines from a “Later Sonnet” show: “trapped I turn toward friends / Long dead when I found them, poets / Who when I’m crazed give my heart strength / By their tone of voice they do it.” Another “Later Sonnet” offers a subtle, intricate portrait of Denby moving through a moment of unsettling flux:

Disorder, mental, strikes me; I
Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear

Many poets, including Notley, found the ways Denby’s poems portray pain and irresolution immensely instructive. “I learned that one could place personal suffering in a context that might be communal,” she wrote. “[T]his is not the quotidian, it is not autobiography. It is motion and event purified of self and then laid next to self as a different kind of shape.” Denby’s poetry, Notley noted, carries information “about staying alive despite the suffering and shame of being human.” Some of Denby’s most oft-quoted lines, from the poem “Ciampino - Envoi” in Mediterranean Cities, speak to negotiating with that suffering, though with his characteristic wit: “For with regret I leave the lovely world men made / Despite their bad character, their art is mild.” As in the poem about Kline where “Between death and us his painting / Stood, we relied daily on it,” the mildness of art, Saint Edwin suggests, is a kind of mercy. We “[q]uarrel, vanish, brilliantly speak,” he wrote, all of which is a great pleasure.

Denby’s own death—he died by suicide on July 12, 1983, after a period of declining health—deeply unsettled the community of poets already grieving the loss of Ted Berrigan, who died on July 4 that year. The proximity of their passing was a destabilizing event that marked the end of a particular era of the New York School. After all, Denby had been a living aesthetic record of interdisciplinary New York School networks, the sage embodiment of the pleasure, complexity, and magnetism of some of the most exciting developments in 20th century art. Perhaps it is true, as the poet Mary Maxwell wrote, that “the whole idea of ‘New York School’ (of any vintage) is meaningful only relative to the vocation of Edwin Denby.” Other understudied figures, such as V. R. “Bunny” Lang and even Burckhardt, are equally important, but thinking of another writer so revered and so integral across two disciplines—poetry and dance criticism—as Denby is challenging. His collected Dance Writings, edited by Robert Cornfield and William MacKay, and The Complete Poems, edited by Padgett, were both published in 1986. Though copies of the former are easy to come by, the latter, now out of print, is increasingly scarce. Though Denby was listed alongside Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky in Donald Allen’s preface to The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 as a pivotal influence on the new avant-gardes, his innovations as a poet, though far-reaching, remain noticeable only in the margins. It’s possible this is for the best. Denby’s poems have always been hard to find—as Padgett noted, “by the 1960s he had become skittish about having his poetry published at all”—and the limited access to his work should not be equated with a lack of importance. Similar to how O’Hara was memorialized primarily as a museum curator following his death, Denby has more often been remembered as a dance critic than as a poet. “Edwin Denby, Dance Critic, Dies at 80” read the headline of his New York Times obituary. Edwin Denby the poet is still being recovered.

Nearly 50 years after his death, a new edition of Denby’s complete poetry would be a fruitful project. “These are poems to live with, to read over a period of time,” Padgett wrote, and the same is true of Denby’s dance writing. Observations such as “Art takes what in life is an accidental pleasure and tries to repeat and prolong it,” from “Against Meaning in Ballet,” and “Watching the shape of a movement is something we all do a great deal of in everyday life,” from “Forms in Motion and in Thought,” are talismanic aesthetic statements across mediums. As Katz confirmed, “In terms of being a painter, I think his Looking at the Dance was much better in aesthetics than most of the stuff written in the fifties on art.”

“Denby’s understated minor key,” as David Shapiro described it, has a history of being richly shared among small, intimate circles of artists, just as it was when his poems were originally composed. Like friends gathering in a loft in the 1930s to see a painter’s new work, “That was the way we got to know Edwin’s poems,” wrote Elaine de Kooning, “one at a time, as he finished them. I kept a copy of each of them and would learn them by heart from reading them over and over.” De Kooning remained one of Denby’s most astute readers, noting that “Edwin’s consciousness, through his poetry, was always of people, of human relationships, of power, no matter what he saw.” One could argue that her recitation of Denby’s poems from memory at his memorial, which startled and moved many in the audience, is the highest aesthetic recognition a poet could imagine.