Billy Elliot of Poems

Ruth has a poem at:

http://ruthie822.blogspot.com/2011/06/poem-argument.html

There is a picture of a barn


The poem starts:


My flesh and blood argue
with my breath...

and continues on to a note of hers on Susan Sontag, who in On Photography writes about Walt Whitman.

Then I wrote as a comment:

Rural barns reminisce about the Civil War,
havens in the storm where Whitman nursed the wounded-
to heal secession between the mind and body:
Souls flying on the light. 

It was very Billy Elliot for me. When I say Billy Elliot, I am referring to the naive and native dancing of Billy before his admission to the School for the Royal Ballet: a mixture of styles emphatic in their desperate desire to break out into consciousness and into the world.

In other words, flesh and blood arguing with breath. And the event is a thrown collage where Sontag and Whitman find a place, and everything begins to meld in my understanding.

My comment is not particularly good, but it definitely is a Billy Elliot stomp. My words often shuffle around like untutored clogs, but sometimes not.

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