My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet started with a letter. Not a real letter, but an epistolary poem: “To my dear friend Rubin in Bucharest, 1937.” I was in an online Quebec Writers’ Federation workshop taught by Derek Webster toward the beginning of the pandemic, and Derek gave us the prompt to write an epistolary poem. I had never written one before, and something about realizing I had never written an epistolary poem made me also realize that I had never written a poem in which my speaker wasn’t, well, me, or at least some close version of me.
Through the kind of memory magic that makes art feel like art, I remembered that my great-aunt Cynthia once told me that her father may have danced ballet in Romania before he emigrated to Canada between the World Wars. An entirely imagined version of this man (whom I have never met, who died before my mother was born, who died when Cynthia was a teenager) began to form, and his voice came out of me and onto the page more naturally than my own ever had. There are only four epistolary poems in my book (two from “Ernest,” my made-up analogue for my great-grandfather, and two from “Rubin,” his completely fabricated lover), but they are the emotional backbone of the narrative that drives the rest of the poems.
This poem, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Banu, please give this to your son, my new friend Rubin, 1933,” is the last of the epistolary poems in the book, but is the first chronologically, a letter sent from Ernest to his “new friend” just after they meet. I’m very grateful to yolk, Arc, and Geist, for publishing the other three letters over the past few years, and I’m so pleased to bring this one into the world in advance of my book’s release.
Misha Solomon reads from My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet
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Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022) and FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020), and his work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Riddle Fence, and & Change. He completed an MA at Concordia University and a BA at Columbia University in New York City. My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is his debut full-length collection.
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My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is available here on All Lit Up, or from your favourite indie bookstore.
