Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine

Background In his 1984 Principia Biographica, Leon Edel says that ‘[a] writer of lives is allowed the imagination of form but not of fact’ (13) and that ‘[t]he biographer truly succeeds if a distinct literary form can be found for the particular life’ (17). Music Made Visible radically tests Edel’s statements by experimenting with how poetry’s affordances are capable of representing aspects of character (specifically that of choreographer George Balanchine) in ways that challenge and extend the boundaries of life writing practice. This work continues my scholarly and creative research into how poetry can represent nonfiction subject matter in new and productive ways. Contribution Each poem in the book explores intersections/tensions between factual ‘data’ and the poetic form. The poems, titled from his corpus of choreographed works, combine appropriate choreographical references with time-relevant biographical elements, musical gestures, critical assessments and elements of Balanchine’s life philosophy. Further, these poems employ nuances of poetic language—line, rhythm, metaphor, visual play etc.—in an attempt to represent Balanchine’s life in a manner befitting his unique experience and artistic contribution. Music Made Visible develops the possibilities of the “biographical” poem tradition by highlighting the significance of components of form when it comes to biographical writing. Significance This book was produced as the result of major research undertaken at the New York Public Library Archive and Houghton Library (Harvard) supported by the prestigious Marten Bequest Travel Award and an Australia Council for the Arts development grant. Several poems from the book were published in esteemed literary journals (Cordite, Australian Poetry, Overland) and in Best Australian Poems; two poems were shortlisted for prizes (2015 Montreal Poetry Prize and 2018 UK Aesthetica Creative Writing Award). Poems have also been anthologised/re-published in international publications.