X. J. Kennedy Verse-Virtual 2016 September

September 2016

When my earliest poems came out, in the New Yorker, I stuck a fictitious X at the front of my name so as to be told apart from better-known Joe Kennedys, and ever since have been stuck with it. Under this pseudonym I've published two dozen children's books, textbooks including An Introduction to Poetry, 13th Edition (now coauthored with Dana Gioia), translations of Apollinaire's Bestiary and the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, and in the past year a comic novel A Hoarse Half-human Cheer and Fits of Concision: collected poems of six or fewer lines. Dorothy M. Kennedy and I live in Lexington, Massachusetts; we have collaborated on four textbooks, two anthologies for children, and five children.

Nude Descending a Staircase
-after the painting by Marcel Duchamp

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
a gold of lemon, root and rind,
she sifts in sunlight down the stairs
with nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
a constant thresh of thigh on thigh;
her lips imprint the swinging air
that parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
her slow descent like a long cape
and pausing on the final stair,
collects her motions into shape.

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