Something I Learned from You: Poise is Too Often Like Pose
July 17, 2026
When my kids were little, after they got cleaned up and comfortable for bed, we would sometimes watch music videos or funny clips from movies and talk about them. I joked that these were Rock Appreciation Nights, after the Jack Black bit in School of Rock.
One of the videos on rotation was Paul Simon’s live performance with Ladysmith Black Mambazo of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” from Graceland: The African Concert. I always liked best the voice and movements of Ladysmith founder Joseph Shabalala.
Jump ahead to a couple of years ago. My younger son, now home from college, watched the video with me again for the first time in 15 years. This time I saw, for the first time, that the young man in Ladysmith on the end of the chorus line is hyper-energetic, filled with joy, and dancing in a way not always in synch with his peers. I laughed and told my son that the singer reminded me of myself in high school—gawky, skinny, comic not handsome, watching everyone else but doing your own thing a little too enthusiastically.
My son corrected me and said that that was what made that singer the best one in the line, the most fun to watch and, he implied, the one most emotionally grounded in the music. I have been thinking about that.
In writing and in art there are other things of course—the ability to use process as a tool and to find the main emotional or intellectual line; knowledge of craft that elevates into voice; compression and even restraint when needed—but it is vital to retain that wild, unabashed energy somewhere, unforgotten in the body, and to let yourself experience it wholeheartedly, even before appearing on the stage of the page.
In Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Armstrong’s Trumpet” (tr. from Russian by Albert C. Todd), “[Louis] played to the whole world / the way he loved. […] Great Satchmo plays all bathed in sweat…each wet handkerchief is as heavy / as the crown of art. / Art is very far / from the lady whose name is Pose, / and when it labors / it’s not ashamed of sweat.”
I hope to be a bit better as a writer, thanks to your comment, Julian.
