Few poems can be tested in your living room, but Elaine Summers's "Private Dance Structures 1" practically demands it. It reads less like a description than a set of directions, and the title nudges us to treat it as a score for movement: a "structure" for a dance whose only performer, judging by the word "Private," is whoever happens to be reading. On the surface it is about paying attention to your own body. Underneath is a quieter idea: we use our bodies constantly without noticing them, and looking at them slowly, without trying to perfect them, can be a kind of dance in itself.
The poem begins with a small paradox. "Put your feet on the floor / do not consider them." Two lines later the instruction flips: "consider your knees." The verb "consider" returns five times and steers the whole poem. It is a curious choice. It isn't "look at" or "feel," but something slower and more deliberate, like weighing an object in your hand. One reading is that the feet are first allowed simply to be a foundation, and attention then travels upward like a torch being moved around a dark room.
What keeps the poem from sounding like a manual is the way its language loosens. "Consider" is formal, almost old-fashioned, but it keeps company with the offhand "place it somewhere" and "touch them any old way." Those phrases are generous in a deliberate way. The poem refuses to say where the foot should go or how the toes should be touched, so there is no wrong answer and no technique to fail at. Then comes the line that changes the atmosphere: "Sigh, bunches of sighs." "Bunches" is a homely, slightly comic word, as if sighs were grapes or flowers you could gather. Read aloud, the line also does what it says. The hissing s sounds in "Sigh" and "sighs" push the breath out of you, so the reader exhales on cue.
The construction is plain but careful. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Lines of different lengths follow the rhythm of someone speaking calmly to you, one step at a time. Punctuation is sparse, and the gaps matter. In "lift one foot off the floor place it somewhere" there is no stop between the two commands, so lifting and placing run together as one motion, while "bend them" gets a comma, a small pause to match. The only full stop in the poem is the very last mark. The ending also uses the line break cleverly: "keep your eye on your left eye and slide / it all the way down the mirror." The word "slide" is left hanging at the end of its line, and "it" glides over the break, so the form itself slips downward.
The last movement is also the strangest. The poem has been moving through parts (feet, knees, toes), then steps back to the "complete self" in "a long mirror," and then narrows sharply to a single left eye. "Keep your eye on your left eye" is a dizzying doubling, an eye watching an eye, and it explains the word "Private." The reader is performer and audience at once, with no one else watching. Then the gaze slides "all the way down the mirror." In a long mirror, that path would end at the reflected feet, which brings us back to the floor where the poem started. This is an inference from the image, but it gives the poem a loop: the dance ends where it began, with the body looked at again, now by someone who has really paid attention to it.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It treats a dance as something anyone can do alone, in ordinary clothes, with no skill required beyond willingness. It also changes what a poem can be. The page is not a finished object to admire but something incomplete until a body completes it, and the reader's sighs, bent knees and sliding gaze become the poem's missing lines.