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The Rail chats with the NYPL’s connection between people and film.

Karen Valby, a writer living in Austin, Texas, befriended Lydia Abarca—and five of her fellow DTH members (and friends), Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, and Marcia Sells—and listened as they recounted their incredible time spent at DTH and beyond. The result is The Swans of Harlem, a group biography that tells the story of these pioneering Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood.

To a reader who has followed this author as long as I have, the text seems a culmination of his efforts to date, and I was glad the Rail gave me the opportunity to discuss it with him. We exchanged the following emails, lightly edited, while he was on the West Coast for research.

Near the beginning of his defense of Poetry, Shelley defines the poem as an exemplary social site, which should “constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.” A successful poem should establish a necessary balance of Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Love, and Pleasure.

Collage informs much of the work of the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) whose work is gathered in a galloping and gregarious survey at Magenta Plains.