Today’s Poem: Uncredited

The contemporary poet Boris Dralyuk on artists and their artistry

A backview of Hollywood (Caleb George, Wikimedia Commons)

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” It was Yeats, of course, who asked the question, and it is in many ways the fundamental question of art. The question of the artist. The question of what remains of the maker after the act of making.

It’s more or less the question that Boris Dralyuk (b. 1982) asks in his 2021 poem, “Uncredited.” Born in Soviet-era Ukraine, Dralyuk came to America as a child and ended up in the Los Angeles area — the proximate cause of the title of his first collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems (2023). A widely published translator of Eastern European literature, he edited the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2016 to 2022, before heading to his present post, teaching at the University of Tulsa.

In “Uncredited,” Dralyuk imagines the life of a starlet, and the poem sharpens Yeats’s question down to a small needle, taken in the heart. The idea for the poem came to him, Dralyuk has said, while watching reruns of Blake Edwards’s 1958–1961 television detective series, Peter Gunn. In one early scene, the actress Lola Albright — playing the detective’s girlfriend, a nightclub singer named Edie Hart — sings a breathy jazz version of the “How High the Moon,” and Dralyuk was caught by her voice, her beauty, and her career.

A 1959 publicity shot of Lola Albright as Edie Hart in Peter Gunn (Wikimedia Commons)

Or what of her career there was. For “Uncredited,” he blended her biography with that of other actresses who appeared on television from the 1950s through the 1970s — Linda Lawson, Nola Thorp, and all the rest: the ones who didn’t fail and yet never quite broke through. The beautiful, talented women with a lead on a single short-lived television series, a few dozen supporting parts in single episodes of series here and there: “a stray recurring role, a guest appearance / on Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files.”

Looked at in one way, their careers were successful. More so, at any rate, than the Hollywood careers of those whose mediocre talents or awkward circumstances or just plain bad luck didn’t let them reach any heights at all. But looked at in another way, their careers are sad, with just enough success to know that they weren’t actually successful: “a prisoner of reruns / on local stations high up on the dial.”

And what of what they did? That’s the question a poet has to ask. The question of art, and a question, I think, that haunts Boris Dralyuk about himself and his own work. Is the shining moment of Lola Albright performing “How High the Moon” in a 1958 episode of a television show enough? Yes, of course. But . . .

The poem consists of four pentameter quatrains rhymed abab, with the a-rhymes mostly two-syllable slant rhymes (reruns/appearance, in Van Nuys/husband’s lies) and the b-rhymes exact (misty/Christy, afar/are). The inexactness of the b-rhyme in the first stanza, dial/Files, bothered me, till I decided Dralyuk intended it, gesturing to the let’s-ignore-the-terminal-s kind of imprecise rhyme that popular music allows — since the poem ends with the woman singing in a minor nightclub. And “For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe: / Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.”

A minor career is not likely to be Boris Dralyuk’s fate. But we can understand the question. Artist are not murdered by their art. Life — with its aggravations and its pains, its need to walk the dog and pay the bills, its ambition for fame and immortality (without which few turn to art) — continues, after the performance. There’s a sadness there and a glory. A worry and a promise.

---

Uncredited

by Boris Dralyuk

No breakout leads — a prisoner of reruns
on local stations high up on the dial:
a stray recurring role, a guest appearance
on Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files.

Her second act? Pure dullsville in Van Nuys.
Chablis with ice. A Chevy dealership
gone belly up. Her paunchy husband’s lies:
a broken marriage. Then a broken hip.

None of that matters, if you ever catch her
singing “How High the Moon” — silvery, misty —
on that one show . . . She isn’t any match for
the stainless Julie London or June Christy,

but through her gauzy voice, as through a sieve,
spare notes of heaven reach you from afar.
For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe:
Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.

The poet Boris Dralyuk

---