The Best Slow Dancer by David Wagoner

The Best Slow Dancer By David Wagoner
In this poem, my first impression is a feeling of floating and a feeling of being caught up in a slow motion camera. With the words he uses, I feel as if I am the taking part of the dance ; I immediately identified myself as the girl rather than the “you”. –perhaps because I always take the feminine side of everything almost always. The Title is sort of contradictory at first to me because I always imagined a dancer as fast-moving with expertise but perhaps by reading this poem, those two words , “best slow” are a perfect combination to describe the slow passion undertaking through these “slow” dancing movements. The poem accurately describes the physicality of the dance and by doing this one can transform physically and mentally into the dancer he is describing. Since dancing is all physical, this poem entails physical descriptions of human contact in order to instill the feeling of basically “feeling” the touch of the dance. After the last human contact of the lips, the speaker shifts physicality into contemplation of wanting to tell her something. It all shifts into mind of the boy and how he is not a boy any longer. It is interesting how right after the physical contact of lips with ear that this physical dancing contact is gone between the two. Perhaps it is because, the lips was the aim of the dance and the other human contact was needed in order to get to the pursuable-the lips. Through the lips he can tell his story and that is what he indeed wanted. I also like how the poem has a lot of “s” sounds in order to make the dance slow with lots of hushes and he and her exist with this hushness around them.