Let's go to Ina from the Netherlands, and she's going to ask us about, I think she's going to ask about XJ Kennedy's Nude Descending a Staircase. >> Can I interrupt her one second? Anthony Risser is the [INAUDIBLE] [CROSSTALK]. >> Anthony, of course. Anthony, hello, Anthony. Here we go. >> Hello. This is Ina, [INAUDIBLE] from the Netherlands. I have a question about the poem, Nude Descending a Staircase. I was wondering if Duchamps, Duchamp. His painting wasn't already a satire and so this poem would be a satire on a satire. And, therefore, perhaps not understood very well, as it might be a bit too much to ask for a reader to understand why he was using this form and not a more free form. And I was also wondering if the perspective of the poem from the landing upstairs in the poem instead of downstairs because the speaker is looking through the bannister and when you are downstairs, and you are in front of the staircase, you don't see through the bannister. You see, as we've seen, coming down. My English is not very well but I hope I made it clear what I was wondering about. And I also want to say I'm really enjoying the course, it is very nice and very professionally done. Thank you and bye. >> That was great. I'll read the poem and then we can talk about it. This has probably been more of a cause for controversy in ModPo over the years than I expected when I put it in there. Partly because it's a response to Duchamp and it's, and we, in our video, we go after it as a satire that's like a pro neoformalist satire. And people take exception to that. And maybe we can rehearse that argument here. So I'll just read the Kennedy. Nude Descending a Staircase is obviously coming after Duchamp's painting. Toe after toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon root and rind. She sifts in sunlight down the stairs with nothing on, nor on her mind. We spy beneath the bannister a constant thresh of thigh on thigh, her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts go by. One woman waterfall she wears her slow decent like a long cape and pausing on the final stare collects her motions into shape. Anna Strong is making up a mad face and so what I want to do is go to Anna first and you're going to stir it up I'm sure. And then we'll go to Molly and Erica for a follow-up response. Okay, Anna. Why are you so angry at X.J. Kennedy? >> Because [LAUGH] I guess the thing that has always really deeply bugged me about this poem is that, what did Duchamp painting does is actually a radical un-objectification of the female nude form, that almost every painting pre-Duchamp was a highly objectified, very male gaze-y version of a female artistic nude. And what Duchamp actually does by doing this radically fractured, cubist version of that female nude descending the staircase is he actually takes away the sexual male gaze quality of it, and instead makes it this incredible painting about motion and movement and dynamic form. The Kennedy poem actually just undoes all of that categorically and remakes the radical ground breaking, paradigm shifting painting into an incredibly traditional objectified version of the Nude Descending a Staircase. >> And it could have been a poem, it would simply new formalist poem about a painter's, an artist's rendering of a woman coming down the stairs. But didn't have the title of the previous work, it would be hard to argue, or a little harder to argue that it's a satire but because it uses the same, it's clearly a counter argument of some kind. Lily? Let's go to Molly and Erica and then Lily, you can add something. Molly, your thoughts on this? Are you as up in arms as Anna Strong? >> I'm not. My reading of the poem is that, actually Kennedy is saying Duchamp is not exempt from this male gaze issue, and that he sees Duchamp's attempts to fracture this traditional view, this traditional objectification, may be ineffective, just because he's so explicit about the lips and the parts. And I guess, I can't bring myself to think that he's not being ironic. XJ Kennedy is. >> Yeah, right, so we spy beneath the banister a constant thrush of thigh on thigh. That, what I would consider to be awful looking, I'm adding the editorial awful there. You're saying he's ironizing, that he is not that speaker, he's not in favor of such spying, he's satirizing it. That's what you're saying? >> That's my reading, yeah. >> Okay, Erica what do you do with this thing? >> [COUGH] I think I might be on Anna's team. The thing that I think a lot. >> You can't see it but Anna is celebrating that you're on her team because she likes you and wants you to be on her team. >> I agree. The painting was huge and hugely important and what Duchamp accomplished in the painting was something that was pretty radical and I feel like, the thing that gets me about the poem is how rhythmically contained it is, like how dependent it is on the rhyme scheme and the meter. And it just seems like the form of the poem, in a lot of ways, devalues any possible satire to make. >> Lilly? >> I think for me, I like and understand Molly's reading, but I think for me, the part where he says nothing on not on her mind. >> He's insulting her? >> Yeah, but it just puts me a little more an honest camp that even if he was saying Duchamp wasn't as radical as people think he was, he didn't really do his critique with his poem because he's still only talking about her in an objectified way. Whereas, what I think is radical about Duchamp's work is that he doesn't let us see enough of the women to, or even tell us that it is a women, to let us make those kinds of assumptions. Like, she's dumb or she's, [INAUDIBLE] thing you would think about a naked woman walking around here. So Duchamp doesn't, something like a radical intervention, he doesn't let you do that. He doesn't let you see this beautiful woman reclining on a couch eating grapes and think, she must be so rich and she's still beautiful. But like a traditional nude world whereas the poem makes all of those assumptions right away and doesn't, yeah, it doesn't do any of the radical. >> What I had intended in putting this in ModPo was to take the modernist, earnest, and sincerity which you get in the Duchamp. Duchamp is a gag guy. He makes a lot of jokes but in that piece, I think he is being very serious about the innovation. And Kennedy later in this Augustan period, this period of satire, the 50s, where there's a rolling back of modernism, deliberate rolling back of modernism, is making a wise crack here. Saying that because she wears nothing, she's got nothing on, she's nude, nude descending a staircase. Chris can you bring me up in the room just a little? Nude descending a stair case, she's got nothing on and then he goes ahead and says, nothing on her mind, ha ha ha, because she's naked, she must be a bimbo, she must be stupid. So this doesn't really respect the tradition of women in portraiture. But, the participation of women who are the object of artists' renderings, just leaving that aside. But, it also just makes a joke. I don't think it's like, I think it's, it is a satire. It's a satire of modernism's attempt to break down the subject object dominance. >> It's just saying like let her be a hot lady. She's a hot lady. >> She's beautiful and Ina from the Netherlands said she's challenging our idea that, the subject position of Kennedy here is looking up, right? Looking up. And she's wondering well maybe you could, she thought about it, Ina did. Maybe you can see her from the banister. I mean, I don't really ultimately care. I think Ina's probably got a reasonable case there. But, there's a constant thresh of thigh on thigh beneath banisters, so it strikes me as a looking up, which is a very. When someone's coming down the stairs and you're below, you would think that higher has dominance over lower, but actually lower because it's looking up as a kind of dominance, and the poem thinks that's hilarious.