Lew Watts

Lessons for Tangueros Lew Watts

This collection of poetry is more than a compilation of poems around the dance of Argentine Tango. It represents the author's early experience of learning the dance - from the depths of humiliation to later moments of ecstasy - and of the important lessons of life learned through this experience. The initial poems in the first section describe events and emotions that led to the decision to attend the first lesson which introduces the second section on the lessons themselves. A third section dwells on some of the individual steps and movements within tango, often from a different or unique perspective, and the book concludes with a series of poems that reflect on the experience and the dance itself. The combined work represents one year in a new tanguero's (male tango dancer's) life. In this collection you will find free verse, blank verse and prose poems interspersed between more formal metrical forms. There are pantoums, rondeaus, sestinas, sonnets, terza rimas, triolets, villanelles as well as haikus, tankas and even sapphics. The end result is a book of dance, and of finding oneself within the beautiful dance of tango.