The
Life and Legacy of Larry Levis
~EDWARD
BYRNE~
TO RECOVER
THE POET: LARRY LEVIS'S ELEGY, THE SELECTED LEVIS, AND
THE GAZER WITHIN
Few poets in recent
decades have
written work as intelligent
and elegant as the poetry
in
this collection. In these poems
Larry Levis, as if in
song, has
perfectly united the conversational
voice with the
inspirational
music of their lyrical lines. Each
powerful piece,
containing vivid
images and focused details
written within the
expanse of
its rich and sweeping language,
displays a personal depth
of
emotion on the part of the poet
that is matched
magnificently
by the deep well of understanding
for our human condition
÷ life
and love to loss and death ÷
demonstrated by the very
words
so carefully chosen for these poems.
This has been, I
believe one of
the tasks of contemporary poetry ÷ to recover the poet and the
idea of
the poet for our time. Such has been the constant example
provided
by such poets as James Wright, Anne Sexton, Philip Levine, Adrienne
Rich,
John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, and Margaret Atwood ÷
to name
only a very few who occur to me at the moment ÷ poets who
created the role
and reality of the poet during the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, it would
be false to assume that this poetry has been concentrated wholly upon
the
Self, or exclusively upon the Self. In many ways it may have
sought
only to rescue poetry from some extremes, some abysses, of modernist
impersonality.
÷ Larry Levis, "Some Notes on the Gazer Within"
When
Larry Levis
died of a heart attack at the age of 49 in 1996, one of the most
accomplished
and still promising voices in contemporary American poetry was
silenced.
As David St. John mentions in the afterword to The Selected Levis:
"With Larry Levis's death came the sense that an American original had
been lost." In addition, Philip Levine writes in the foreword to Elegy,
a posthumous collection of Levis's poetry, that the United States had
lost
"one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His
early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a
major achievement that will enrich our lives for as long as poetry
matters."
Indeed, throughout his history as a poet, now ended much too soon,
Levis
already had been perceived by many of his peers as one of the leading
practitioners
of his art.
Levis's
record
of publications and awards was second to none among his
generation.
His first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States
Award
from the International Poetry Forum in 1972. A second book, The
Afterlife, was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of
American
Poets in 1976. The Dollmaker's Ghost won the Open
Competition
of 
the
National Poetry Series in 1981. His fourth and fifth books, Winter
Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves, (1991)
received
even greater critical praise and placed Levis among the top ranks of
American
poets. In between publications, Levis received numerous esteemed
honors, including a Discovery Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a
Guggenheim
Fellowship, and three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
Larry
Levis's
influence and reputation as a teacher of poetry also spread throughout
the years as he taught at various universities, including California
State
University (Los Angeles), Missouri, Iowa, Utah, and Virginia
Commonwealth.
As Levis wrote in an article for the Contemporary Autobiography
Series
published in the year of his death, and reprinted in The Gazer
Within
(2000), "I worked hard to write poetry. But I've had, I think, an
enormous amount of luck as well." Revealing the modesty Levis
seemed
to always present, these comments appear in a section of his essay
titled
"Luck." Nevertheless, most poets and readers of poetry would
discount
the "luck" and credit Levis's success to his growing talent as a writer.
Some of
the samples
of poetry included in The Selected Levis and taken from early
work
seen in Wrecking Crew may appear derivative and stilted at
times,
as in "The Poem You Asked For" with its lines clearly reminiscent of
Mark
Strand's poetry of the late '60s and early '70s:
My poem would eat nothing.
I tried to give it water
but it said no,
worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light
turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.
Nevertheless,
even in this first collection published while Levis was in his
twenties,
other poems already showed some of Levis's developing voice and central
concerns, his increasingly conversational tone and his need to keep
alive
the familiar places (California and the family farm) or important
people
(parents and farmworkers) from his personal past. As David St.
John
again comments in the afterword of The Selected Levis:
A native of California's central San Joaquin Valley, its endless rows
of
vineyards,
its groves of fig and almond orchards, Larry Levis brought to his
poetry
John
Steinbeck's dramatic sweep of the landscape. Although Levis came
of age in the
late sixties, it was his upbringing on his family farm that helped to
provide
the
sense of social conscience that resonates in all of his work. It
was a time when
César Chavez brought the plight of farmworkers to the world
stage;
but for Levis
those questions always remained personal and intimate, the stories of
particular
young men whose voices spoke alongside him in the fields of his
childhood.
Indeed, despite
the unmistakable early influence of other American poets, including his
teachers Philip Levine, whom Levis met as a freshman and described as
the
one who nurtured his interest in becoming a poet, and Donald Justice,
whom
he credits with helping him develop his craft, or the characteristics
borrowed
from those European surrealist poets whose works seemed to affect so
much
of the nation's poetry at that time (in fact, Levis acknowledges
their influence also came indirectly by way of "marvelous 'American'
surrealists
÷ if they can be called that: by Bly, Simic, Tate, Lux, Knott .
. .") and
appears to dominate many of the poems in Wrecking Crew, the
first
evidence that Levis was moving slowly but steadily toward a signature
voice
and subject matter can be seen in a poem like "The Town":
The town I grew up in
has a drug store where men
gather, since their words
fall into the tiny graves
rain makes in their tracks.
So it goes.
In the
twenty-five
years between the release of Wrecking Crew and the posthumous
publication
of Levis's final collection of poems, Elegy, readers were able
to
witness a gradual maturation of the man and his increasingly masterful
use of a distinctive poetic style which now stands as a model for other
poets to follow. Early in his writings, Larry Levis displayed an
ability to fill his poetry with interesting and inventive images, as
fine
as those in the poems of the French and Spanish poets who clearly
influenced
him, and frequently even resembling the scenes one might see depicted
on
any surrealist canvas, complete with the keen similes and metaphors
suggested
by such paintings.
When you look into the eyes of Gerard de Nerval,
Always the same thing: the giant sea crabs,
The claws in their vague red holsters . . . .
But looking into the eyes of Pierre Reverdy
Is like throwing the editorial page
Out into the rain
And the riding alone on the subway.
["Readings in French"]
Though
he certainly
had not become a confessional poet, by the time The Dollmaker's
Ghost
was published in 1981 Levis had honed his craft, shifted his attention
to a more intimate voice and nearly narrative style that more often
than
not focused on past autobiographical experiences or personal memories
as
if to arrest those important moments in his life and memorialize the
people
he at last realized had helped shape the man he was or was to
become.
In this transitional volume, many of his poems suddenly were presented
to readers for viewing more like fading photographs from a family album
rather than the surrealist paintings on a museum wall. Levis's
poignant
and painful poems acted as lasting reminders of illuminating moments in
his personal history, though those moments were surely depicted in many
situations against a darker social backdrop. Like the scarred
index
finger or the rustling of vines in "Picking Grapes in an Abandoned
Vineyard,"
each incident in a Levis poem now triggered memories ÷ either
emphasizing
the lingering influence of others from his childhood and adolescence or
discovering an emerging awareness of absence felt in his
adulthood.
Each written recollection offered Levis ample opportunities for a
poetry
of self-reflection in a more relaxed and conversational tone:
Picking grapes alone in the late autumn sun÷
A short, curved knife in my hand,
Its blade silver from so many sharpenings,
Its handle black.
I still have a scar where a friend
Sliced open my right index finger, once,
In a cutting shed÷
The same kind of knife.
*
I would stand still, and chalk my cue stick
In Johnny Palores' East Front Pool Hall, and watch
The room filling with tobacco smoke, as the sun set
Through one window.
Now all I hear are the vines rustling as I go
From one to the next,
The long canes holding up dry leaves, reddening,
So late in the year.
*
Today, in honor of them,
I press my thumb against the flat part of this blade,
And steady a bunch of red, Malaga grapes
With one hand,
The way they showed me, and cut÷
And close my eyes to hear them laugh at me again,
And then, hearing nothing, no one,
Carry the grapes up to the solemn house,
Where I was born.
Inklings of what
readers would find in The Dollmaker's Ghost first surfaced in
"Linnets,"
the long twelve-section poem that appeared in The Afterlife
(1977).
In "Some Notes on the Gazer Within," the central essay in The Gazer
Within, Levis states that when he began this poem he learned he
seemingly
"had nothing to say"; therefore, he "had to find a way to say it
with a finality, with a stare, with style. At least, this is what
I thought, anyway. So I chose the least likely incident possible
for a poem: my brother shooting a small bird with a shotgun in his
adolescence,
in my childhood. I thought that by choosing such a subject I
would
learn how to write about nothing at all, which seemed to be my lot. . .
. The more I thought about the absurd subject of my poem, the
more
possibilities it began to offer."
In an
interview
with David Wojahn, Levis remarked that "Linnets" is "more concerned
with
the natural world; it's a parable poem. . . ." Indeed, Levis
begins
to discover the natural world and stresses landscape more and more in
the
following years. He values landscape in his poetry: "I don't know
what could be more unfashionable just now than the whole 'idea' of
landscape,
but at times, for me, the world is a landscape, and I think of
my
own poems as if they were landscapes, or I could think of them
by
virtue of their places." Levis writes about his rural Southern
California,
its landscape and its farmworkers, with the same precision with which
Levine
writes of Detroit's urban landscape and its factory workers.
Where I grew up, the specific place meant everything. As a
child
in California,
I still thought of myself, almost, as living in the Bear Flag Republic,
not in the
United States. When I woke, the Sierras, I knew, were on my
right;
the Pacific
was a two-hour drive to my left, and everything between belonged to me,
was
me. I was astonishingly sheltered. It was only gradually
that
I learned the ways
in which place meant everything, learned that it meant two hundred
acres
of
aging peach trees which we had to prop up, every summer, with sticks to
keep
the limbs from cracking under the weight of slowly ripening
fruit.
It meant
a three-room schoolhouse with thirty students, and meant, also, the
pig-headed,
oppressive Catholic Church which, as far as I could determine, wanted
me
to
feel guilty for having been born at all. And it meant the gradual
self-effacement
and aging of my parents.
At the
same time,
Levis concludes that only after he came to a full realization about his
sense of place could he truly write his own poetry: "After I left for
good,
all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had
been.
That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where
poetry
might begin." Consequently, these poems from the middle volumes,
written after time and distance had allowed Levis to view his
California
roots more clearly, reveal to an even greater extent the self that was
Larry Levis. As he observed: "The authentic experience of any
worthwhile
landscape must be an experience of my own humanity."
Levis's
work
becomes more and more a poetry of place in his middle books, The
Dollmaker's
Ghost and Winter Stars. Nevertheless, Levis
recognizes
that any landscape or place one calls home is not necessarily that
identifiable
location on a road map. Instead, as he says in "Eden and My
Generation,"
an essay that locates him and his work about the San Joaquin Valley
among
"Levine's Detroit, James Wright's Ohio, Lowell's Boston," it is the
internal
landscape, "the geography of the psyche that matters, not the place,"
since
the place represented in any poet's work is romanticized,
fictionalized,
filtered through the mind. It is not because so much "is subject
to change and decay," but it is because "the poet has sealed those
places
away into the privacies of his or her work forever. . . . In a
way,
we can never get to those places because they don't exist ÷ not
really,
anyway." Levis reaches the following decision:
Place in poetry, then, or for that matter in much fiction, is often
spiritual,
and
yet it is important to note that this spiritual location clarifies
itself
and becomes
valuable only through one's absence from it. Eden becomes truly
valuable
only
after a fall, after an exile that changes it, irrecoverably, from what
it once was.
In
"Linnets" the
influence of other poets on Levis and the desire to establish his
singular
style seem to be competing with one another. Clearly, his voice
appears
to be echoing others in some sections, as in the following where one
can
hear once again hints of Mark Strand, especially "The Untelling":
This is a good page.
It is blank,
and getting blanker.
My mother and father
are falling asleep over it. . . .
They are all tired of reading,
they want to go home,
they won't be waving goodbye.
When they are gone,
the page will be crumpled,
thrown into the street.
Nevertheless,
Levis exhibits a beginning understanding of how landscape and self can
be joined together. Again, as he says it, "authentic experience
of
any worthwhile landscape must be an experience of my own
humanity."
Also, Levis detected difficulty in sharing his experiences or personal
observations in the tightly constructed form of shorter lines which
mark
his early poetry. As a result, the emerging voice of Levis
÷ more conversational and comprehensive, more autobiographical
and intimate
÷ is also present in other sections of "Linnets," such as this
opening
of the poem, which ironically Levis "fashioned . . . into prose" to get
away from "problems of form":
One morning with a 12 gauge my brother shot
what he said was a linnet. He did this at close range
where it sang on a flowering almond branch. Any-
one could have done the same and shrugged it off,
but my brother joked about it for days, describing
how nothing remained of it, how he watched for
feathers and counted only two gold ones which he
slipped behind his ear.
As
Levis confides
that he consciously designed The Afterlife to close with
"Linnets,"
readers are justified in believing 
this
poem indicates the close of one stage in his poetry and the turning
toward
a new direction. Even when one examines the table of contents for
The
Selected Levis, the differences between the titles of the poems in The
Afterlife and the following collection, The Dollmaker's Ghost
÷ its longer titles containing more detailed information and
readily identifiable
places or people ÷ are easily apparent. Indeed, in many
ways, the
poetry of The Dollmaker's Ghost signals a number of changes in
Levis's
poetry ÷ in voice, lyricism, narrative, linear presentation,
form, subject
matter, thematic emphasis, and the identity of the self ÷ and a
significant
breakthrough in Levis's development as a poet. Levis acknowledges
as much in the interview with David Wojahn included in The Gazer
Within,
where Levis reveals: "I saw, at one point, that if I kept trying to
write
these little jewel-like poems that were composed almost entirely of
images,
of exquisite pleasure, that it reduced what my poetry was or could
be."
Levis comments on his approach to the writing in this volume:
I think in the case of The Dollmaker's Ghost, I had an idea
that
I wanted a
kind of linear energy ÷ something that went across a line.
But I
also wanted
a kind of vertical energy to move down through the poem, thanks to the
way
in which the stanzas were shaped. One of the things that helped
me
do this was
a particular kind of enjambment, a violent runover of the line.
But
they're not
enjambments so violent that the reader can't sense my pause at the end
of the line.
I want the individual lines to always keep a certain integrity.
To
capitalize the
letter of each line also helps to draw attention to that fact, helps to
say that it's
still a line and not something arbitrary.
With
the introduction
of long or irregular line lengths written in a conversational tone, a
vocabulary
with changing levels of diction, and a comprehensive poetry of personal
experience, Levis's poems finally seemed more natural and fit more
easily
into the tradition of Walt Whitman, a poet whose work often seems a
model
for Levis and to whom he pays homage in a later poem, "Whitman:" from Winter
Stars, where Whitman is the persona. Levis reveals, "at a
certain
point in writing The Dollmaker's Ghost I was very aware of the
shape
of the poem, the way it looked on the page. . . ." His conscious
construction of the poem's shape on the page is especially evident in
the
new design of his lines. As Levis describes the process to
Wojahn,
"I feel the line establishes itself as a distinct unit ÷ it
becomes almost
like a dance step." One can see his new style at work in poems
like
"Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923" which begins:
In Fresno it is 1923, and your shy father
Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor.
On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge
Over gradually whitening water.
If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended
To be trout.
You can see the whole scene
Is centuries older
Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning.
As is
frequently
the case in the work of our best poets, many of the most interesting
poems
in The Dollmaker's Ghost concern themselves with themes of the
fast
passage of time and an increasing awareness of one's mortality.
For
example, in "The Ownership of the Night" Levis reminds his readers that
time grinds along as persistently and insistently as the humming
mechanism
in a household refrigerator, and no one can know for certain when the
cycle
of life will end and the moment of death will arrive:
After five years,
I'm in the kitchen of my parents' house
Again, hearing the aging refrigerator
Go on with its music,
And watching an insect die on the table
By turning in circles.
Throughout the
poems in this collection, Levis chronicles the stages of his life,
beginning
in this poem with his conception:
. . . I can think of the look of distance
That must have spread
Over my parents' faces as they
Conceived me here,
And each fell back, alone,
As the waves glinted, and fell back.
In the
first section
of "Blue Stones," a poem in two parts and dedicated to his son, Levis
imagines
the days on his own death bed ("They will slide me onto a cold bed, / A
bed that has been brought in, / Out of the night . . ."). The
image
he presents appears to be one of passive helplessness and perhaps a
stolid
acceptance of an absence already felt:
All I will have to decide, then,
Is how to behave during
Those last weeks, when the drawers
Of the dresser remain closed,
And the mirror is calm, and reflects nothing.
Just
before the
end of this section, Levis relates his father's thoughts about death:
"My
father thought dying / Was like standing trial for crimes / You could
not
remember." He follows this with a section directly addressed to
his
son, Nicholas, in which the speaker shares his thoughts, requests he be
remembered and that after his death, rather than an absence, his
presence
should accompany the son at least for a while through his life,
promising
in the end not to follow, but allow the son his independence, his own
life:
Someday, when you are twenty-four and walking through
The streets of a foreign city, Stockholm,
Or Trieste,
Let me go with you a little way,
Let me be that stranger you won't notice,
And when you turn and enter a bar full of young men
And women, and your laughter rises,
Like the stones of a path up a mountain,
To say that no one has died,
I promise I will not follow.
I will cross at the corner in my gray sweater.
I will not have touched you,
As I did, for so many years,
On the hair and the left shoulder.
I will silence my hand that wanted to.
Despite the fact
that the poetry in The Dollmaker's Ghost contains more
autobiographical
instances, intimate 
images,
and personal emotions than his previous book, Levis nevertheless
witholds
his full sense of self. Although indications of the self are
often
offered to the reader through the views of a persona ÷ including
well-known
individuals like Harry Truman, Weldon Kees, Miguel Hernandez, and even
the female figure in an Edward Hopper painting ÷ or an indirect
self represented
by the second-person "you," Levis still seems reluctant to become as
totally
vulnerable as a first-person testimony might make him. In his
interview
with Wojahn, Levis refers to these personae and indirect narrators as
the
"ghosts." He claims, "the ghosts are also ways to talk about
parts
of myself that I wouldn't feel decent talking about from the
first-person
point of view. I don't feel brave enough to talk about them in
the
first person, or I felt too modest at a certain point in my life to
talk
about them as if those parts were, in fact, me."
However,
with
the 1985 publication of the poems in Winter Stars Levis finally
felt ready to make the next important step forward. As he put it
in his 1982 interview with Wojahn, at the time he was writing some of
the
poems for this collection, "Sometimes you have to address things that
are
happening in your life that you really don't clearly understand and
that's
difficult. All the new poems I write are me; no
personae."
He further explained the poems he had written for his new manuscript:
Well, for one thing, there are no personas being used: there's no ghost
network. . . .
I had this sudden idea of myself being able to say something that was
terribly
frank and honest and uncompromising and which might, in fact, be
poetry.
I
was thinking that it was poetry and that it was what I really
wanted
to do, to say
something terribly unequivical. Not a literal or pedestrian
honesty
but an honesty
of the imagination. . . . I'll never forget that moment: it was
an
avenue into
something, and it made me understand what I really wished to do in my
poetry.
In my life. I understood the kind of power I've always wanted to
have in poetry.
It is a sort of energy, the way Yeats has it in, say, "Easter 1916,"
when
his energy
isolates a moment in time and makes it stay there forever and live in
that
present.
It's what Eliot means when he talks about that Chinese vase, with its
pattern
always moving, and yet always still. And I think I felt that I
could
have that
quality by talking very directly in a poem. That's what
I'm
doing now ÷ just
talking very directly from a first-person viewpoint. . . .
Although Levis
speaks even more directly from a first-person stance, like the poetry
of
the Romantics rather than the confessional poets, his poems in Winter
Stars rarely rely solely on the autobiographical incidents of a
personal
self, and they usually avoid the exploitation of private or clinical
matters
often characteristic of confessional poetry. To the contrary,
instead
of alienating the audience or creating a distance between reader and
speaker
by use of the personal details contained in these poems, like a wise
storyteller
who creates greater interest on the part of his audience by linking
himself,
with knowledge of distinctive details, to the tale he is narrating,
Levis's
willingness to take the reader into his confidence only proves more
engaging.
In this way, in poem after poem Levis reveals the themes in his
work.
His poetry now brings together the self and the subject matter in a
manner
that makes the two essential to one another. As Levis describes
the
process in "Some Notes on the Gazer Within": ". . . to find a subject
is
also, simultaneously and reflexively, the act and art by which anyone
finds
himself, or herself. A poet finds what he or she is by touching
what
is out there." In fact, Levis concludes that the process of
self-discovery
is imperative in order to uncover one's relationship to the world
around
him and, thus, detect those subjects of importance or discern those
themes
that are meaningful:
To really look inquiringly inward as Sidney advises or as the most well-
intentioned guru advises is to encounter, at least on some very honest
days,
my own space; it is to discover how empty I am, how much an onlooker and
a gazer I have to be in order to write poems. And, if I am lucky,
it is to find
out how I can be filled enough by what is not me to use it, to have a
subject,
and, consequently, to find myself as a poet.
The
working manuscript
for Winter Stars was titled Trouble. Levis
explained
the circumstances around his composition of the poems in Winter
Stars
as "a rocky time in my own life." In his interview with Wojahn,
he
summed it up:
My father died about a year ago; my wife and I separated in August; we
have
a son. . . . All these things coalesced at one point. I
used
to think that one could
only write about such things long after they had happened. But it
seemed to me
that there was no other choice but to try to write about them as
they happened.
Now maybe this is wrong. But there seemed to be nothing else to
say,
to talk
about. . . . Anyway, that's what the book seems to be about.
By
adopting Winter
Stars as the title over Trouble, Levis might just as well
have
been indicating, among other things, how his poetry was meant to be
viewed,
how far-reaching and inclusive he intended the work to be. He
also
may just as well have been suggesting the title poem as a model, a
guide
to this work.
Although
the
narratives that make up many of the poems in Winter Stars are
autobiographical,
Levis seems almost always to extend the reach of the themes in each
poem.
Even when addressing the most personal issues, he opens up the subject
matter in the poems ÷ through metaphor or meditative lyrics
÷ in ways that
allow all readers to respond. In the title poem of Winter
Stars,
which serves as a perfect example of the work in this book, Levis
focuses
on what may be the major subject in this collection, the "hard death"
of
his father from Parkinson's disease and a series of strokes, the
irrecoverable
distance between the two, and along with other circumstances, sources
for
the continuing sense of absence he was feeling in his life. The
poem
begins in the direct, conversational tone Levis already had been
developing
in The Dollmaker's Ghost:
My father once broke a man's hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand. . . .
As is
often the
pattern in Levis's later poetry, the speaker shifts from past to
present
and back again throughout the poem. There appears to be an
ever-present
nearly nostalgic longing for the past, or at least a desire to revisit
the past to achieve better understanding of the present, in many of
Levis's
later poems. When he remembers his father's actions ("My father
simply
went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, / Lay alone in the
dark,
listening to music.") after the confrontation with Rubén
Vásquez,
who "wanted to kill his own father," Levis comments: "I never
understood
how anyone could risk his life, / Then listen to Vivaldi."
However,
the next stanza shifts the attention of the poem, as well as the reader:
Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.
In
this manner,
Levis begins to universalize, literally and figuratively, the content
in
his poem. Surely, the main figures in the poem are Levis and his
father:
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him.
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can't remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed. . . .
Nevertheless,
despite a chronicling of their difficult relationship and the father's
death ÷ something Levis returns to again and again in the form
of images
or thoughts of death, the father's and the poet's ÷ the subject
matter
broadens to include not only the relationship between Rubén
Vásquez
and his father, but as any Romantic poet might, the nature of mortality
in contrast with the immortality of nature, as well as the ironic
frustration
with the inadequacy of language when words fail, especially for a
father
who is unable to communicate and a poet-son who values the
particularities
of language:
I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it alll wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.
Finally, the speaker
arrives at a resolution that combines all of the myriad of topics
raised
by this poem, as well as others in the collection: life vs. death, love
vs. loss, past vs. present, nostalgia vs. regret, memory vs. reality,
mortality
vs. immortality, human vs. nature, young vs. old, mystery vs.
understanding,
innocence vs. experience, ignorance vs. wisdom, naiveté vs.
maturity,
literature vs. living, theory vs. practicality, passion vs. apathy,
absence
vs. presence, son vs. father, etc.:
Tonight, I'm talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again÷
Which may be all that's left of you & me.
When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.
The pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it's empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.
In an
odd addition
to Levis's changing writing style, beginning with the wonderful poems
in Winter
Stars he places an ampersand inside all his lines where he
previously
would have written the word and. Although minor and
idiosyncratic,
this small gesture seems to be a marker that might signal as well a
turning
point, a shift in his thinking, and despite the awards garnered by his
three previous books, Winter Stars stands as a superior
work.
This volume represents a triumph, one of the best collections of poetry
produced by his generation, and the moment when Levis finally
accomplished
the goal he had been seeking since he was an adolescent:
. . . when I was sixteen, I decided one night, to try to write a
poem.
When
I was finished I turned out the light. I told myself that if the
poem had one
good line in it I would try to be a poet. And then I thought, no,
you can't say
"try." You will either be a poet, and become a better and better
one, or you
will not be a poet. The next morning I woke and looked at what
I'd
written.
It was awful. I knew it was awful. But it had one good
line.
One. All the
important decisions in my life were made in that moment.
["'Larry Levis': Autobiography"]
Having
attained
the level of excellence displayed in Winter Stars, Levis seemed
even more assured of his abilities as a poet and even more sure of the
direction for his poetry. Not surprisingly then, with his growth
in confidence Levis attempted even longer and more ambitious poems with
an extensive reach in his next collection, The Widening Spell of
the
Leaves.
In this
book
another theme rises to prominence as a rival to Levis's recurring
considerations
of memory, mortality, and death. In The
Widening
Spell of the Leaves, Levis examines not only how the nature of time
is ever-present in any examination of these themes or contributes to
them,
as he'd already explored in previous volumes. Instead, now Levis
contemplates the complexities of the idea of Time itself. It is
as
if he wishes to find out how and why Time is our enemy÷ or as he
quotes
Pound from The Cantos, "Time is the evil" ÷ so that he
can attempt
the impossible, to stop its progression with his poetry. An
indication
of Levis's interest in this topic can be seen in his 1993 essay, "So
That:
On Holub's 'Meeting Ezra Pound.'" Levis begins the essay with a
statement
that he once overheard in a lecture hall: "Time is a violation."
Levis explains:
It makes us finite, and therefore the violation is always personal: its
final form
is both banal and intimate, for it is simply one's death, but finally
all
of us get
the idea, an idea which is actually the absence of any idea and,
therefore,
unimaginable. As close as one can get to a statement of it is:
"The
meaning
of life is that it stops." And there it is: the empty, white,
blank,
unblinking
center of it all.
Indeed, in much
of the poetry of Levis's career ÷ especially in the later
collections and
most obviously in his posthumous collection, Elegy ÷ it
appears
as if Levis continually writes in an elegiac manner, mourning not just
the dead or his own mortality, but also times or places that have
passed,
which exist only in our personal or collective memories, as well as
analyzing
the very passage of Time. The elegiac form offers an
opportunity
for observation of a solemn situation and expression of one's sorrow;
however,
it also allows a sense of giving life, a feeling of momentary pause, as
though the poem resembles a monument, perhaps more likely a planted
tree,
which when erected in commemoration of the dead or to mark the gradual
passing of a life and an era suddenly presents a seemingly enduring
answer
to the impermanence of life and the true transitions of Time. In
his commentary on Holub's poem, Levis decides "Holub's imagination,
which
does typify our time, seems to move at the speed of light. It
delivers
us from history, so that in this way, Holub's elegy becomes a kind of
birth."
In "The
Spell
of the Leaves" Levis writes of the immediate aftermath of a marriage
that
has ended. A husband has left his wife and for a while she is
unable
to adjust to "those first, crisp days of a new life." The wife
rises
each morning, looks in on her seven-year-old son, dresses for work,
then
gets into the car on the passenger side and waits for her husband "to
come
out and drive her":
. . . The first two times it happened
She was frightened, she said, because, waiting for him,
Something went wrong with Time. Later, she couldn't
Say whether an hour or only a few minutes
Had passed before she realized she didn't
Have a husband.
The
poem's speaker
tries to understand her situation, and what will become of her, but he
confides to the reader, "when I think of her, nothing has happened
yet.
/ It is this moment before she remembers / Her husband isn't
there.
. . ." The image of the woman sitting in the car, waiting and
unaware
of the changes time has brought to her life, is frozen in the mind of
the
speaker, captured in this elegiac poem mourning loss like a stilled
frame
from a movie:
When I think of her, she's still sitting there,
On the wrong side of the car, intent, staring,
As her thought collects in pools yet keeps
Widening until, now, it casts its spell. . . .
The
spell spreads
to the boy "who sits / like stillness itself," and "the stillness finds
his father / With his shoulders stooped, unmoving, in another
state."
The individuals in these poems act as if caught in a strange state,
perhaps
the "sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense," as Levis characterizes
a moment in "Slow Child with a Book of Birds." Indeed, the poems
in this collection seem themselves to be spells, states of enchantment
holding a magic power through compelling words that attract and
influence
us while, as the speaker admits, nothing appears to actually occur:
I keep waiting for the next thing to happen,
And that is the problem: nothing happens, nothing
Happens at all. It is as if Time Itself
Sticks without knowing it in this wide place
I had mistaken for a moment. . . .
Levis
has at last
come to the point he had hoped to reach with "Linnets" in The
Afterlife,
in which he had wanted to "learn how to write about nothing at all," or
at least to compose a poem which gave the appearance that nothing
happens,
but "to say that with finality, with a stare, with style." Of
course,
in Levis's later poems where the action is stilled, so much more
happens
beyond the appearance. However, for Levis the trick of writing
the
kind of meditative and introspective poetry one finds in his later
collections
comes from his halting of time in the lyric, moving away from the
linear
chronological progression of the poem's surface and concentrating on
the
depth of a captured instant. As Levis speaks of something similar
in "Some Notes on the Gazer Within": "And so this is what happens at
the
moment of writing: the wave takes the shape of the fire. What is
'out there' moves inside. The poet becomes threshold." Out
of moments in this world of sadness or misery, of death and loss,
throughout
the elegiac poems of his last few books, Levis discovers a satisfaction
not by escaping from that world, but by using his art to stop it, at
least
long enough for inward contemplation and reflection. His further
definition continues:
The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an
insistence,
through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such
ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a
condition of it.
In
"The Perfection
of Solitude: A Sequence," a 20-page poem that foreshadows the expanse,
in length and in breadth, of the works in Elegy, Levis returns
to
the tactic of freezing Time. The first section, "Oaxaca, 1983,"
presents
a wonderful description of a hotel lobby and the café or closed
shops outside in the plaza where he is visiting "in this moment when
the
plaza sleeps & is abandoned." After a lengthy and detailed
description
written in present tense, the speaker confesses:
. . . Actually, the moment I refer to happened
Years ago, & I remember gazing at the plaza the whole time so that
Nothing would change, so that nothing would ever change. . . .
However, his attempt
to still time and appreciate the enchanting world around him,
represented
within the spell of this poem, is abruptly interrupted as reality and
the
true times in which he lives intrude ÷ "Five seconds / Later a
bomb went
off in the telegraph office & a young janitor who was // Sweeping
up
the place felt both his legs surprise him with their sudden /
Absence."
Levis later determines: "You could feel a century beginning to come to
an end. . . ." And even further into this section of the poem, he
is reminded of twenty years earlier: "You are thinking of
Berkeley
& Telegraph Avenue in 1970 / Because you cling to a belief in the
Self,
which memorizes, which is nothing."
Throughout the
sections in this astonishing long poem, Levis examines examples in
which
art or poetry halt or compress Time, and as in "Oaxaca, 1983," he
relies
on memory to bring different moments in time together for comparison
and
contrast, to better understand the world as well as to better
understand
himself.
In
section two,
"Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex," Levis discusses a 17th-century
painting
in which the artist places "his own face in the decapitated, swollen,
leaden-eyed
head of Goliath." Levis, perhaps thinking back to his father's
comment
about dying being "like standing trial for crimes / You could not
remember,"
is amazed at the artist's accomplishment:
Wasn't it like this, after all? And this self-portrait, David holding
him
by a lock
Of hair? Couldn't it destroy time if he offered himself up like
this,
empurpled,
Bloated, the crime paid for in advance? To die before one dies,
&
keep painting?
Later
in the same
section, in another compression of time, Levis nostalgically recollects
listening to "Johnny B. Goode" ÷ "the song that closed the
Fillmore" ÷
played by Garcia and the Grateful Dead, or recalls idealistic college
days
when he once marched against the Vietnam War, and even remembers a
high-school
friend who resembled the Caravaggio face on the Goliath in the
painting.
He uses his memory to capture the pleasant adolescent years when he and
his friend would "skinny dip & drink" some summer nights in the
pools
of the model homes at a nearby suburban development. However,
just
as the frozen moment of the plaza scene in the previous section was
broken
by a bomb blast, Levis's fond recollection of his friend is cut short:
"Two years later, thinking he heard someone call his name, he strolled
three yards // Off a path & stepped on a land mine." Levis
judges
that "Time's sovereign. It rides the backs of names cut into
marble."
In a
third section
of this sequence, "Turban," Levis admires the way Breughel preserved
the
people in his paintings, especially the children whose youth and
exuberance
are forever kept intact, their enthusiasm undiminished by time;
although,
he acknowledges the silence is what is most noticed about the boy and
that
the tiny lines in the cracking paint tend to undo the illusion,
reminding
a viewer this is offered with the artifice of art and not the reality
of
life:
Sometimes, in the Breughel paintings, the children who are skating hold
perfectly
Still for a moment; I could have counted them there if I wanted
to.
Or a boy
Has just fallen out of the sky, & no matter how hard the water is
the
splash
On the canvas is always silent, & can only grow more so. And
the water rising
For centuries around the boy is famous only for the little silence it
displays.
The way the paint has cracked slightly on the canvas is meant to remind
you
That this is, after all, only a painting. In which Breughel has
destroyed
time.
In
fact, the title
of this section derives from another painting in which the artist
assumes
a persona, a work in which Rembrandt, trying to make money, paints the
image of his own face into a depiction of St. Paul. Levis points
out:
He can paint another self-portrait. This time he is St. Paul with
a wry turban
On his head! There is a kind of forgiveness in it all. He
looks
as if he is
About to smile, but he does not, & then after a few moments it
looks
as if
He will never smile again.
Few
poets in recent
decades have written work as intelligent and elegant as the poetry in
this
collection. In these poems Larry Levis, as if in song, has
perfectly
united the conversational voice with the inspirational music of their
lyrical
lines. Each powerful piece, containing vivid images and focused
details
written within the expanse of its rich and sweeping language, displays
a personal depth of emotion on the part of the poet that is matched
magnificently
by the deep well of understanding for our human condition ÷ life
and love
to loss and death ÷ demonstrated by the very words so carefully
chosen
for these poems.
Just days
before
his death, Larry Levis had confided in his former teacher, longtime
mentor,
and friend for twenty-five years, Philip Levine, that he had a new
nearly-complete
manuscript of poetry. Although Levine had previously seen only
about
one-fourth of the poems from this new collection, at the request of
Larry
Levis's sister Levine accepted the responsibility of compiling a
posthumous
publication of the poems left behind by Levis. Levine reports in
a foreword to Elegy his method for deciding what to include in
the
book:
I have rewritten nothing. I have revised nothing. I have
done
my best to
determine which poems Larry felt were completed or had gone as far as he
could take them. I've tried to include the final or the last
versions
of these
poems. By no means have I included all the poems I believed Larry
considered
finished. I had no choice but to trust my own taste. . . .
With
the assistance
of two other poet-friends to Larry Levis, Peter Everwine and David St.
John, an organization of the individual works was determined.
Given
the ever-developing presence of elegiac verse in Levis's later poetry,
it is most appropriate that this volume, published as a tribute to
Levis,
is titled Elegy and it closes with nine extended poems, adding
up
to more than fifty pages, each with a title beginning with the word
"Elegy."
As early
as 1982,
when interviewed by David Wojahn, Levis responded to a question about
whether
he considered himself "principally an elegiac poet" with the following:
"I often feel that that's what I am as a human . .
.
Also, it seems to me, or has seemed to me for a long time, that the
elegiac
poem, the poem that is meditative and narrative, simply touched me more
deeply." Further into the same interview, when asked about "the
purpose
of elegiac writing," Levis offered a very revealing reply: "Merwin, for
example, has a wonderful circumspection of mind and charity in a little
poem called 'Elegy.' He says, 'who would I show it to?' which is,
of course, the whole truth. Many times elegies are
self-reflexive,
and they often point not to the figure gone but to the person writing
them,
and they are meant to reveal that mind, that nature."
Like the
poetry
of Walt Whitman, that poet to whom Levis has paid homage, directly and
indirectly, throughout his career, the poems assembled in Elegy
present a lyric voice at its most cogent and passionate pitch, yet one
willing to be ambitious and challenging, stretching its poetic
technique
to include extremely long lines and expansive or discursive text that
approaches
the straightforward tone and comprehensiveness of prose. In this
manner, Levis boldly confronts the reader with the subjects in his
poems.
In "Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967," Levis puts
forth the following compelling opening lines:
I'm going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won't mistake him for something else,
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes from a row of vines.
Later
in the book
during the "elegy" series of poems, as he often does in the poetry of
this
collection, Levis repeats a phrase or image ÷ creating "motifs
or 'riffs'
to unify the collection," Levine suggests in his foreword ÷
echoing those
previous opening lines with similar lines in a work titled "Elegy for
Whatever
Had a Pattern in It":
I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto
Huerta
Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit
Out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon, I'm going to let
you
Keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late
Elberta peaches up to me where I'm standing on a flatbed trailer &
breathing in
Tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through it
So that they seem to swim through the air.
As his
poems increasingly
resemble the work of Whitman, so do the messages they contain. In
"Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate," Levis offers the following
invitation:
With the light coming back to one star
In the late summer dusk after another
Until at last the sky above it resembles
The vast rigging of some lighted ship
Drifting slowly out of reach. Come with me,
Stray a little from your task . . .
Walk with me a little, just for company. . . .
An
ongoing interest
in the elegy and elegiac poetry is evident in an essay titled "Mock
Mockers
after That," originally delivered as a lecture by Levis at the Warren
Wilson
MFA Seminar for Writers in 1994 and included in The Gazer Within.
This lecture was written at the same time Levis was composing poems in
his "elegy" series. Clearly, Levis had decided to follow through
on the conclusion he'd stated a decade earlier that elegiac is
what
he felt "as a human." Likewise, he had felt "for a long
time,
that the elegiac poem, the poem that is meditative and narrative," was
what mattered most to him. In this essay, Levis presents the
following:
Although they are not tricks, elegies are tricky things. In the
study
of the
form in English, the poet and critic Peter Sacks suggests that not all
poets
escape from elegies they write without attendant feelings of guilt,
anxiety,
and the sense of some further obligation that comes upon them
surprisingly,
either within the wake of what they have written or within the elegy
itself.
For such feelings of guilt, anxiety, and obligation are what they have
created
as well, are the sometimes unforeseen by-products of the elegiac act,
while
the elegy itself becomes, of course, public, social, part of a culture
which
defines not only the conventions of the elegy, but also what the work of
mourning and consolation is.
Levis
acknowledges
feeling a sense of "injustice," that his work may be praised or he
might
garner attention for each elegy or elegiac poem he has written about
the
deaths and losses of so many others, especially since those written
about
cannot control how they are portrayed by the poet. Levis
believes
the ethical discomfort caused by "the violation that occurs in the
elegiac
act" is even more serious than that which might be felt by "the
so-called
confessional poet" who "feels dismay, embarrassment, sometimes shame in
showing off his scars in print" because "the elegy always involves
another,"
and in writing the elegy a poet often "has little alternative but to
falsify
the life and death it preys upon."
However,
as the
poems in this posthumous collection display, even when writing elegies
for others, Levis is truly writing works that are best defined by his
1982
observation about the elegiac voice, that "elegies are self-reflexive,
and they often point not to the figure gone but to the person writing
them,
and they are meant to reveal that mind, that nature." The irony
of Elegy
is that these poems, apparently written to memorialize the lives and
times
of others, are so self-reflexive that they actually serve perfectly to
portray Levis's own mind and nature; indeed, although Levis often wrote
of death and his own mortality in earlier poetry, he could not have
known
how these poems, most seemingly about others, would provide his finest
elegy (the form about which he commented, it "simply touched me more
deeply"),
preserving a wonderful portrait of himself for all.
In Elegy,
Larry Levis produces the sort of poetry that he had steadily been
working
toward for more than a quarter century, an elegiac poetry that mourns
the
passing of people, including the younger Larry Levis, as well as places
or eras that can now only be seen in one's imagination ÷ and
even that
occurs with a struggle. The marvelous closing poem of the book,
"Elegy
Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope," widens to become an elegy for
the devastated Yugoslavia he had once known:
All I have left of that country is this torn scrap
Of engraved lunacy, worth less now
Then it was then, for then it was worth nothing. . . .
Of
course, he
discovers that in his memory and his imagination he has much more left
of that country, its land, its people, his observations, and his
experiences,
all of which combine to create the elegiac poetry in this long
poem.
Nevertheless, Levis continually alludes to his reluctance ("I don't
feel
like explaining it, / And now I have to") and the difficulty or
futility
of his task: "I can't imagine it back"; "I can't imagine it enough"; "I
can't imagine how to get back to it"; "I can't imagine her enough"; "I
can't imagine it enough, & even if I could, one day / That, too,
would
be the wave's sprawl on the empty rocks"; "I can't imagine them enough
to bring them back."
Yet,
Levis's
elegiac poetry celebrates life even as it reckons with the
inevitability
of death. It gives us the lives of those people or places that
would
otherwise be lost to Time. If not for the immortality offered by
art, including the elegy, all would be lost. "We go without a
trace,
I am thinking. We go, & there's no one there, / No one to
meet
us on the long drive lined with orange trees, / Cypresses, the
bleaching
fronds of palm trees," he writes in "Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern
in
It." Levis then poses the question, "What are we but what we
offer
up?" In many ways, upon reading these elegies, one might easily
respond
that Larry Levis is what he offers up ÷ his poetry. In his
interview
with Wojahn, Levis was asked about what he would like to achieve by the
end of his career as a poet, and he replied: "I don't know. I
can't
really say. I would like to write my poems and leave it at
that."
However, Levis enlarged upon his response to include the following:
I just want to write my own poems. I would like to be one of
those
people
who was, in poetry, a rule breaker; someone who mattered. Poetry
sometimes
seems so totally an enclosed or secluded world, a very tiny one . . .
so
much so
that other worlds are closed off to us. I think poetry ought to
challenge
these
other worlds in the ways that fiction can challenge science or that art
can
challenge technology.
By the time
Levis had written the poems included in Elegy, he had fulfilled
these goals. Levis, who revealed in "Mock Mockers after That"
that
he had once dreamed he'd been visited by William Butler Yeats, had now
become one who demonstrated what had been offered as advice by that
poet-ghost
in his dream: "Passion is the only thing that matters in poetry.
As a matter of fact, it is the only thing that matters in life."
And so, Larry Levis presents in his poetry not only the passion that
matters
in poetry and life, but a poetry that reveals a life of passion that
matters
to all who will read his works. Indeed, although in his
autobiographical
essay Levis had attributed much of his success as a poet to "an
enormous
amount of luck," clearly the real reason for his literary
accomplishments
was Levis's passion and joy in writing poetry: "It never seems like
work
to me. It feels like pleasure." In the end, the elegy for
Larry
Levis might state that the passion and joy he experienced in the
process
of writing has produced a legacy of splendid poetry that always feels
like
an enormous pleasure to read.
Levis, Larry. The
Gazer Within.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ISBN:
0-472-06718-4
$14.05
Levis, Larry. The
Selected Levis.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. ISBN:
0-8229-4141-4
$22.50
Levis, Larry.
Elegy.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. ISBN:
0-8229-5648-9
$12.05
© by Edward Byrne
