The Edge of Seventeen
BY ADAM O. DAVIS
“[The poets] shared a dangerous fate that all writers should hope to avoid. It was expressed by one critic… who, writing about the popularity of literary biographies, regretted a trend towards a fascination with the life but not the work. The affairs and penury in the lives of poets, the drunken lost weekends, professional jealousies, status anxieties and crises of self-doubt relieve a wider readership from engaging with the poetry.”
-What We Can Know, Ian McEwan
What artist with any degree of infamy hasn’t found their work refiltered through the posthumous mesh of their doings? Such analysis recalls the final lines of “After a Death,” where Tomas Tranströmer writes that “the shadow feels more real than the body. / The samurai looks insignificant / beside his armor of black dragon scales.” Here we have the question of artist and art, actions and creations. Sometimes the armored myth swallows the work, sometimes it enhances it, and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Larry Levis has long loomed as a reckless totem in my mind—his verse so heated with brilliance that it burned the hand and mind like a hot skillet. His legend has been drawn from his prodigious output and promise, not to mention his personal demons and the tragedy of the early, hard-earned death that put him in league with so many poets whose names are writ in water. Though I’d shy from calling him confessional—his work is too wily to be pigeonholed as such—his life was the catalyst for the crucible of his art, of which he was a master, and so I’m reminded of a story I once heard.
Twenty years ago, I was drinking cheap lager and sugared absinthe in the basement bar of what had once been the secret police’s Prague headquarters. In that sunken place perfumed by liquor and summer sweat, I and several other poets entertained ourselves by telling what poets young or old love best to be entertained by: the poor behavior of famous poets. As anyone with a Wi-Fi connection knows, this kind of hot gossip drips freely from academia’s branches, and, at the time of its telling, such stories were still viewed with cackling disappointment, as if the bad habits of talented men and women in positions of artistic power were to be expected because, after all, God help us, they were widely tolerated.
The story shared that night was about Larry Levis who, according to this piece of lore, while attending an endless house party somewhere in Salt Lake City, decided to shave a co-ed’s legs with a straight razor as she lay in a tub. Because Levis was good company, the party followed him to the bathroom, where he sat balanced on the tub’s edge with the co-ed’s leg laid across his lap, his lit cigarette bobbing like a seismometer pen between his lips as he conversed with the assembled crowd, all the while working the razor up and down the girl’s leg. Any student of Chekhov can tell you what happened next. Somewhere behind the girl’s knee Levis failed to account for pressure and topography, and the blade cut her, a jet of blood arcing across the room.
The story ended there. I cannot confirm if there was consequence for Levis or care for the co-ed. Indeed, having not been its author, I hesitate to repeat this tale, but what struck me then is what strikes me now—that scene, no matter its truth, was a Levis poem. Within it, his inimitable mix of sensuality and sudden violence, his irreverent West Coast philosophizing that blurred the lines of good taste and art wherein the aesthetics of pleasure were balanced tremulously upon the literal blade of potential harm. In his work as in this scene, we find the capricious verve of good nights gone bad, the cautionary tales of desperate souls trampling each other in the dark of alcohol, drugs, or depression as they search blindly for a light switch. But is that it? Hardly.
Levis may have been a son of Fresno (what Philip Levine, his mentor and friend, referred to as “the asshole of the world”), but he was also a scholar and philosopher of the world. His poetry is full of poetry (Stevens, Herbert, Rimbaud, so many others), of intelligence, of sensitivity. Yet, it’s the darkness at the edge of his town—the haunted longing so endemic to the children of the ‘capital-W’ west what with its endless vistas and boomtowns gone bust, those places where generations toiled to sow their dreams to no effect while others struck rich by purest chance—that reminds us of how tenuous our grasp on property and self can be. Levis’s poems contain the gorgeous heartbreak of our American experiment—our fascination with violence and redemption, with romance and reality, with money, love, family, and the foolish myth of independence, self-reliance, and freedom that leaves us, like the poet, most often alone and writing against it, praying in our secular ways for guidance.
So, what to make of Levis’s final—chronologically speaking—secular prayer in “God Is Always Seventeen”? Whatever guidance is sought is immediately imperiled by the speaker who declares, “This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want / To finish it.” Here, the poem threatens to end before it’s even begun—an overwhelming weariness or wariness consuming the poet—and what follows is an antic balancing act between pop-culture bravado and parental heartbreak as the following lines surge with punk insouciance, pushing the reader and their concern back on their heels as the speaker claims his desire for onanism (as he puts it, “jack[ing] off”) will wither under his mature lamentations to a meth-curious, musically inclined God who gives long-dead composers blue-collar jobs in red dirt states. This is Levis the smartass, the learned joker playing on his yokel roots to better set up the artistry of his intellect. Misdirection, you might call it, as we get The Clash and Mozart and Tulsa with St. Louis bankers and the Medellín Cartel waiting in the wings, but none of this will ultimately distract from “the darkness of the night spreading / Over the sky…” Try as he might, the poet will not save us with words from what’s coming. In fact, words will only fail him in the end.
But before that, other failures. Sex, though never a happy concern in Levis’s poems, was nonetheless a concern: the resigned adultery of “Oaxaca, 1983” (“Both of us were / Married then, to others, & neither one of us especially wanted it / To happen. Like the children who skate endlessly in Auden’s poem / About Brueghel, who didn’t want to skate that long, then had to, at the edge / Of a pond, painted there, & no boy falling out of the sky above them.”); the embittered promiscuity of “After the Blue Note Closes” (“[…]it is late for blessings: All night / I’ve held a woman who, / Tomorrow, I will not want to see again, & who, / Tomorrow, probably will feel the same / For me.”). But now, the sexual adventure and promise of strangers is gone—the body is no longer a place of pleasure but of pity, and the demands of maintaining a home must come first. You could call this an acceptance of adulthood, but the sense of dislocation—Mozart reincarnated and waxing floors in Oklahoma, homes owned by out-of-state banks that are also in cahoots with Columbian drug lords, a man who didn’t realize he shot and robbed a convenience store clerk, the speaker’s estranged relationship with his son—reigns. No one knows what they’re doing nor does anyone know who’s in charge because no one, neither speaker nor heavenly or financial father, can self-govern effectively.
Such dislocation—sometimes of bones, more often of psyche—is central to Levis’s poetics, especially in his explorations of the politics of transgression. In “God is Always Seventeen,” a conversation—another hallmark of Levis’s work, the way we tell stories and what their telling says about us—unfolds that combines Denis Johnson’s loveable losers, Charles Bukowski’s leering cynicism, and Philip Levine’s blue-collar suffering raised to art. At a bar, one man talks; other men listen. Who’s in charge? No one, it turns out: “[…] what happened in [the story] was a clerk bleeding to death / In a 7-Eleven, & the guy telling it called 911 for an ambulance, & the police found both / Cash from the till & the gun on him when they arrived. He didn’t think he’d shot / Anyone that night or anyone ever & was surprised & puzzled / When they made a match on the gun, the clerk lived to testify, & they convicted / Him.” Once the story’s been told, the listeners filter out in silence, “[…] one by one, we paid & got up & left / And went out under the stars.” No punchline. No cackling disappointment. True to life, the price of such violence is abandonment. It alienates. It disgusts. It forever rends. But still it fascinates, particularly in places where the notion of frontier justice (see “Winter Stars”: “My father once broke a man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor.”) lives large in the imagination of a people whose conversations about how their civilization came to be must fall into myth so as not to rouse the unsettled ghosts of history.
One conversation that doesn’t ensue in this poem is the most necessary one—that between father and son who “[don’t] know what to say to each other.” The volta that breaks the spell of all that followed is simple enough: “I have a child who isn’t doing well in school.” Here, the mask drops, the heart opens, and the poem halts. The father cannot connect with the son and the son, seemingly, has no interest in connecting with the father, but being together they must do something in Robert Creeley-fashion to stave off the darkness, so they go to a record shop. Much like the rainy prison window painting tears on Robert Blake’s unfeeling face in In Cold Blood, the “inconsolable” music in the store betrays the relationship’s truth, as do the clerks who “call out loudly Can I Help Anybody & Can I Help Someone…” Finally, after so much isolation, help is offered, but it’s not the kind needed, so the speaker—beyond action, beyond hope—can only wonder what will become of them. It’s a fair question—perhaps the fairest question we can ask—and one over which we have limited control. Stories will be told, and like those told by the ex-con in the bar or even about the poet himself, we cannot say how they will be received; only that, if remembered, we may recognize in those tales characters no less complex and human than ourselves.
