Larry Levis’s Swirl & Vortex: Afterword
BY DAVID ST. JOHN
Swirl & Vortex includes in its entirety the five collections of poetry Larry Levis published during his lifetime: Wrecking Crew, The Afterlife, The Dollmaker’s Ghost, Winter Stars, and The Widening Spell of the Leaves. The poems of these last two volumes, his signature collections, announced Levis’s profound influence on the future course of American poetry. To these original books, I have added a new volume, A Hotel on Fire, a reframing of the poems published in Levis’s posthumous collections, Elegy (1997, edited by Philip Levine) and The Darkening Trapeze (2016, edited by me). These two collections, published almost twenty years apart, represent Levis’s posthumous work. Yet, I have always felt the late poetry created a complete poetic vision that the two individual volumes had broken in half.
The story of editing Levis’s collection Elegy, from over two hundred pages of poems and drafts gathered after his death, may be found in both Levine’s foreword to Elegy and my own afterword to The Darkening Trapeze, a collection drawn from the poems not included in the former book. For Elegy, Levine had chosen to hold back some poems due to their length and others for their allusions to drug use. Almost immediately after the publication of The Darkening Trapeze, I understood that I wanted to gather, one day, all of Levis’s posthumously published poetry in a single volume. A Hotel on Fire is that imagined collection, housed firmly within the larger frame of Swirl & Vortex. My hope is that readers experience, in A Hotel on Fire, the poised meditations of Levis’s visionary late work, as well previously unknown poems, alongside the stunning body of poetry created by his elegies.
Over these past thirty years, I’ve grown to feel that Levis’s elegies may be read as an ongoing dialogue of self and soul, one constantly revised and inflected by history. The elegies represent, for me, the most powerful and complexly braided work of Levis’s career. Philosophically and politically astute, stylistically inventive and provocative, Levis’s elegies resonate as the culmination of a lifetime dedicated to the act of writing poetry, which he considered the most fiercely self-reflective and precarious of the arts. I’ve also held a deep conviction that Levis’s elegies should be published together in a single group, in the manner of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which I believe was a decision Levis had been moving toward—after having first resisted this possibility—in the year before his death. In the Levis archives, one discovers that many of the poems first titled “Poem with . . .” became, instead, “Elegy with . . . ,” as they then remained, suggesting it had become Levis’s intention to collect these poems under the book title Elegy, which he’d told Philip Levine would be, in fact, the title of his next collection. “Elegy,” the final section of A Hotel on Fire, asks readers to experience these poems as a single (and singular) body of work, although a final intended sequence for these elegies is impossible to know.
In his elegies, one feels that Levis no longer crosses “borders” in his poetry as much as he simply dissolves them. He moves past the checkpoints of daily convention, holding a kind of passport of otherness—not of the sublime, but something more final. The solitary speaker in these poems walks always alone in an increasingly profound isolation. It’s not sufficient to call this Levis’s solitude or his solitariness. It is an element far fiercer. Levis’s speaker is so singular he seems beyond the illusions of community or consolation. In his late poems, Levis’s latent Catholicism surfaces as he reflects on guilt, and threads of abjection emerge in his poetry, as well as invocations of God. About the poem “Prayer,” a previously unknown elegy for his parents, Levis’s sister Sheila Brady wrote to me: “I was rereading Larry’s ‘Prayer,’ and realized that he must have written it soon after my father’s death. I know where he was standing, which window he was looking through. Larry lived, not always comfortably, in those empty spaces between belief and nothing.”
I want to add a personal note on Levis’s poem sequence “The Perfection of Solitude.” This twenty-eight-page, seven-part requiem stands as one of Levis’s most compelling works. There is substantial critical writing touching on “The Perfection of Solitude,” some of it focusing on the poem’s second section, “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex,” which reads as a kind of paradigm not only for this sequence but also for the whole of Levis’s late poetry. The “swirl,” that gestural embrace of Levis’s meditations, emulates an ideal he loved in Wallace Stevens—“the act of the mind”—that becomes, in his poetry, the swirl of the imagination as the narrative gyre of a poem is woven by long streams of appositive phrases. The swirl begins to widen like the parentheticals around a friend’s discursive aside, or a lover’s arms, until the vortex of the reflection slowly draws closed around a crystallized moment. Levis’s capacious intelligence and constant generosity of spirit move these poems across a staggering range of philosophical, historical, and personal concerns. He often speaks while in the act of passage, a lyric traveler, restlessly in movement, scrupulously attentive.
I now think of Levis’s solitude as his central vocation in many ways. His claiming of outsidership embraces figures like Caravaggio, François Villon, the unnamed “thief in the rigging,” and those twin thieves on their crosses at Calvary. Yet Levis remains stubbornly of this world. His late poems show a prodigal’s desire for the lost family. In “Prayer,” Levis sees he is the son who is now himself the father of a distant son, a triangulation of loss. His family represents a direction home and the possibility of gratitude for what remains of what he loved. Like other prodigals, Levis looks back, in memory, to find his next way forward.
Countering these solitudes, throughout all of Levis’s books, we discover his sly humor, exquisite lyricism, and his trust in the physicality of the present. He is expansive and compassionate, embodying what Galway Kinnell calls “tenderness toward existence.” Thirty years after his death, Larry Levis’s powerful voice—at once wry and resonant, disarming and humane—continues to speak to us from the swirling vortices of a century’s end, as we are drawn again into the widening spell of his world-making.
Afterword copyright © 2026 by David St. John. Reprinted from Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems by Larry Levis with the permission of the author and Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.
