Introduction
BY DAVID RODERICK
I’m writing this intro from a worn-down hotel room in my hometown, a few weeks after my mother’s death. An enormous storm is about to ride roughshod over this whole coast, dumping feet of snow. My dinner tonight: Doritos and a cup of lukewarm tea. On the muted television a news broadcast covers the state-sponsored murder of another fellow citizen. I spent the day sorting through my mother’s things, leaving most of her life’s belongings at a thrift shop, then came back to this hotel to find a few hundred clowns in the lobby. Yes, real clowns from the Northeast Clown Institute, gathering for their annual convention. These folks went all out, juggling and dancing and mugging for cameras. I even witnessed a clown on stilts, striding up and down the hallway.
There’s something about the cosmic joke of this particular day, and now its final task—writing alone in a hotel room—that echoes the poetry of Larry Levis. The deep blue streak that runs through his writing resonates with me. He wrote about strained family relationships and failed love; about death and landscape (and the death of landscapes); about regular people like you and me. When I read his poems about loneliness or grief, I feel recognized. And when his poems reach for beauty, my spirit soars.
After experiencing my mother’s material life flow away from me this afternoon (dishes and pots, stacks of Tupperware, scented candles, hair curlers, doo dads, sox), after wading through the clowns’ buoyant revelry (which I admired but was too numb to feel), I heaved onto my hotel bed and opened Levis’s Elegy for the first time in at least a decade. These lines, from the book’s opening poem (“The Two Trees”) greeted me:
Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced
By failure. It clung to me & did not let go.
When I ran, brother limitation raced
Beside me like a shadow. Have you never
Felt like this, everyone you know,
Turning, the more they talked, into…
Acquaintances? So many strong opinions!
And when I tried to speak—
Someone always interrupting. My head ached.
And I would walk home in the blackness of winter.
I still had two friends, but they were trees.
One was a box elder, the other a horse chestnut.
I used to stop on my way home & talk to each
Of them.
Discursive and intimate passages like this are what drew me to Levis’s work years ago. It was a thrill to be addressed one-on-one, to be admitted into his private, painful way of seeing. In this passage I detect the influence of Dante, Yeats, Whitman, and Plath. I also see an element of American loneliness that feels almost too palpable. Fortunately, the passage welcomes us, “Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced / by failure,” even while the speaker (and presumably the poet) feels utterly alienated from others. In the midst of this despair, Levis still manages to reach out to us in a hopeful, amiable manner. He offers us the privilege of listening to his most secret thoughts. If only we could reply.
As it happens, we now have that opportunity. Two new volumes of Levis’s work have just been published: The University of Pittsburgh Press’s reissue of Levis’s classic Winter Stars, and Graywolf Press’s collected Swirl & Vortex, edited by David St. John. Because of these two books, it seems like the perfect moment to gather critical interpretations of Levis’s writing and discuss how it holds up thirty years after his untimely death at age 49.
A friend of mine noted that though Levis influenced many writers profoundly, his poems haven’t been widely anthologized. Why? Perhaps for some editors, Levis’s intimacy is off-putting, too personal–as if his voice slips the grasp of conventional critical approaches. Also, there are many poems throughout his work that pull the reader into the frame, dissolving boundaries between subject and object. In “The Two Trees,” notice how we, the listeners, are addressed as friends and welcomed to witness Levis’s alienation and failure. I think we’re capable of inhabiting moments like this because Levis has such a marvelous painter’s eye. He is an extraordinary sensory writer–a poet of texture, color, detail, and depth. The trick of his poetry is the delicate balance between his private pathos and democratic, incantatory vision.
What is a retrospective supposed to do? Reassess and recalibrate. Perhaps introduce the work to a younger audience that hasn’t yet been exposed. I hope the essays Adroit has collected here offer new perspectives on Levis’s work. Paisley Rekdal’s introduction to Winter Stars and David St. John’s afterword for Swirl & Vortex anchored this project from the start. We’re grateful to them for their generosity. We also scored remarkable insights from St. John’s co-editors, James Ciano and L.A. Johnson. The other essays included here, submitted by poets Shara Lessley, Jon Pineda, Adam O. Davis, Nathan Xavier Osorio, and Megan Pinto, offer a mix of brilliant personal and critical perspectives on Levis’s life, teaching, and poems. Hopefully this unique “Enlightenments” section supports the superb volumes published by Pittsburgh and Graywolf, allowing more readers to experience the wisdom, humanity, and beauty found in Levis’s poems.