On Editing Larry Levis’s Swirl & Vortex
BY JAMES CIANO
In the fall of 2023, thanks to the hard work of Ken Hopson at VCU Libraries, L.A. Johnson and I were provided access to the now-digitized files from several floppy disks, and two disk drives, of Larry Levis’s computers. Our task, then, was to sort through all of it. Every two weeks, over the course of that fall, we would meet to sort through another chunk of material, combing the enormous drive, file by file, and draft by iterative draft.
What that work illuminated and reinforced to me was the obsessive nature of Levis’s composition and revision practices. Devoted readers of Levis will be familiar with a repetitive imagistic vocabulary that appears in his late and posthumously published work—I’m thinking, for instance, of how the image of “wave sprawl” appears first in “Late September in Ulcinj” and “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans,” from The Widening Spell of the Leaves, but then recurs in the title and body of “Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It” and “Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope,” and comes back yet again (three times) in the poem “The Necessary Angel,” and in the poem “Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn,” both published in The Darkening Trapeze. I knew all of this—I was writing my dissertation on Levis at the time, but nothing could have prepared me for being inside the files, and to see Levis circling, refining, and then uniting a body of work via the image across poems.
Beyond his imagistic obsession, a much larger pattern of splicing and cannibalizing began to reveal itself. It was not uncommon for Levis to move whole sections or pages from one poem to another; to cut them entirely, only to bring them back again; to try them out in a new context, in a new poem. For instance, a complete draft of a poem titled “The State Shall Wither Away” was ultimately enfolded into the longer poem we now know as “Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope.” An ambitious long poem titled “Red and Black” would ultimately be shortened, then combined with the draft of a different shorter poem to compose “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It.” Levis pulled apart large sections of “A Singing in the Rocks,” then retitled them as individual short poems, some as brief as two lines. A restless devoted spirit haunted the practice—it exemplified a poet who would try almost anything in an attempt to get it right.
While sifting through countless drafts that year, we also came upon other materials that slowly began to contextualize the multi-faceted experience of Larry Levis the person. This digital ephemera, as much as the poems themselves, conveyed the collaged picture of a mind moving “first one way, then another, then both ways at once” as Levis himself puts it in “The Perfection of Solitude.”
There was a bill of sale for his television, alongside course syllabi, including one for a graduate seminar entitled “Abstraction and Feeling,” which offers its own kind of guide to reading Levis. In the course description, he writes “Abstraction, as it occurs in the work of certain poets, does not function as some form of detached, philosophical consolation, but is in itself, and properly, the embodiment of loss. Abstraction, in this case, is not without feeling, but full of feeling, not a relieving of pain but the realization of pain.” There was a request for sabbatical, and in the following file a list of favorite lines—Bill Knott next to Philip Larkin, a passage from Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” next to lyrics from “Stay Free” by The Clash; and countless letters, some to students, some to friends, and many to his dear friend (and former teacher) Philip Levine. I’d read much of this correspondence in Levine’s archive at the New York Public Library, but experiencing the letters in this context—side by side with the drafts—it was clear how the space of correspondence became, for Levis, a way to clarify and expand on the themes that animate the poems themselves.
In a letter to Levine dated August 23, 1995, Levis describes the life and art of Caravaggio & Villon, two artists who were essential to Levis’s own cosmology of exiles: “Their work asks God to forgive them, and in their work, where they portray themselves, disguised, their shame is sufficient. I don’t know what God decided. Time forgives them. We forgive them. I think we forgive them because they didn’t try to sell themselves to us, because they were never for sale.”
With the publication of Swirl & Vortex, I hope a new generation of readers find in these pages a poet who himself was never for sale, a poet who lived “beyond all jurisdiction.” Or, as Charles Wright beautifully reminds us, Levis “remains, whatever the outcome, the pride of his generation, sharp-edged and shining, his only ambition always for his poems, and his poems alone. The right stuff, for sure.”1
1 Charles Wright, “Larry Levis and the First-Time, One time, Irvine Manuscript Day” in A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis, ed. Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long (Eastern Washington University Press: 2004), 10.
