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BY JON PINEDA
In the mid-90s, I lived in a small studio apartment on Franklin Street in Richmond, Virginia. There was a room in the basement of the building where residents were told to leave their trash. But there was an art to it one had to adopt. You had to swing and lob each of your bags, if just to reach the mountainous heap already filled with mostly ripped packaging and the rot of old meals. It was hard then—and even now—not to find something figurative in the action, in each attempt.
To make matters worse, the mountain itself was guarded by a mischief of rats.
Looking back now, 30 years later, I think there was something singular about these animals. Their dark fur, slick, as if combed into place. Their bodies, posed and huge. They had, even without one’s impulse to anthropomorphize them, something that approximated a kind of style.
I had moved to the city to study with the poet Larry Levis. But Larry wasn’t in Richmond anymore. He had died that summer, and yet, like the ghost of Poe returning in his poem “Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It,” Larry was also very much alive. You could walk into the bookstore on Harrison and hear people mention his name casually. As if, at just that moment, he might be down the street at the Village Cafe, on the corner of Harrison and Grace, a local haunt for many of us studying in VCU’s MFA program.
Months earlier, when I learned the news of Larry’s death, I had already signed a lease for my apartment on Franklin, not even a block away from where I would take my poetry workshops. That summer, I packed my things and filled my satchel with my dog-eared copies of Winter Stars and The Widening Spell of the Leaves. I was not certain of anything in my life. All I really knew was that poetry, especially Larry’s, made me feel differently about the world. That, and that I needed to carry Larry’s work with me into the future.
I should mention here how I first learned of Larry Levis and those gorgeous poems that felt, to me, like suspension bridges made of air. So much of his work was and is exquisitely discursive, yet somehow is also strengthened by its very nature of extension, of continuing. The momentum his poems generated through apposition are celebratory feats. I simply had never encountered work such as his.
Prior to applying to MFA programs, I would spend afternoons at the local library off Cedar Road in Great Bridge, a small town along the Intracoastal Waterway in Chesapeake, Virginia. The center of town is not far from the tidal creeks and marshes of my childhood, where, as a boy, I explored such landscapes with canoes and shotguns, but it was also worlds away from the California of Larry’s poems.
Each day, I spent afternoons at the library reading poetry, and then later, I would drive to my job at a giant chain bookstore in Virginia Beach, where I unloaded pallets of books, mostly upmarket bestsellers, and scanned each copy before shelving them onto towering endcaps for customers to consume.
The library had an aisle with a few shelves dedicated to contemporary American poetry. All of it, of course, was alphabetized by an author’s last name, and because I wanted nothing more than to be a poet, I thought it might be a good thing to begin at the “A’s” and work my way down letter by letter, until I had finished the entire alphabet. That was the goal, at least.
But when I reached the “L’s,” I hit a snag. I had been returning to Philip Levine’s What Work Is, which had been published a few years before, and I remember standing in the aisle that day, with the book open, whispering aloud the poem that bore the title of the full collection. Those who know this poem know its sublime narrative of the speaker, waiting in a long line of factory workers, thinking he could see his brother up ahead, and yet, later, knowing it was impossible because his brother wasn’t actually there at all, he was at home sleeping off an earlier shift. After reading that poem, I remember turning to the front of Levine’s book and seeing that he’d dedicated it to Larry Levis.
Larry Levis.
At the time, I didn’t know who this was. I didn’t know if he was a poet, and I didn’t know that decades before Larry had been Levine’s undergraduate student at Fresno State. All I knew was that the book I was holding, this book that had made me feel connected to the world, had been dedicated to Larry. When I returned it to the shelf, I saw the name again, multiple times—Larry Levis. How had I missed it?
Next to Levine’s work were all of Larry’s collections lined up in a row, starting with Wrecking Crew and continuing on until they reached The Widening Spell of the Leaves.
I don’t know why I pulled down Winter Stars first and opened it, stopping at random on the poem “In the City of Light” to read the lines: “The last thing my father did for me / Was map a way: he died, & so / Made death possible. If he could do it, I / Will also, someday, be so honored.”
Here were themes of finality (“last thing”) and possession (“my father”) juxtaposed with the speaker’s recognition of an offering (“for me”). The very idea of death had been tilted, shown to me in a way I had not considered. Immediately following was the enjambment of the third line, ending with the word “I” that held the expectation of what? Before the subsequent line offers context, it comes forward with the future tense (“Will also), which speaks to an acknowledgment of continuing.
I mention this idea of continuing because embedded in these opening lines are also what I’ve come to think of as Larry’s signature punctuation: the ampersand. It is prevalent in Winter Stars (where, after three previous collections, it makes its first appearance), in The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and in his posthumous collection Elegy.
When I think back to how I first reveled in the wonder of Larry’s discursive lines, of the humor and honesty with which his poems often simultaneously face the beauty, the mystery, and even the absurdity of existence, I remember the way the ampersand remains present, whether implicitly or explicitly, and how it connects the mysterious scaffolding of Larry’s genius.
That fall, during my first semester at VCU, I would learn that Larry didn’t like the poems I’d submitted as part of my MFA application. I had learned this bit of unfortunate information from a faculty member who felt the need to let me know. We were standing on Franklin, a block away from those places on Harrison and Grace that I’ve mentioned already. I want to say that I wasn’t hurt learning such a thing—Larry, after all, had been one of my literary heroes—but that would be a lie.
The first thing I did after leaving that conversation was to go back to my apartment and read Larry’s work. I took out my copy of Winter Stars and read it from beginning to end. I did the same with The Widening Spell of the Leaves.
Larry’s work still did the thing that made me believe in poetry. I felt indebted.
That same evening, I went down to the basement of my apartment building. I carried a trash bag filled with the drafts of those poems—my poems—the ones that had brought me to this place. I did the thing I had learned to do. I had to keep going. I swung and lobbed the bag onto the mountain. The rats scattered.
