On Editing Larry Levis’s Swirl & Vortex
BY L. A. JOHNSON
“For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other.” This is a line from the last poem, “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans,” in the last book Larry Levis published in his lifetime. When I read those words for the first time more than a decade ago, it shook my mind loose the way you might beat a rug clean of dust. I was young, trying to make sense of my own life and my own writing, wondering if there was any sense to be made at all. Later, in this same poem, he offers a similar line, “But it’s all or nothing in this life.” This idea of one’s only life is a throughline connecting all of Levis’s work and became a thread which I followed both to understand my own life and to guide my process as an editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis.
When I arrived at the University of Southern California to pursue my doctorate, I began earnestly studying Levis with my mentor and now co-editor, David St. John. I learned that particular line of thought had trickled down to Levis through Gregory Orr, who had published a poem simply titled “Poem” from his first book with the opening line: “This life like no other.” Though the seed may have come from Orr, Levis made this concept his own; the stakes of one’s only life bend and refract in his poems and equally shift inside my own life and writing.
Larry Levis was a man who made a life of words and made his life into words. When I began my work as associate editor in 2022, I found myself going on long walks, asking the fundamental question: who was Larry? I asked this because, in perceiving his work from an editorial perspective and making sense of the startling new posthumous poems and unfinished writing we discovered, I found that a significant part of my work was to understand Larry’s sensibilities as a person and as a writer—and thus, as a revisor of poems. What I learned was how to decode the person behind the myth of Larry. I had to learn how to let Larry become real.
Larry Levis was a passionate revisor. Beyond working like a craftsman on individual lines and images, he was also willing to export entire sections from one poem to another. One of the confusing things about analyzing all the materials and papers and poems Levis left behind was that there were many overlaps, and it took significant time to determine where one poem ended and another poem began. Drafts would be worked on for months and years; drafts would be abandoned. One of the profoundest joys of this editorial process was bringing forth previously unpublished poems by Levis and, remarkably, finding later drafts of poems we once thought were finished.
One such poem was “La Strada.” Through the archives, we discovered many drafts, the dates for which reveal that Levis was working on this poem in his final months of life. The final draft, now brought forward in Swirl & Vortex, contains various reworkings of the previously published version and, most significantly, a final section that, in my opinion, elevates this poem to a paragon of his final work. Yet throughout all the drafts, the opening line remained the same: “This life & no other.” Here was this startling idea again. It felt like Levis was pulling me on a cosmic string through his work and through my life, a line attempting to simplify what it means to live and what it means to die. For me, this idea also expanded to make me consider what it meant for someone like me—a small child in California when Levis died in 1996—to be partially responsible for the writing of his lifetime; this work on his poems became the most important work of my life.
The closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience occurred during certain hours when I labored intensely with David St. John and James Ciano to enact the final versions of the newly discovered poems by poring over the multiple drafts, including Levis’s own handwritten corrections and his random notes in the margins. I call this experience “religious” because in that process, my mind seemed to be synchronized with the minds of my co-editors as well as Levis’s mind and his voice, his only life, and it was almost as if I could hear him speaking to me across time, from his past-life to my living one. “For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other.” Throughout the process of this work, I thought constantly of this idea. Levis was right: everyone lives and everyone dies. But Levis was wrong: there is another life. There is a life in poetry that knows no boundaries of the living and the dead, time and space. Larry had one life, yes, but his poems have another. His poems go on living in the minds of all of us who read his work.
