Larry Levis’s Winter Stars: An Introduction
BY PAISLEY REKDAL
I like to tell poetry friends that I took my job at the University of Utah because Larry Levis once taught here, a statement that’s only partly a joke, as of course I came to Salt Lake for a host of reasons not unlike those you’d find in a Levis poem itself: a collapsed marriage, the death of a former teacher, the amorphous desire to find some better language for my life in a landscape whose wildness made me feel at once both profoundly at home and alien. During my early years as a poet, Levis’s poems generated in me a mystic charge unlike that of almost any other contemporary American poet. So, it was with both excitement and trepidation that I approached writing this introduction, as it would require a critical re-reading of his seminal book Winter Stars, a collection I studied obsessively in my youth. Would Levis still cast his spell? Or would I now confront the deckle edge of his aesthetics, new infelicities to his sentiments perhaps, political tripwires around selfhood that almost no poet writing as openly about masculinity, desire, history, and class as Levis did in the late ’90s could likely escape?
What I found instead was a poet whose imaginative powers were nearing, but not yet at, their peak: a poet who was beginning to locate himself within a nexus of forces he could feel if not always articulate. In Winter Stars, we see Levis caught in the private web of family, with its particular burdens of paternity and marriage; in the social collisions of race and class within a California farming community; and in the larger historical conversation any intellectual might find himself engaging through the traumas of history. This last subject Levis would return to most powerfully in his following collection, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, the very first collection of his I read, purchased after a friend (a fiction writer, no less!) stumbled upon it at our local bookstore and told me he’d been stunned by its ambition.
In retrospect, it shouldn’t surprise me that Levis’s poetry would appeal to a novelist. Levis’s work is often characterized as narrative, a slightly misleading depiction of his style, as Levis’s rangy, anecdotally inspired poems give readers the appearance of storytelling while remaining, at heart, lyric constructions. While focused on events and people, Levis’s poems rarely spin out cause and consequence in progressive time. Rather, his poems evolve within a continuous whirl of sensation and memory, in which Levis’s speakers exist in both the present and past, creatures of both material reality and imaginative speculation. The result is that the speaker of each poem feels like a jewel turned, slowly, under the light, so that his every flaw and brilliance is revealed. Levis also enjoyed inhabiting—imaginatively—the interiority of people radically other than himself, as we see in his poems “Sensationalism” or “South.” Levis’s subject appropriations were, I believe, a way of interrogating not only our artistic treatment of historical trauma (including Levis’s own) but also of testing out the limits of what we can finally know about each other and history. Some part of reality is always lost to us, Levis reminds me, and in our attempts to recapture the beating heart of the past, we lose as much as we gain through our artistic recreations.
Many critics of Levis have noted that, aesthetically, Winter Stars departs radically from the compressed and highly imagistic poems of his first book, Wrecking Crew, but I would argue that he weds the national politics of those early poems to a more mature meditation on the social politics of personal expression. I would also argue that Levis always had a more capacious mind than what Wrecking Crew formally allowed him. If he was influenced by both European surrealist poets and the Deep Image movement, he learned to marry these impulses to a Whitmanian expansiveness that framed the self as a democratic container: a vehicle for the self’s inherent multiplicity. The result is a hybrid: an American lyric suffused with European duende.
Levis was a poet whose work displayed its influences, a fact that might lead a certain critic to declare the work derivative, though I find Levis’s evolution of style, at the last, sui generis: even thirty years after his death, these poems’ self-revelations feel fresh, their tenderness both aesthetically earnest and earned. Though the poems often center on death, Levis’s vision is not fundamentally bleak. Levis is a love poet whose erotic charge stems from the inevitable fact of loss: the loss of a father, a wife, a lover, a doomed high school classmate with an equally doomed crush on Levis. In these poems, love is felt precisely because flesh is mortal and human consciousness mutable. Here I’m reminded of Levis’s first great influence, John Keats, whose “Ode on a Grecian Urn” might serve as a warning note to readers. If, on the urn, the painted lovers strain and pant after each other, they achieve no satisfaction because they are frozen in time. Such love might seem, at first blush, ideal—desire that cannot disappoint or fade!—but after a while, you sense its nightmarishness. What gradations of feeling can you experience when you cannot satisfy your longing? If there is no death, there is no reason for self-knowledge. There is no reason, either, to make art. In contrast, Levis’s narrator is a man all too aware of how he lives within a cascade of stories and events that will vanish even if, by chance, Levis’s own words survive.
Time, not personal history, is the real subject of Levis’s poems. Levis would likely shrug at my acknowledgment of his particular debt to Keats; I am only surprised I didn’t see their kinship before. I was too dazzled as a young poet by Levis’s wide-ranging subject matters, perhaps confusing form with philosophy. Unlike Keats, Levis didn’t use the sonnet as the formal underpinning for his free-verse meditations. And yet Keats’s restive debate over whether poetry acts finally as liberating vehicle or artificial container for the human imagination is everywhere in Levis’s work. Like Keats, Levis was an ekphrastic poet, but like Whitman, Levis used art as a narrative departure. Note how, in “The Assimilation of the Gypsies,” Levis expands narrative time to walk out of the photographic moment, to explore the interior thoughts and feelings of Josef Koudelka’s subjects. No photo, no matter how carefully composed, can give us the kind of psychological interiority that Levis finally provides us: only a poet’s imagination can do this. It makes the poem its own living art, not a verbal illustration of the static moment any photo presents us.
Of course, as Levis himself admits, he may “have made [everything] up, & that / [i]t could be wrong to make up anything.” Levis recognizes that reader and writer, artist and subject have their own solitude, “so different,” he writes, “from my own.” And yet what is poetry but an opportunity to bridge these solitudes, to link the private life of the reader up with the public language the poet creates, to find oneself part of a larger web of realities in which we already feel ourselves enmeshed? If Levis’s poems risk fantasizing too much, there is a greater risk in imagining nothing at all: one of the heart’s greatest pleasures is in recognizing oneself in the mind of another.
And that is what, finally, Levis teaches me. If our time on earth is limited—and Levis’s tragically was—we become the extension of each other’s memories. Levis’s open-hearted revelations of self now invite our own. In that, his poetic influence on new generations of writers and readers keeps more of us alive.
Paisley Rekdal’s introduction to the reissue of Larry Levis’s Winter Stars, © 2026, is reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
