Beautiful and Hopeless, Bright & Wrong
BY SHARA LESSLEY
Spring quarter in the 1990s, a voice student from Fresno slipped me a handwritten copy of a dozen quatrains by Larry Levis. I’d never heard of him. What I did recognize was an emotional weather borne of a particular place. “The Poet at Seventeen” wasn’t some idyllic ode to the Golden State’s famed poppies or coastal redwoods, but representative of California’s oft-maligned or wholly ignored Central Valley. Having been raised just thirty-five minutes from Levis’s hometown of Selma, I saw how “The Poet at Seventeen” made the region’s unspoken paradoxes plain—particularly, those tensions between the barren and fertile, impoverished and affluent. To my ear, Levis’s diction resurrected the familiar “monotone” of tractors discing “the same / Gray earth for years.” Thanks to the particularity of phrasing, I could almost smell the “glum” variety of raisin that “made that little hell of days—” for laborers “Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes / They picked.” But most significantly, via the subtle negotiation of reticence and self-revelation, I could intuit Levis’s homegrown boredom, isolation, and sensitivity as if those very feelings were my own.
And hadn’t they been? Perhaps Levis’s rendering of the valley’s dusty acres and fog-locked winters remains especially potent to me because, like the poet, the land’s familiarity is rooted to the familial. Whereas Levis’s parents owned expansive vineyards and orchards (“inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner / […] always seemed afraid of something, / And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs”), I’m the descendent of migrant fieldworkers. Whatever our early economic differences, upon first reading “The Poet at Seventeen,” I related immediately to the speaker’s reminiscences of a place where agriculture is a livelihood, adversary, time’s measure, and—for the lonely—a steady companion. And because land shapes what it yields, whether food, culture, power, innovation, scarcity, or selfhood, I also understood Levis’s fealty—and ambivalence—to Selma and its surroundings, as well as his later characterization of the San Joaquin Valley as “beautiful and hopeless.”
While the above description of Central California rings at least partly true to my upbringing there, the contrariness of Levis’s characterization (“beautiful and hopeless”) provides insight to his poetics. Perusing Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems, I continue to marvel at Levis’s mastery of gradation and nuance. Whether revisiting his sprawling elegies, cogent meditations on time, or the elliptical or more plot-driven poems, it’s via the precise expression of seemingly obverse feelings and impulses that Levis most fully inhabits what we think of as “the self.” Take, for example, the restless rumination in lines like “You slept with your mouth open. // You were nothing. / You were snow falling through the ribs / Of the dead. // You were all I had.” As the sentences move between stillness (sleep) and motion (falling snow), the literal (living “you”) and figurative (“ribs / Of the dead”), self-erasure (“You were nothing”) and affirmation (“You were all I had”), Levis accesses the speaker’s interiority. In this accumulation of oppositional thoughts and action, we experience the enactment of inner confusion as the stanzas teeter toward rationalization and resolution. Like much of Levis’s oeuvre, the poem, titled “The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing,” operates simultaneously across several modes: it is anecdotal and philosophical, argumentative but not exclusively rhetorical, private but not hermetic, troubled but not wholly forlorn.
Written around the same period as the poet’s fourth collection, Winter Stars, but posthumously published decades later in The Darkening Trapeze, “Gossip in the Village” likewise uses snow and sleep to depict human despair, although the sonnet’s crisis isn’t existential. Instead, devastated by eros, the poem’s solitary speaker wakes to desire’s inevitable fact and thus concludes, “My fate, I will think, / Will be to have no fate. I will feel suddenly hungry. // The morning will be bright & wrong” (emphasis mine). “Beautiful and hopeless.” “Bright & wrong.” With such pairings, Levis privileges observation and feeling, assessment and pronouncement. Though seemingly incompatible in terms of meaning, each word in the aforementioned phrases is made more resonant as it is fused with its counterpart.
Such contradictions, again, point to a critical tension in Levis’s poetry; that is, lyricism laid over occasions of isolation, alienation, or abjection. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It.” Recalls the poem’s speaker, “I worked with men in vineyards once who were paid / In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.” Here, Levis juxtaposes a plainspoken iambically-driven line with one that is sensory and figurative, thus contrasting the indisputable fact of “work” with those ethereal “wages” that dissipate into the elements (“thin as water,” “rose like heat”). What follows are stanzas that, while rich in imagery and acoustics, further amplify the prevailing conditions of the working poor who “lived in rows of makeshift sheds the owner hauled // Into an orchard too old to bother picking anymore, / And where, at dusk, a visible hunger // Raced along the limbs of the trees surrounding them.” Note, here, how slant and internal rhyme emphasize injustice: the consonant, r, alliteratively threads rows and rushing while binding, via consonance, owner, bother, anymore, where, and the all-consuming hunger.
Time and again, across Swirl & Vortex, readers witness Levis’s careful lyricism, even when what’s rendered might be considered lowly, melancholic, outcast, or banal. “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank,” for instance, begins with a simple declaration, albeit one that emphasizes ignorance. “I don’t know what happens to grass,” admits the speaker, echoing Whitman (“A child said, What is the grass?”). Unlike Whitman, however, Levis’s grass isn’t God’s handkerchief or an emblem of democracy. Instead, the poem follows the emotional arc of a Sisyphean landowner who moves from sympathy to resentment before arriving at envy for grass that, season after season, wildly grows “In some other spot, & with a different look / This time, as if it had an idea / For a peninsula, maybe, or its shape / Reclining on a map….” Despite the mortal farmer’s efforts to master the earth, Levis’s grass not only remains but renews. Static yet in motion, “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank” is of and outside time. And while Whitman’s communal tufts are “out of hopeful green stuff woven” Levis’s “rank but still blossoming weeds” have “nothing / To do with us” as grass simply appears “To fight long & well / For its right to be, & be grass…”
It’s this clear-sightedness that I’ve come to expect of Levis, whether the given poem takes place in a Central California field or on a snowy evening in an apartment in the Midwest, a graveyard in Rome or some far-flung corner of the poet’s imagination. As a whole, Swirl & Vortex marks the range of Levis as meditative and discursive, reticent and emotive, observer of the local and chronicler of the mythic self. But, above all else, the Collected Poems reveals Levis as a writer of telling contradictions, as illustrated in the final stanza of “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It”:
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t.
