Dreaming of Design: Reading Denise Levertov

Abstract

You are alone forming darkness into dark on white paper (CEP 109-10) To begin just here is to mark a plausible originating moment in reading of Denise Levertov's poetry, as inscribed within work itself, a moment familiar to anyone who has written anything that draws upon buried resources, a working point from which to probe a few dimensions of a model of poetic enterprise: writer (it is not she, but another, under observation) in solitude, engaged in a process of formation whose product, words, bears imprint, darkness, of source. poem cited here is called Ring of Changes, roughly midway in With Eyes at Back of Our Heads, published in 1960, Levertov's third American volume, and her fourth volume overall. (The poem is later collected in CEP 106-10.) In fact, passage is a more literal rendering of a moment from a poem that precedes this volume by fourteen years, aptly titled Interim (CEP 4), where we find darkness and paper of our first passage conflated into black page of night. Also, writer's stance is somewhat more passive in earlier formulation, where words will spring from darkness now . . . to fill hollow mind/laid still to hear them. change from receptive stance (mind/laid still) to active (forming darkness into words) would be not an abandonment of one position in favor of another, but a recognition of difference. In Testament, published in same year as Ring of Changes, Levertov begins by characterizing poets both as instruments on which power of poetry plays and as makers, craftsmen (PW 3), positions she would elaborate a few years later in Work and Inspiration: Inviting Muse: Poems come into being in two ways. There are those which . . . seem to appear out of nowhere, complete or very nearly so and poems that are hard to write (PW 25). In both Interim and Ring of Changes proceed from darkness. Similarly, in The Wife speaker imagines her husband plucking/truth from dark surrounding nowhere (CEP 114). This darkness is an unspecified elsewhere. Although it is treated as a space, it is neither clearly separated from nor integrated self that writes, though logic, expectation, and evidence suggest latter. It might be described as a space, an elsewhere, opened within self, an indwelling otherness which self communes. It may be memory or conscience or unconscious. In fifth section of Ring of Changes, section from which our first passage is taken, we find two people, writer and speaker, in a room, a space, listening to a radio broadcast of a concert by Pablo Casals, whose instrument, even, is another space: The cello is hollow . . . /The space of cello is shaped. A space within a space, and more: there is space in us-- but lines and planes of its form are what we reach for and fall, touching nothing (outside ourselves and yet standing somewhere within our own space, in its darkness). This space, whose darkness writer forms into words, is everything, repeated everywhere, both inside and outside, object of striving (what we reach for) and lure of tragedy (and fall), real but intangible (touching nothing). This room, section concludes, is the living-room, work-room (108-10). Thus, in this originating moment, space repeats space, and a poem, in an elegant phrasing, is the proper space/holding existences in grave distinction (80). In The Vigil poet writes of waiting for animal god that with its claws opens/Chinese boxes (98). And in The Room poet proposes an elaborate network of mirrors to give access to a world beyond my own glance: With enough mirrors within and even without room, a cantilever supporting them, mountains and oceans might be manifest. But even here she perceives danger that I could encounter my own eyes too often (99). …