Levis and All Loss

Abstract

In poems of Elegy, Larry Levis tries again and again to face obliteration, to take in truth of obliteration, to realize it. This great theme fuels poetry in such an unremitting, obsessive way that book's publication after Levis's death seems frighteningly apt. Levis died unexpectedly in May 1996 at age of forty-nine, before he completed book; Elegy was built from Levis's manuscripts by his friend Philip Levine (with help from other friends). It is Levis's sixth book of poems. Elegy fascinates in more than one way. There is real poetic power in it; at same time, one can't help wondering about relation between Levis's death and one's opinion of book; and at same time, there is troubling feeling that book is not quite what it was by its author to be. Elegy feels to me like a quiet sober warning. I am forty-nine years old. I never met Larry Levis. I paid little attention to his books over years, though I did notice something ambitious going on in long loaded discursive poems of Widening Spell of Leaves (1991); it was one of those countless books I meant to get back to. There is no denying that Levis's premature death moved me to look more carefully and respectfully at Elegy than I would otherwise have done. To admit this shames me, a little, but it's a terribly common kind of shame. What is spooky is way Elegy seems to already know that this particular shame will be necessary, inescapable. poetry is suffused with awareness that poet won't last, reader won't last, and appreciation anyone gets in life will never be enough, and thus ultimate sublime efficacy of poetry will have to come-if it comes at all-in a fabulously tenuous and threatened spiritual life beyond life of poet who breathed and walked. Poetry will have to be no more (but also no less?) powerful than a transparent angel, or a bird even more unseen than Keats's nightingale. Here are first two stanzas of The Poem Returning as an Invisible Wren to World: Once, there was a poem. No one read it & poem Grew wise. It grew wise & then it grew thin, No one could see it perched on woman's Small shoulders as she went on working beside gray conveyor belt with others. No one saw poem take shape of a wren, wren you could look through like a window, And see all bitterness of world... Later in poem wren endows factory woman with the knowledge of it singing in her blood-a music which seems to be both wren's song and whispering of a river which does not summon woman to death by drowning; thus wren, poem, seems to have helped woman survive, and yet poem does not at all come to rest in this idea but rather in a cloudy crypto-religious affirmation that everything shall be remembered / When dead come back, & take their places / Beside her on line, & gray conveyor belt / Starts up with its raspy hum again. Like a heaven's. Probably most readers would acknowledge an impressive visionary authority in passages I've quoted, and The Poem Returning as an Invisible Wren to World certainly approaches us on wavelength of greatness; it's kind of poem that goes all out for greatness, in a blatant and somehow ingenuous way. Indeed, most pages of Elegy strike this same note of un-sly, unironized big ambition. And I do feel power in Invisible Wren poem; yet I find poem to be unsuccessful as a whole. I think it is marred by one of Levis's characteristic indulgences, which is a facile generalized reference to poor or oppressed people of world, calling for sympathy in a painlessly familiar manner (an indulgence found also in some poems by Levis's friend and mentor Philip Levine). Also, metaphor of A wren you could look through like a window strikes me, when I step back from poem's momentum, as undermeditated and unearned. …