Denise Levertov Research Articles

A poet's revolution: the life of Denise Levertov

Acknowledgements Prologue PART ONE. LISTENING TO DISTANT GUNS (1923--1948) 1. Walls of the Garden, the First Light: Beginnings (1923--1933) 2. When Anna Screamed: Levertov's Response to Nazi Oppression (1933--1939) 3. The Double Image: Apprenticeship during World War II (1939--1946) 4. Recoveries: Abortion, Adventure, and Marriage (1947--1948) PART TWO. COMMON GROUND (1949--1966) 5. Dancing Edgeways: Coming of Age as a Poet in the New World (1949--1955) 6. True Artist: Levertov's Engagement with Tradition (1954--1960) 7. Poem Ascends: Taking a Postion (1960--1963) 8. To Speak of Sorrow: Levertov's Emergence as a Social Poet (1963--1966) PART THREE. LIFE AT WAR (1966--1974) 9. or Death: Living in the Movement (1966--1970) 10. Freeing of the Dust: The Revolution Hits Home (1970--1974) PART FOUR. SLEEPERS AWAKE (1975--1988) 11. A Woman Alone: Beginning Again (1975--1981) 12. Task: Social Protest and Liberation Theology (1982--1988) PART FIVE. RESETTLING (1989--1997) 13. Of Shadow and Flame: The Re-cognition of Identity (1989--1992) 14: Beauty Growls from the Fertile Dark: Facing Death (1992--1997) Notes Bibliography Acknowledgment of Permissions Index

A Poetics of Consenting Attention: Simone Weil's Prayer and the Poetry of Denise Levertov

This article examines the practice of attention as a subject of Denise Levertov's poetry, one that emerges fully only after her commitment to Christianity and its convictions of immanent, incarnate transcendence. Simone Weil fluidly and precisely describes this practice and the receptive consent to the subject that accompanies it in her response to stark contemporary circumstances earlier in the century. I explore Levertov's exemplification of this practice in Weil's terms, arguing that Levertov's hesitant and late-arriving Catholicism, like Weil's own devotional experience, underwrites the responsorial practice of attention. It operates for Levertov as both a poetic method and as a response to contemporary questions of poetics and language, producing a poetics that privileges the possibility of knowing as love and speaking as prayer.

The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

News and Comments

News and Comments Sara S. Hodson The Wallace Stevens Society has received a generous anonymous gift allowing it to establish a Best Article Award for the next ten years. As the donor wishes, this award will be titled the John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal. The award will be judged by a rotating group of three colleagues: two members of the Editorial Board and one Society Officer. We will be delighted to present our first award, for the best article printed in the course of 2011, at our business meeting during the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. Please join us in thanking our anonymous donor for the generosity and vision to make this award possible. In April 2012, the U.S. Postal Service issued a series of commemorative stamps dedicated to twentieth-century poets. The twenty-stamp pane marks the largest group of authors honored together in the history of the Postal Service. It presents ten American poets, each included twice per pane: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Each stamp bears the face of the poet; in Stevens’ case, this is a shot from the well-known series by Sylvia Salmi. The back of the pane features lines of poetry from each of the honored writers. The stamps have been issued as Forever® stamps, which means they are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce rate. Our Art Editor, Alexis Serio, has prepared a cover for the next issue of the Journal based on the series of stamps; pending copyright permission, we hope to have it grace our publication next time. On June 11, 2012, the Academy Award-winning actor and comedian Bill Murray selected two poems by Wallace Stevens, “The Planet on the Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” for his reading at Bubby’s Brooklyn as part of Poets House’s 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Poets House,” its website tells us, “is a national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.” The reading may be enjoyed on YouTube. [End Page 287] Jay Parini will be the featured speaker at the 17th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, to be held on November 3, 2012, at the Hartford Public Library. A novelist, poet, essayist, anthologist, and biographer, Mr. Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. Birthday cake and champagne will follow the presentation. The annual celebration is sponsored by the Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library, with help from the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens (www.stevenspoetry.org). In a series of recitals in early February 2012, Dr. Kathleen Miller and Dr. Kirk Severtson of The Crane School of Music at the State University of New York, Potsdam, presented the rarely performed song cycle for soprano and piano Harmonium Op. 50, by Vincent Persichetti. The performances took place at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio; the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory in Berea, Ohio; and the State University of New York, Fredonia. The song cycle premiered in New York City in 1952, when Stevens forewent the opportunity to attend the performance. Two letters he wrote to the composer are included in Letters of Wallace Stevens. At the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle, the Honorary Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, John N. Serio, was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. This well-deserved honor, which follows twenty-two years upon John’s receipt of the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement in 1990, once again underscores the scholarly editorial community’s high regard for the Journal. We are proud to join in the congratulations. A sampling of rare books on the market over the past year includes two lots offered on October 6, 2011, by Pacific Book Auction Galleries. The first is the November 1914 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse containing “Phases I–IV,” Stevens’ first...

Book Review: The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: Transcending Theological Boundaries in the Writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov and Annie Dillard

Book Review: The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: Transcending Theological Boundaries in the Writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov and Annie Dillard

The Poet’s “Caressive Sight:” Denise Levertov’s Transactions with Nature

The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

Dry Thoughts

Dry Thoughts Ed Block (bio) Dry thoughts in a dry time;the roots of things hang, poised to feel the spring. No tendril penetratesthe rocky soil. Dry wind combs out last autumn's hair. In time of drouth the dry ground yearns to feel the grace of flood. [End Page 123] Ed Block Ed Block is professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, where he teaches courses on poetry and creative writing. His recent research interests include the poetry of Denise Levertov. His poetry has appeared in Crosscurrents, Review for Religious, Janus Head, The Way of St. Francis and other venues. edwin.block@marquette.edu Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Trees and Us: Poetic Metaphors and Pastoral Images

This article elaborates on my earlier contention that poetry and pastoral care have a great deal in common (Capps, The Poet’s Gift, 1993) by focusing on Joyce Kilmer’s well-known poem “Trees.” I use this poem to support the metaphorical association of trees and human beings and to advocate for the pastoral image of the upholder. A brief sketch of Kilmer’s life is presented, and parodies of the poem are used to address the question whether pens are mightier than swords (a question that Kilmer’s own life as a poet and soldier also evokes). The article concludes with Denise Levertov’s poem “From Below” which, together with Kilmer’s “Trees,” illumines the image of the pastor as ordained to be the upholder of the community and of the individuals who comprise it.

In a Hazelnut: Julian of Norwich in Contemporary Women's Poetry

Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century anchoress who is the first woman known to have written a book in English, remains a figure of spiritual, cultural and literary interest. In popular spirituality, Julian’s text is frequently plundered to promote easy messages of spiritual hope. She has also been quoted, with more complexity, in poetry, famously by T.S. Eliot at the conclusion of ‘Little Gidding’. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s concept of the veiled woman as a site of projection, I will look at how four women poets, specifically Denise Levertov, Kathleen Jamie, Lisa Samuels and Frances Presley have also explored Julian’s visionary ‘Showings’ in poetry, in ways that move from the biographically speculative towards the more linguistically enquiring.

Amerykańska ekopoezja – nowa odmiana tradycyjnej poezji natury

American ecological poetry is a relatively recent literary phenomenon that has marked its existence within the tradition of nature poetry. It is represented by such poets as Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Archie R. Ammons, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. The major feature that distinguishes ecopoetry from traditional nature poetry is its distinct biocentrism that is manifested in the attitude of humility towards the world of nature and a critical approach to technological civilization posing danger to Earth’s eco-community. On the level of the ecological consciousness that it promotes, ecopoetry is inspired by such ecosophies as Benedict Spinoza’s monistic pantheism, Aldo Leopold’s earth ethics, Arne Naess’s deep ecology and James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia.

Moon Music: A Composition of Art and Science in Dialogue

Leonardo da Vinci's careful descriptions of the reflection of light by the moon inspired the author to compose a piece for choir on ways of perceiving the moon. In The Two Moons, Leonardo's words are contrasted with two additional texts: facts from a textbook on astronomy and a poem by Denise Levertov. The author discusses the challenge of transforming text and idea into musical sound. Further he discusses exploring natural phenomena by means of parallel efforts in art and science.

Introduction to Focus: A Company of Companies: Essential Micropress Reading

Introduction to Focus:A Company of Companies: Essential Micropress Reading Ted Pelton, Focus Editor (bio) One had the company —Robert Creeley, Autobiography (1990) "The company," as phrased by the late Robert Creeley, was comprised of one's fellows in writing. For Creeley, this might have meant, at different moments of his career trajectory, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe—or any dedicated student he happened to be talking to at the moment. Writing and poetry, particularly by innovative artists, create networks of like-engaged people, who may be at different stages of lives or careers, and whose work may create dissonances and contrasts as well as likenesses, but who are nonetheless united by that shared activity. Is it too easy a pun, too light a formulation, to say that in the past decade various constellations of what Creeley called "the company" have shared the activity of forming companies? The small presses here highlighted (or "micropresses," to distinguish them from their larger, often institutionally supported sistren) are generally the brainchildren of founders who are writers themselves, who have formed presses for the purpose of publishing not themselves but writers whose work they believe in. Or maybe they started by publishing themselves, but now it is the publishing itself that has to a great extent become the signature creative act. They theorize this act as artistic strategy—"kitschy" (Action Books), "anarchic" (Belladonna Books), "weird" (Chiasmus Press), "small" (Futurepoem), anti-"war" (Les Figues Press)—rather than as an economic or market-driven enterprise. Publishing poetry, innovative fiction, hybrid prose, and text and image assemblages, these presses did not get seeded by federal or state grant or foundation money, and are not generally funded by academic institutions (even, in some cases, when the director or publisher is herself an academic). They are mostly volunteer organizations, captained by single persons or couples, perhaps nonprofits, perhaps just non-profiting, and they measure success by continuing to survive and produce books. They have all known crises and continued to survive, drawing a quixotic strength from defying the tremendous odds against them. Indeed, "The Permanent Crisis," to borrow the title of an old Ronald Sukenick story—the never-ending, grinding sense of economic and cultural "futility," as Julie Carr and Tim Roberts of Counterpath Press term it, is perhaps the mitochondria of micropress identity. Everywhere, American culture tells these presses that they are irrelevant, don't matter: that people don't read; that the younger today's citizens are, the less likely they are to bother with books, and so there's no future in publishing; that there are too many books out there anyway (according to both Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, among others); that the books that really matter are those reviewed in periodicals with "New York" in the title, and published by companies located in the skyscraperland that still imagines itself the capital of publishing; that even this industry is dying, so how could some kitchen operation in Buffalo, Denver, Queens, or South Bend claim to know better?; that e-books are the future, or text on multimedia devices that will make reading less boring; that there's a recession, and so people really aren't interested; that there are too many creative writing programs in the US, producing too many writers, too few readers, and far too much Internet blather; that such meager resources as used to fund the arts have been cut; that other types of nonprofits are more essential than are new publishers in these hard times; that, for relevancy's sake, isn't it time they did something else? But I myself recently witnessed something I had only read about in St. Gertrude of Paris, who wrote, the creator of a new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between. The outlaw creator, in the case I saw firsthand, was not me but one of Starcherone Books's authors, Zachary Mason. Lo, in March 2009, Mason's novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey was selected as one of five nominees for the prestigious Young Lions Prize from the New York Public Library, a prize given...

Denise Levertov: Poet and Pilgrim

William Butler Yeats posed the dilemma: one must choose the perfection of the life or of the work. Denise Levertov offers a refutation of that choice. As the world she responded with full engagement to her historical environment. Her poetry of pro- test was written response to the major political issue of her time, the Vietnam War. She later confronted the tragedies of her personal life through her poetic craft, ultimately coming to a renewed sense of awe and wonder. In the last years of her life this avowed agnostic turned to faith, and the process produced a luminous and crys- talline poetry. Levertov acknowledges that writing poetry was her means to faith, that her work enfaithed. It is also true that her faith resulted renewed creativity and produced poetry in service to the transcendent. For Levertov, there was no choice between life and work; the desire for engagement and the consequent transfor- mation linked the two. Denise Levertov claimed few designations other than that of poet and pilgrim. At age seven or eight she intuited she was an artist; she soon understood her vocation was to poetry. When she was twelve she sent off her first clutch of poems to T. S. Eliot for critique, who

Notes on Contributors

Linda Kinnahan is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. She is the author of “Poetics of the Feminine: Literary Tradition and Authority in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser” (Cambridge UP 1994) and “Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse”(Iowa UP 2004). She has published numerous articles on modernist and contemporary poetry in North America and Britain, including work on Williams, Erica Hunt, Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, Geraldine Monk, and John Mathias. Recent essays include treatments of the lyric subject in British contemporary women poets, such as Jackie Kay, Grace Nichols, and Gillian Clarke, and a historical consideration of linguistically innovative poetry by British women, moving from Veronica Forrest-Thomson (in the 1960s) to a present-day generation that includes such poets as Caroline Bergvall. Kinnahan’s current book project, “Modernism and the Gendering of Economics,” argues the...

The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: Transcending Theological Boundaries in the Writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov and Annie Dillard. By Sue Yore.

The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: Transcending Theological Boundaries in the Writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov and Annie Dillard. By Sue Yore.

Denise Levertov’s Ambivalence about Feminist Poetry

Denise Levertov’s Ambivalence about Feminist Poetry

"That We Can Somehow Add Each to Each Other?": George Oppen between Denise Levertov and Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"That We Can Somehow Add Each to Each Other?": George Oppen between Denise Levertov and Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Black Serial Poetics: An Introduction to Ed Roberson

Black Serial PoeticsAn Introduction to Ed Roberson Brent Hayes Edwards (bio) This special section is the first collection of criticism devoted to the work of Ed Roberson, one of the most quietly dazzling poets writing in English today. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Roberson's first book, When Thy King Is a Boy, as well as the upcoming appearance of his latest (ninth) volume, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, and given the extraordinary layers and depths of this body of work, its incisive attention to the complexities of black life in the United States, and its singular formal complexity—in overlapping syntax and unsettling enjambment designed to suggest multivalence and multivocality—it would be an understatement to say that this initial scholarly attention is long overdue. The essays and interviews assembled here are intended both as a first foray and as an attempt to provide source materials, conceptual framing, and methodological approaches that will inspire further consideration of Roberson's unique oeuvre.1 While critical interpretation has been slow to come to terms with Roberson's accomplishment, it is not that he has been overlooked. He won the Grand Prize in the Atlantic Monthly poetry contest as a college student in 1962, and has been recognized with numerous honors and awards over the years, especially in the last decade and a half. When Thy King Is a Boy was one of the selections for the Pitt Poetry Series in 1970 (along with Michael S. Harper's first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane), and Roberson's collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1995. He received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award in 1998, and his book Atmosphere Conditions was selected for the National Poetry Series the same year and then nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award in 2000.2 In 2008, Roberson was awarded the prestigious Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (presented to a living American poet "selected with reference to genius and need"), and the citation praised the "meticulous design and lasting emotional significance" of his writing (Wright and Hejinian). The reviews of When Thy King Is a Boy were emphatic in suggesting that the book marked the emergence of a major talent. In the Saturday Review, for example, Robert Spector discusses Roberson's volume with works by Daniel Berrigan and Denise Levertov as examples of innovation in recent poetry. "The quiet fierceness of Ed Roberson's poetry terrifies," Spector writes, "as it comes out from a controlled if unconventional verse form that seems an amalgam of Charles Olson and E. E. Cummings." For Spector, Roberson's poems were "like ominous icebergs, seven-eighths invisible and threatening beyond their placid surface appearance" (51). A few months later in Prairie Schooner, Charles Peek reviewed Roberson's book alongside Michael S. Harper's debut and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Islands, the final volume in his magisterial "Arrivants Trilogy," and concluded that [End Page 621] where Harper startles with his vigor and his ability to contain that vigor in his poetry and Brathwaite's ability to mellow his passion in poetry calls for respect, Ed Roberson overwhelms one with genius. One might return to any of these books a second time, but he would return to When Thy King Is a Boy first. … Anyone interested in black poetry, in modern poetry, in literature with life, should read these books. The first two will be memorable books; the last, an unforgettable one. (84, 85) These kind of notices make it all the more puzzling that Roberson's second book, Etai-Eken, hardly made a ripple when it was published in 1975. It would be nearly another decade before friends of Roberson in Pittsburgh raised funds to publish a limited edition of the remarkable Lucid Interval as Integral Music (1984), and another decade after that until Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1995), the larger volume of which Lucid Interval comprises the first half, was chosen for the Iowa Poetry Prize. The critical establishment, especially in the world of African American poetry...

"A Dialectic of Contrasts": Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov’s Ecological Writing

Abstract "A Dialectic of Contrasts" details how the mid-twentieth century American poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov employed their understanding of Whitehead’s notion of "contrast" to imagine poems closely linked to ecology and cosmology. Exploring the references to Whitehead’s heterogeneous dialectic of contrasts in the Duncan/Levertov correspondence, the article displays the forcible role Whitehead’s thought played in directing the two poets to a linguistic-organic poetics invested in nonhuman agency.

‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)

This article discusses the political dimension of post-war American Poetry from around 1950-1980. The underlying argument is that the antirepresentationalist poetry produced in and around the LANGUAGE-school in the 1970s is the necessary continuation of the political and social activism initially opted for by the Beat Generation. I assert that the kind of language-centeredness typical for many works of the LANGUAGE- school was already entailed in central texts of the 1950s and 1960s, as writers began to examine processes of meaning production/construction in the social sphere. Looking at selected poems by Allen Ginsberg (“A Supermarket in California”, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”), Denise Levertov (the text collection To Stay Alive ) and Bruce Andrews (“I Guess Work the Time Up”), the article traces a specific feature of postmodern poetry, spotlighting the growing ambivalence inherent in the search for an alternative cultural politics instigated by post-war American poets. I point out how the increased interest in the (linguistic) constructedness of political realities resulted in a poetics of “nonnarrativity” and hermetic closure that began gradually to jeopardize the communicative foundation of their collective political goals. My article concludes by suggesting a conceptual link between the projects of multiauthorship engaged in by several LANGUAGE-poets and the Habermasian notion of “communicative rationality.”