I would like to speak of the rhythmical precisions of Denise Levertov, not to expose metrical mania or pedantry, but to give sense of the justice of her power. This rhythmic finesse might be said to be the synaesthetic component, because here the cadences, wandering caesuras, and musical discontinuities produce painterliness. It is the oddity of Levertov's work that her most chromatic effects are precisely these tough and anxious shifts of rhythm, and that her polyrhythms, as it were, are more significant than certain aspects of her so-called matter. And one might go so far as to underline this cadential mastery as her particular topic, and place this musicality as an essential eros of the work. I am going to use the poetry selected for the canonic Donald M. Allen anthology in 1960, because it marked for me the repleteness of her work as well as its particularity among other poets. One is attracted to the dashes and depths of Beyond the End, and particularly the way the iamb is flouted, lesson learned from William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and presumably Charles Olson, but here promoted to the abstract stage of becoming the subject matter, not just, in Meyer Schapiro's terms, content matter. process poem much touted in the age of the Abstract Expressionists has, I think, arrived here at some of its most overt propositions: 'hewers of wood' & so on; every damn craftsman has it while he's working but it's not question of work: some shine with it, in repose. Maybe it is response, the will to respond--('reason can give nothing at all/like the response to desire') maybe gritting of the teeth, to go just that much further, beyond the end beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy. (Allen 60-61) passages concerning poetics have begun to take over the poem itself, very much as the act of staining the canvas had become for Helen Frankenthaler more than ritual or carving of shapes, but the act that most proposed the immanent as the naked matter of art. I think that this connects Beyond the End with those moments in Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue--really book more than poem, book dedicated as much to Jackson Pollock as to Vladimir Mayakovsky--when the poetic line in its relations to spilled paint becomes the leading metaphor. Here the matter of rhythm becomes an intransigent force: It's energy; spider's thread: not to 'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend: It has no grace like that of the grass, the humble rhythms, the falling and rising of leaf and star; it's barely constant. Like salt: take it or leave it (60) In The Hands there is another vivid metonymy offered for the act of musical construction, hands are slithering among the (61) And the almost painful/movement of the poem registers Levertov's erotic sense of the actors at rehearsal, in their demotic costumes, or costumes of the demotic: common clothes. whole stage is democratic, flexible and unfixed. But the poem is particularly horrifying because from the beginning the poet has made it clear that the hands are horrible, oneiric, and fragmentary: Don't forget the crablike/hands, slithering/among the keys. These haunted, uncanny hands are particularly unheimlich because of the homely rhythmical maneuvers of the line which slashes them into pieces: parts for the part. Levertov is the master ironist of this music which drifts you/off your feet: too easily let off. What would be the possibility of difficulty in this world but nakedly that of painful/movement? enjambments are all ways of insisting on rhythmical breakdowns themselves: a tension, as of/actors at rehearsal. Robert Creeley was to make this rhythmical indecision into the canonic proposals of anxiety that are, after all, his poetic. In Olson's hands such consciousness of rhythmical skepticism has mostly been used for purposes of pedagogy and epic affirmation. …