#larrylevis

I have written about Levis extensively elsewhere, and I imagine the merits I find in his work are no different from what others see: his gorgeous admixture of lyricism and colloquialism; his Whitmanic expansiveness; his gift for image-making that never diminished after his deep-image beginnings; and his mastery of a kind of poem he all but laid claim to, the postmodern poem of middle-length that weaves together several narrative threads, deliberately fraying the edges so as to raise questions about the possibilities of completion and meaning in a fragmented psyche. Above all, his work distinguishes itself with its inimitable tone, at once compassionate and ruthless:

  Don’t worry. Don’t worry… In the future, everyone, simply everyone, Will be hung in effigy.

          (from “Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine”)

 And certainly The Darkening Trapeze is full of riches of all kinds:  there are brief lyrics (“Gossip in the Village” and “Ghazal” are one-pagers, and after the final poem of his second volume, The Afterlife, Levis was rarely a one-pager); examples of what Levis himself would call the “wave sprawl” of long pieces (“A Singing in The Rocks,” “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” etc. ); and one of the better prose poems I’ve read in a long while (“The Worm in the Ear”). There are off-handed profundities and fresh phrasings, perfect vulnerabilities and hymns to the imperfect world. There are true poems.

 And yet the collection is troubling. The long afterword by David St. John is both a disclaimer about the unfinished nature of some of the poems and an inspiring testament to the devotion of the poet’s friends and acquaintances to assembling his drafts and fragments, their Herculean effort to “parse and reconstruct Larry’s thinking process, his creative process,” as Amy Tudor explains. It is the kind of devotion that not merely every poet would be grateful for, and by all accounts Levis earned it.      

 When FSG brought out Elizabeth Bishop’s Uncollected Poems and Fragments in 2007, what followed was a now infamous exchange between Helen Vendler and the volume’s editor, Alice Quinn, with the former confidently asserting that “had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied … with a horrified 'No.” This makes for good literary gossip, if you go for that kind of thing, but at bottom it’s just as troublesome to become a self-appointed guardian of a writer’s “process” as it is to present versions of his or her unfinished work. I would like to avoid doing the former, and fortunately the editors of The Darkening Trapeze did not do the latter without thoughtfulness and an acknowledgment of their own process. Indeed, both in St.  John’s afterword and in the “Notes” at the end of the volume, we understand that “in some cases, subsequent handwritten revisions on a hard-copy draft of a poem were also incorporated into a piece in an attempt to establish as near a ‘final’ draft as possible.” The notes clarify things further, though in some cases those clarifications only exacerbate the issue. Note, for instance, that the short poem “Ghazal” originally appeared “in the manuscript of poems titled Adolescence,” the working title of Levis’s breakthrough volume Winter Stars (1985). This, of course, means that Levis himself cut that poem from the volume as he was preparing it for publication, and I must say that a quick glance at the poem, save for its penultimate couplet, suggests why. Pacing a volume of Levis’s poems with short and long pieces, as Philip Levine and St. John did while editing Elegy, the (first) posthumous Levis collection, seems both prudent and by all accounts in step with the poet’s vision.

 On the other hand, publishing a volume of poems that includes some slack lyrics that the poet himself rejected seems problematic. Yet didn’t I say that I would hope to avoid the presumption of defending a poet against the devotion of his own friends? Guilty as charged, I suppose, and once again it seems there’s no better testament to the strength of a poet’s work as when it compels you to feel personally defensive on its behalf, as presumptuous as that may be. To say it another way, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve typed “Larry” instead of “Levis” while writing these remarks, only to laugh at myself for my presumption and delete. As Levis himself writes, with what must have been a knowing smile, “When I say you to what isn’t there I mean me.”

 And what about Levis’s process as against the effort to fix his poems in some completed form? Accounts suggest that the poet was in the habit of lifting sections of drafts and setting them down again in new poems, utterly diligent as he waited to hear the click of their proper positioning.   Undoubtedly such a broad field of vision enabled him to write his greatest longer poems, and yet The Darkening Trapeze occasionally leaves a reader wondering if we are encountering some of those edits-in-progress. I am thinking particularly of “The Necessary Angel,” which not only has its parallels in Elegy, as the “Notes” acknowledge, but includes a final line with some familiar echoes. Compare these endings, the first from “The Necessary Angel,” which the “Notes” does not date, and the second from “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” from Winter Stars:

 Said so that it can never be unsaid, by the creaking Of his wife’s chair, by the ironic scraping of limbs Against a wall, until the two sounds are all there is— Filling the house with their brief & thoughtless triumph.

  …

  The flames reaching through the second story of a house Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

  History is rich with the great revisers. Think only of Robert Lowell, for example, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) contains no fewer than five revised poems from his first volume, The Land of Unlikeness (1944), and think of Elizabeth Bishop elegizing him with those heartbreaking words, “Sad friend, you cannot change. ” Are we to take Levis’s work as a single river of dynamic energy, a self-generating organism consumed by that which it was nourished by, and vice versa?  I think in some real sense we are, and I admit I have an aversion to the kind of workshop-ese that speaks of a writer’s repetitions with contempt, constantly exhorting her to “make it new” in a way that seems to reek of the very consumerism that Levis, for one, was interested in critiquing. Give me a new product, we say, forgetting the difference between novelty and freshness.

 The double irony, of course, is that The Darkening Trapeze is a new product, and although no one publishes a volume of poems to find fortune we must still ask (with or without presumption) if its presentation as a volume of Last Poems is entirely in keeping with Levis’s vision, which undoubtedly could distinguish between the poet’s right to revisit his own terrain on the journey toward a finished poem and the publisher’s desire to sell each footprint along the way. No piece in The Darkening Trapeze is as empty as a footprint, but some are most definitely on the way.

 And yet the afterword and the notes do their work. Nearly every one of my colleagues and friends who has read this volume offers a slight, knowing shrug when I ask about the authority of the poems, and once that’s acknowledged we proceed to recite favorite lines. “Yes, but,” we say, “yes, but,” and begin listing the riches. If we acknowledge, as I’ve tried to do here, that perhaps it would have been more just (if less marketable) to title the volume something like The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems and Drafts, rather than to save that acknowledgment for the “Notes” on the ninety-first page, then we, too, can proceed to the riches.  

 And they are legion.

 I should say that there is no doubt that some of these poems are utterly polished, and the “Notes” help us considerably with dates of composition. To my ear, the strongest poem in the volume is “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” which St. John argues convincingly was originally intended to take its revised place in the poet’s series of Elegies. There is also the prose poem I mentioned earlier, “The Worm in the Ear,” which the “Notes” tell us Levis was satisfied with enough to arrange for publication, unlike some of the drafts published in Poetry and elsewhere. The title poem, “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It,” is one of Levis’s more astounding pieces, another one of his poems that miraculously blends a socio-political conscience with the personal in a way that avoids self-righteousness, or what Keats called “palpable designs” on the reader.  

 Indeed, Levis’s “political” sensibility is unique in American letters. Whether he’s writing about Booth or Marx, Stalin or even Christ, he is transfixed by the figure whose “revolution” leads tragically to emptiness and more destruction, and I think this is a key to understanding Levis’s work. His poems are so multi-faceted, so dialectical, that they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) announce their fidelity to Keats’s “negative capability,” their dedication to holding at least two conflicting ideas in their minds at once, to holding “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” or, we might add, resolution. Revolutions do not happen without resolution, and throughout his poetry Levis seems to have expressed a particular bind of the American poet: he has inherited the spirit of the revolutionary, but his being a poet prevents him from the single-minded resolution that might accomplish any particular change. Instead, he must be change itself. As he writes in “New Year’s Eve at the Santa Fe Hotel, Fresno, California”:

   …I thought That coming back here always showed me just How much this place has changed; but no. The only Real change is me. Now, when I sit Across from two friends at a table, I am Whatever’s distant…

 In the title poem, as elsewhere, Levis’s revolutionaries are empty and broken:

  The only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx.

…

The only surviving son of Jesus Christ survives now Mostly in English departments & untended graves.

 To commit yourself to the single-minded act of revolution, Levis’s poems suggest, would be to sacrifice the subtlety and moral openness from which poems and souls are made. To resign yourself to a constant state of dynamism, a ‘state’-less state in which poems are made, is to be a citizen of nowhere or everywhere, which in the language of interpersonal relationships amount to the same place. Try to read Larry Levis’s poems without feeling the music of banishment, the perpetual attempt to sing yourself back in to the gates, knowing all along that song is what has banished you. Kafka, too, knew the process of becoming was as Levis would depict it, “having to imagine everything, in detail, & without end,” and at his finest moments Levis is a writer every bit as powerful, every bit as original.

 Each reader will find her own favorites in this volume, but apart from those I’ve mentioned above I would also praise “Ghost Confederacy,” which nods to Whitman’s “passing stranger”; “The Space,” an ecstatic hymn to failure; and “A Singing in the Rocks,” which woos us with its “refusal to explain. ” “He was the singing & the no one there,” Levis writes, and we could say it of him, as well, so long as we understand the “no one” is “everyone,” and that he has found a communion in a kind of self-abnegation that does not diminish or detract from the individual.   It is an impossible accomplishment, but he did it.

 And yet if Levis did not quite eschew and distrust aesthetic completion as much as Kafka, asking no Brod to burn his work in a final blazing hymn to the world’s incompletion he would now become a part of, he nonetheless enters a tradition of writers whose work cannot be assessed without considering it as a commentary on its own becoming. For all its riches, for all its flaws and debatable inclusions, The Darkening Trapeze remains true to the inimitable vision of Larry Levis, who tells us himself what we can do with questions of completion and perfection:

  This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want to finish it.

 …

 Joseph Fasano is the author of three books of poetry: Vincent (Cider Press, 2015); Inheritance (2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets' Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet.” 

 His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, Tin House, FIELD, The Times Literary Supplement, Measure, Passages North, The American Literary Review, and other publications. A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize, he has been featured in The PEN Poetry Series, the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, and Verse Daily, and his work appears in the anthologies Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Any Occasion (Abrams, 2015) and The Aeolean Harp (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2016). He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.