Wish To Be Swept Clean

Wish to Be Swept Clean: The Poetry of Larry Levis,


American Poetry Review, The , Mar/Apr 2002 by D.W. Fenza


With Levis's poetry in mind, it is easy to read his own death as another trope among tropes, like those of Elegy and The Widening Spell of the Leaves, which confirm that oblivion is the only place free of delusions, ideals, and the hurt that comes of them-that death is the only State, the only egalitarian democracy, in which all individuals achieve equality and peace. But we know a curious quality about Levis from the circuitous routes that many of his poems took-we know that what he sometimes understated, deflected, or passed by, he would later embody, enlarge, or confront. Perhaps, as with all the other mortal consolations, he would have continued to debunk love as being insufficient, just another passing misapprehension in a world afloat on its own delusions. (Many of the poems in Winter Stars, like "Adolescence" and "Family Romance," dramatize this view.) Or, maybe, somewhat like the older T. S. Eliot of Four Quartets, who turned away from the despair of "The Hollow Men"-perhaps Levis would have presented another change in poetic strategies and sensibility in the books that would have followed Elegy.

Those that knew Levis as a friend, colleague, or teacher sometimes found it puzzling to try to reconcile the good humor, whimsy, and carelessness of the man with the artfulness, erudition, cunning, and darkness of his poetry. As a man, he seldom seemed to take himself very seriously. When he was my teacher at the University of Iowa, he often looked as though he had just slept under his mattress rather than on top of it. In one of my journals, I wrote that "Larry Levis has the air of a man who considers himself a small joke in a cosmic debacle."

Perhaps the humility of that view was enough of a message for him and the only morality worth elaborating upon. Perhaps that kind of humility, had he lived longer, was all that he would have continued to praise in his subsequent works; but this seems unlikely, if you know his poems, or knew the man. He held himself with such nonchalance and disregard that he became more receptive to others and to their world, as if they really were the better alternative to himself. As the imagery of his poetry proves, he loved the world and its people as a keen observer, as a sensualist, and as a humane thinker. He loved the world and its people so much that he made these playful and treacherous poems to disabuse us of our own assumptions so we can see more carefully-a renewal of vision that has little to do with mere novelty or easy pleasures. With the unexpected conclusion of the art and life of Larry Levis, we can only wonder what books he would have written next, what disparagements of the self, what apologies for the earth and her failing progeny, and what testaments of love.