The Poetry of Larry Levis

D.W. Fenza
excerpt from The Wish to Be Swept Clean: The Poetry of Larry Levis


With Winter Stars, Levis had found his Duende, his subject matter, and a number of strategies for making unforgettable poems. His last three books, Winter Stars (1985), The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991), and Elegy (1997) comprise a triptych of uni-fied images and themes; they demonstrate the range of his unique voice and the cunning of his dissimulations. Often, in his best work, what seemed to be a passing anecdote or pleasing image returns and initiates a series of tropes more disturbing and crucial than what the reader had anticipated. The poem "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" from Winter Stars, for instance, begins simply and affably, with a riff of nostalgia and lost love:

Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded
That I, too, was once banished from New York City.
Not because of drugs or because I was interesting enough
For any wan, overworked patrolman to worry about--
His expression usually a great, gauzy spiderweb of bewilderment
Over his face--I was banished from New York City by a woman.
Sometimes, after we had stopped laughing, I would look
At her & see a cold note of sorrow or puzzlement go
Over her face as if someone else were there, behind it,
Not laughing at all. We were, I think, "in love." No, I'm sure.
But the poem soon raises the stakes and poses an extravagant poetic conceit:

If my house burned down tomorrow morning, & if I & my wife
And son stood looking on at the flames, & if, then,
Someone stepped out of the crowd of bystanders
And said to me: "Didn't you once know . . . ?" No. But if
One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,
And if it said to me; "You loved her, didn't you?" I'd answer,
Hands in my pockets, "Yes." And then I'd let fire & misfortune
Overwhelm my life.

Levis sometimes merged the conventional with the unconventional, the antipoetic with the brazenly poetic, to make poems that commented upon the blur of traditions and innovations by which our culture has grown so smart that it may soon out-smart itself, hastening to a terminal miasma. Like other poems in his last three books, "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" is about our desire to surpass ourselves; it dramatizes the beauty and destructiveness of that desire. The poem continues to braid the motifs introduced in the opening lines--laughter, fire, Billie Holiday, and confessions about an estranged lover--and then concludes:


That morning, when she asked me to leave, wearing only
That apricot tinted, fraying chemise, I wanted to stay.
But I also wanted to go, to lose her suddenly, almost
For no reason, & certainly without any explanation.
I remember looking down at a pair of singular tracks
Made in a light snow the night before, at how they were
Gradually effacing themselves beneath the tires
Of the morning traffic, & thinking that my only other choice
Was fire, ashes, abandonment, solitude. All of which happened
Anyway, & soon after, & by divorce. I know this isn't much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
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.

Our desire to surpass ourselves has personal and national ramifications, but that desire creates quandaries in art, too; and Levis was, in part, a cartographer of desire as it shapes psychological, political, and artistic spheres.

The work of Larry Levis charts the dreamscapes of desire, which we often mistake for the world, and which have become, decade by decade, more madly multiple in Western culture, especially in the U.S. Our consumerism desires whatever is new and improved; yet newness has become, paradoxically, an old standard. The desire for newness adores individuality over community; self-fulfillment, over common law. Artists and theorists who fancy themselves as brave outsiders and champions of the avant-garde have been ironically appropriated by the temperament of mainstream consumerism, which demands newness above all things, even above humanity. Like good consumers, many "cutting edge" iconoclasts love the rush of newness more than they love the company of people, and the progressive politics that underlie their innovative theories has little to do with what is possible, politically pragmatic, humane, or sane. In our universities, the trendsetters run from theory to theory, from one disposable creed to the next--zealots in a demented church of continual reformation, inquisition, and self-immolation. Levis addressed the folly of so much novelty and change. His work throws into high relief the continents of desire as we hurl ourselves into the consumption of newness, the solipsism of self-gratification, and the ideals of political, aesthetic, or religious purity. Vandalizing the idealism of Marx, Rockefeller, God, America, and even poetry itself, Larry Levis was an Equal Opportunity Offender. His nihilism was comprehensive; but, in his poetry, his nihilism is a stimulant that wakens us to this world and to the disparity between it and all the hypothetical worlds we are always imposing upon it.



D. W. Fenza is the author of a book-length poem, The Interlude (The Galileo Press, 1989), and he is now completing his second book-length poem, Latin from Manhattan. He is the editor of The Writer's Chronicle and the executive director of Associated Writing Programs, a nonproÞt organization of writers and writing programs.