The first time I heard of the poet Larry Levis was undoubtedly in some dark corner of one of any number of the neighborhood bars that, much like an old Family Circus comic strip, the crew of writers I hung out with back then, stitched together a sloshy dotted line that formed a heroic embroidery of bad decisions and hilarious misunderstandings which inevitably led to the ultimate triumvirate of more booze, plenty of punchlines, and, if we were very, very lucky, a modest epiphany or two.
We could have been gathered around some wobbly table sticky with spilled suds or in some rickety booth, the coiled springs sharply poking up through the exhausted Naugahyde, at Nico’s Recovery Room or Duke’s. It could have been at Kelly’s or Remedy or The Cage.
The romantic in me wants to say I first heard the name Larry Levis in the ink-dim lacuna that is Gooski’s. I had just returned to the booth after plugging the jukebox with my last couple of sweaty dollar bills and swung by the bar for a pitcher refill from Larry. I slid in opposite from Scott Silsbe and Jonathan Moody, poets themselves, as Silsbe relates a drunken adventure from their shared MFA days at the University of Pittsburgh.
The story Silsbe told that night was oft repeated during many another spree, the details slipping in and out of his story as naturally as the Mon’s ebb and flow in the bathtub along the Parkway East. Eventually the tale became the poem “How I Remember the Night Moody and I Looked for the Tape of Larry Levis on Tony Hoagland’s Old Porch” from his collection The River Underneath the City which reads in part,
…and when we found ourselves
stopped at the corner of Mifflin and Biddle, I think I shouted,
“Oh shit!” because it occurred to me we needed—needed—
to find Hoagland’s house, find his house, find that tape,
so we could hear Levis’ voice. I’m not even sure if we stopped
at the right house. But I remember you drunkenly trusting
my bad judgment and following me up to the house to dig
through the things someone—apparently not Hoagland—
kept on their front porch. The cassette was clearly nowhere
to be found but we were clearly determined to find it.
And when the somewhat frightened, somewhat angry college kid
came out on his porch to confront us, all we could say was,
“We’re in pursuit of greatness” or “We’re trying to find the voice
of one of the masters” or “Have you seen Larry?”
So even before I had read a single poem by this Levis guy, he was a bit of a legend.
I mention all of this because right at this moment I am holding that near-mythic cassette in my hand. A non-descript Scotch BX 90, a brand I personally have never used (Maxell and sometimes TDK is where it’s at), that came into my possession years later at a party where Silsbe surreptitiously slipped it into my hand with that winning Detroit grin of his. “Is this…the tape?,” I recall sputtering. “Oh yeah,” he laughed.
It’s a recording of a reading that Levis gave at The Wild Blue Yonder, a bar in Fresno, California on August 27, 1984. Levis was born in Fresno in 1946 and grew up on his family’s farm less than 20 miles south in Selma. This reading would have been a sort of homecoming for him. He had spent six years teaching English at the University of Missouri, and as of this recording he was four years into what would be a twelve year stint teaching at the University of Utah where he directed the creative writing program.
In a brief essay written for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Levis describes the farm as “a place that seemed to exist, the fields and vineyards and even the sky over it all, in some motionless and unchanging moment.” The farm contained orchards of peaches and plums, and also grape vineyards which the young Levis worked alongside his father’s hired crew of laborers. He goes on to write, “That land! It was a kind of paradise preserved, held intact, by the toxic perfume of malathion and sulfur, insecticide sprays, fertilizers, and by the people who worked on it, who were Mexican if they were older, Chicano if younger, who spoke Spanish mostly, and who were underpaid. Many of them lived in poverty and the intermittent misery of unemployment.”
During the reading on this cassette Levis introduces his poem “Adolescence” by saying, “I heard recently that Fresno is ranked the last city in the United States that you’d want to live in. But, obviously, they’re wrong. It’s Selma.”
Levis’s complicated feelings about his hometown, his family and the land they owned and worked, the workers he labored alongside as a young man, and the disparity between his position as the owner’s son and that of the largely poor and immigrant men he toiled with in the heat and dust play out across the span his poetry. These themes are central to the work contained in Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems.
The poem “Adolescence,” which would appear the following year in Levis’s fourth collection Winter Stars, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, opens with the gothic image of boys playing touch football in a graveyard and goes on to say, “At night, these huge trees, rooted in such quiet, / Arch over the tombstones as if in exultation, / As if they inhaled starlight. / Their limbs reach / Toward each other & their roots must touch the dead.” Those last two lines effectively blurring the distinction between the boys, their young arms outstretched for the football, their kin no doubt buried in this same earth, their “roots” connecting them to this land forever.
David St. John, poet and editor of Swirl & Vortex, in his Afterword to the earlier The Selected Levis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) wrote, “Levis brought to his poetry John Steinbeck’s sweep of the landscape.” I would amend that by saying, yes, Steinbeck, but also, I think importantly, Steinbeck by way of John Ford’s vision of that quintessential California novelist. I’m thinking of Ford’s 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath and its wealth of shadows; its pinched interiors and crowded compositions which give way to the vastness of the western sky. Levis’s poems would sprawl outward as his work matured, his lines reaching to the furthermost edges of the page, but his focus on the human figures who moved through his rich environments remained granular. Take these lines from “The Cry,”
Then, everything slept.
The sky & the fields slept all the way to the Pacific,
And the houses slept.
The orchards blackened in their sleep,
And, outside my window, the aging palomino slept
Standing up in the moonlight, with one rear hoof slightly cocked,
And the moonlight slept.
The white dust slept between the rows of vines,
And the quail slept perfectly, like untouched triangles.
The hawk slept alone, apart from this world.
In the distance I could see the faint glow
Of Parlier—even its name a lullaby,
Where the little bars slept with only one light on,
And the prostitutes slept, as always,
With the small-time businessmen, their hair smelling of pomade,
Who did not dream.
Dice slept in the hands of the town’s one gambler, & outside
His window, the brown grass slept,
And beyond that, in a low stand of trees, ashes slept
Where men with no money had built a fire, and had lain down,
Beside the river,
And saw in their sleep how the cold shape of fire
Made, from each crystal of ash, the gray morning,
Which consoled no one.
Or the opening to “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans”,
You can watch a video of Levis reading at The Wild Blue Yonder. It’s available on Youtube by way of the Fresno Poets Archive maintained at Fresno State. Reading his poems Levis’s voice is unhurried, there’s an easygoing cowboy quality to it. His hands move languorously, but without pause. His wide jaw is firmly set, his eyes burn with a green intensity. Levis wrote, “There’s stillness in their motion & motion in their stillness” and this is a pretty apt description of Levis himself as well as his poems.
In his essay “Flight and Arrival,” Tony Hoagland writes of Levis, “A poet who began in the imagist, quasi-surrealist ‘70s, he grew into one of the most muscular, even baroque, meditative American poets of our time: distinctly apart from the mainstream, a creature of his own fashion, making poetry of a lush fatalistic romanticism, paradoxically both decadent and political.” The pleasure of reading Swirl & Vortex straight through is the experience of watching Levis’s development as though watching a time-lapse nature film. From humble seed to germination to full-flower to unruly overgrowth the whole developmental process is captured in these pages.
However, making a straight run through of over five hundred pages of Levis’s poems is really not the best way to approach his work. Looking over the notes I made as I read it, it’s clear that the repetition of themes and images can become exhausting and at times a little irritating. I lost track after the first one hundred pages how many times death reared its shrouded head. There’s a distressingly high body count here. A quick Google search tells me there are roughly 2800 wild horses currently at large in California. I swear there are way more horses galloping around in these pages.
A quick perusal of my notes offers some of my exasperation: “blank paper again”, “fire again”, “more self-consciousness writing a poem that refers to the act of writing the very same poem again”, “here’s Larry’s dad again”, “why is it always snowing? what season is this poem taking place in anyway?”, “more grass”. Of the poem “Self-Portrait with Radio” I note, “Here’s snow, horses, Larry’s father, and grass. How’d he forget to mention fire?”.
Much better to read Swirl & Vortex as it is parceled out in sections according to Levis’s published books and then take a break to let the poems breathe in your own mind. It is easier to appreciate the way Levis continually rehearses his themes and deploys his preferred images from book to book rather than taking in all the poems together in one giant gulp.
Hoagland, in his essay, also delves into the paradoxical nature of Levis’s approach, “the poems tend towards the labyrinthine; scenic, complex, vaguely narrative vistas, they are like long cross-country drives in which the gaze seems both focused and unfocused, both outward and inward: the speaker’s voice seems more intent upon prolonging and extending the moment that arriving anywhere.” Like any good cross-country adventure, time should be taken to stop awhile and see the sights. You don’t need to be Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon here. Pause and take a good look at the extravagant beauty, really get a sense of what you are looking at when stare into that chasm. It is Time itself that you are seeing. Time rendered upon the landscape. When you read Levis’s poems, particularly his mature work from the collection Winter Stars through Elegy you are witnessing Time.
Mark Doty, in his study What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life,recalls that the poet William Everson once observed, “The book is the intersection of the soul and time.” In his book, Doty calls Whitman’s Leaves of Grass “an edgeless text.” Whitman, in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, asserts that the “greatest poet” in his practice “glows a moment on the extremest verge.” Whitman also writes, “Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time…Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what had been and is.” Larry Levis at his finest brings all of this to bear on the page, and what’s more I feel that he, perhaps better than any other poet I have encountered, embodies what Everson, Doty, and Whitman are all trying to get at.
Or as Levis writes in “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage”, “I’m going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk / I’m bent over until it’s infinite, // I’m going to make it talk, I’m going to make it / Confess everything.”
Reflecting on his work not long before his premature death, Levis wrote “(W)hen I was sixteen, I decided, one night, to try to write a poem. When I was finished I turned out the light. I told myself that if the poem had one good line in it I would try to be a poet. And then I thought, no, you can’t say “try”. You will either be a poet, and become a better and better one, or you will not be a poet. The next morning I woke and looked at what I’d written. It was awful. I knew it was awful. But it had one good line. One. All the important decisions in my life were made in that moment.”
Or as he phrases it in “The Poem You Asked For”, which he closed his reading at The Wild Blue Yonder, stroking his chin and with the faint hint of a pleased grin,
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,
beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,
said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.
Said it was going
over to your place.
Larry Levis died on May 8, 1996. He was 49 years old and deep into the writing of what would become his Elegy, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press the following year. Philip Levine, who edited that volume, wrote in his foreword, “They (the poems in
Elegy) were written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives for as long as poetry matters.” The publication of Swirl & Vortex is a major event. To have all of Levis’s work, from his early brief imagist poems to the grandly constructed cathedrals of his final elegies, much of it out of print for many years, is something to celebrate.
