Denise Levertov Protest, Solitude, and Resilience
Today, we meet Denise Levertov, and English poet, and the tenth of twelve in our Monday series of women poets who changed the poetry game. (If you would like to have a digital version of the document about the dozen poets, let me know, and I will send it, after the series is over.)
During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflected her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraced a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. Amy Gerstler wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, that Levertov possessed “a clear uncluttered voice—a voice committed to acute observation and engagement with the earthly, in all its attendant beauty, mystery and pain.” Levertov’s body of quietly passionate poems, attuned to mystic insights and mapping quests for harmony, became darker and more political in the 1960s as a result of personal loss and her political activism against the Vietnam War.
Levertov had confidence in her poetic abilities from the beginning, and several well-respected literary figures believed in her talents as well. At the age of 12 she sent several of her poems directly to T.S. Eliot. He wrote back a two-page letter that offered her “excellent advice.” This letter bolstered her confidence for creating poems and sending them hither and yon.
Levertov’s American poetic voice was, her use of concrete language, her attention to minute details; in fact, she was inspired by the humble and commonplace – a single flower, a man walking two dogs in the rain, and even sunlight glittering on rubbish in a street. But her real love was poetry itself – a serious love born of dedication to her craft. She wrote about the mysteries of poetry in lives lived.
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.
At the Justice Department November 15, 1969
Brown gas-fog, white
beneath the street lamps.
Cut off on three sides, all space filled
with our bodies.
Bodies that stumble
in brown airlessness, whitened
in light, a mildew glare,
that stumble
hand in hand, blinded, retching.
Wanting it, wanting
to be here, the body believing it’s
dying in its nausea, my head
clear in its despair, a kind of joy,
knowing this is by no means death,
is trivial, an incident, a
fragile instant. Wanting it, wanting
with all my hunger this anguish,
this knowing in the body
the grim odds we’re
up against, wanting it real.
Up that bank where gas
curled in the ivy, dragging each other
up, strangers, brothers
and sisters. Nothing
will do but
to taste the bitter
taste. No life
other, apart from.
How gray and hard the brown feet of the wretched of the earth.
How confidently the crippled from birth
push themselves through the streets, deep in their lives.
How seamed with lines of fate the hands
of women who sit at streetcorners
offering seeds and flowers.
How lively their conversation together.
How much of death they know.
I am tired of ‘the fine art of unhappiness.’
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!
And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees
the sweet rain drifting through western air
a white sweating bull of a poet told us
our cunts are ugly—why didn't we
admit we have thought so too? (And
what shame? They are not for the eye!)
No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,
caves of the Moon ... And when a
dark humming fills us, a
coldness towards life,
we are too much women to
own to such unwomanliness.
Whorishly with the psychopomp
we play and plead—and say
nothing of this later. And our dreams,
with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
Background: Denice Leveratov 1923-1997
Levertov was born and raised in Ilford in Essex, England. She and her older sister, Olga, were educated by their Welsh mother, Beatrice Adelaide Spooner-Jones, at home. The girls further received sporadic religious training from their father, Paul Philip Levertoff, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England and became an Anglican minister. Because Levertov never received a formal education, her earliest literary influences can be traced to her home life. Her mother read aloud to the family the great works of 19th-century fiction, and she read poetry, especially the lyrics of Tennyson. Her father, a prolific writer in Hebrew, Russian, German, and English, used to buy secondhand books by the lot to obtain particular volumes. Levertov grew up surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. Levertov’s lack of formal education has been alleged to result in verse that is consistently clear, precise, and accessible.
Levertov came to the United States after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman, and she began developing the style that was to make her an internationally respected American poet. With the onset of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s, Levertov’s social consciousness began to more completely inform both her poetry and her private life. With several other poets, Levertov founded the Writers and Artists Protest against the War in Vietnam. She took part in several anti-war demonstrations in Berkeley, California, and elsewhere, and was briefly jailed on numerous occasions for civil disobedience. In the ensuing decades she spoke out against nuclear weaponry, American aid to El Salvador, the Detroit riots, and nuclear disarmament. Her goal was to motivate others into an awareness of these various issues, particularly the Vietnam War and ecological concerns.
Levertov taught her craft at several colleges and universities nationwide; she translated a number of works, particularly those of the French poet Jean Joubert; she was poetry editor of the Nation from 1961-62 and Mother Jones from 1976-78; and she authored several collections of essays and criticism, including The Poet in the World (1973), Light up the Cave (1981), and New & Selected Essays (1992). Levertov’s essays ranged over poetics, aesthetics, and politics.
Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of 74. Almost until the moment of her death she continued to compose poetry, and some forty of these were published posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999).
Exploration 1: What do you think of a poet who writes across themes and genre? Is she taking on too much? Would it be better for her to expand her craft through a narrower focus?
Exploration 2: The two World Wars, Korea and Viet Nam conflicts each had their poets, their narrators, and their books. Can you identify similar artists who spoke out and/or recorded the terrain of more recent wars, especially the Gulf Wars and now the Ukraine-Russian conflict?
Exploration 3: Does the raw and earthy tone of “Hypocrite Women” offend you? Why or why not?
Exploration 4: Would you consider “Making Peace” a love song for poetry? How come?
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