On Selected Poems by Denise Levertov
Timothy Otte
There are, in my life, a handful of encounters with text that have been foundational. Several collisions with Eliot’s The Waste Land (including a stunning performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw); a deeply uncomfortable viewing of Sam Shepard’s play A Lie of the Mind while seated next to my mom; weekend afternoons spent sitting on the floor in front of the poetry shelves at bookstores and libraries. I’d bet every writer has a list like this.
But the first time I understood the scope of a writer’s body of work across a whole life—the evolutions, themes, obsessions, quirks—was when I first read Denise Levertov’s Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002). Published five years after Levertov died, it’s bookended by Robert Creeley’s preface and an afterword by Paul A. Lacey, who edited the selection. I encountered the book as part of an independent study that I undertook as an undergrad, in which I also read Levertov’s New & Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992) and her letters with William Carlos Williams (New Directions, 1998). Through these books, I saw the work itself, the thinking behind the work, and the domestic life and relationships out of which the poems grew. All together, these three books showed me How to Be a Poet in the world as much as they taught me how to write poems.
These texts were like a manual, and as a young writer I expected that my trajectory would follow Levertov’s: I would write my early lyrics and publish a book; then perhaps flail a bit and begin a mutually beneficial apprenticeship with an elder poet; finally I’d settle into myself and collect my poems together for publication every few years. Through it all, I would write what I knew about how poems work and what I knew about making them. Levertov’s pace was a book of poetry every one to five years from the 1950’s until her death in 1997. She also published several translations and a handful of prose works, including essay collections and an unusually fragmented memoir.
Most of the Levertov books in my possession came to me as gifts or trades. Sam gave me a stack after taking a seminar on Levertov in exchange for a case of beer. The beautiful Collected Poems published in 2013 was a gift from Mandy when she was moving back to Chicago. (A paperback edition of Collected Poems is finally being issued in November 2023.) This kind of exchange is also how I understand what it means to be a reader and a poet. Though I must have bought a few of her individual collections in my possession, too, Selected Poems is the only one I remember purchasing myself.
Over the years, I’ve returned to Levertov’s Selected Poems often. My copy is a comforting object. The trim size and page count are the platonic ideal of a book. The cover curls from being held and the corners are worn soft and round. The spine is still strong, though it’s been cracked and stretched a little over time. The cover image of a dark doorway in a tall hedge fills me with a profound sense of mystery. What might come out of that opening? What might I find beyond it? Even the purple endpapers are my favorite color. Many of the pages are dog-eared, giving me a glimpse at the reader I was when I first came to these poems, and I often mark new lines that stand out when I revisit so that the book contains the sedimentary buildup of years of reading.
I’ve come to understand myself a little through Denise Levertov’s Selected Poems. It’s been over a decade since I last read this book cover to cover, but in doing so I can recognize the thinking that led me to mark certain poems when I was 22, but I also know why I’m drawn to others now in my thirties. When I was younger, I was attracted to the intensity of Levertov’s earlier poems and saw my own desire and yearning reflected there. The love poems and the poems about grief and family spoke to my experience as a young person experiencing relationships and death in new ways. Some of the poems about writing gave me language for expressing my own tastes and poetics:
—difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf on a bare table.
This, from “Too Easy: to Write of Miracles” from 1946’s The Double Image, clarified my thinking on the confessional, making me consider the possibilities of record keeping. What would it mean to simply describe the actions around me, to record time and find the miraculous in the daily?
Through Selected Poems, New & Selected Essays, and her letters, I came to see Levertov as a driven artist with a unique vision that arose, as Lacey writes in his afterword to Selected Poems, “from her life as outsider, pilgrim and wanderer, as a transplant never fully at home, as an ‘airplant’ rather than a rooted one.” Her father was a Russian Jew who became an Anglican priest, her mother a Welshwoman living in England, and Levertov herself became an English poet writing in the American idiom. Though she wrote out of her own life and experience, she wasn’t a confessional poet. She was mentored by Williams, but willing to push back on his teaching. She was lumped in with the Black Mountain Poets, but her work never really resembled that of Olson or Creeley. These insights aren’t new, but learning how Levertov fit—or didn’t—into a poetic lineage shaped my own ambitions.
Levertov published over twenty collections. Selected Poems attempts “to give fair representation to each part of Levertov’s career and to her dominant themes and concerns,” Lacey writes, though interestingly, there are no section breaks to mark the passage from one book to another. The poems are arranged chronologically, the last poem from one book next to the first poem from the next, sometimes even on the same page. The choice to omit section breaks results in a book that presents a certain kind of unity, like a painting with a gradient from one color to another.
The table of contents is where readers can find which books the poems were selected from, and offers a fascinating look at Levertov’s trajectory as a writer and a person. Book titles chart a path from split or outsider identity (1946’s The Double Image); through grief and anger at the Vietnam War, the death of her sister, and her divorce (1967’s The Sorrow Dance and 1971’s To Stay Alive); to the Catholic faith of her late life (1984’s Oblique Prayers and 1999’s The Great Unknowing: Last Poems).
The poems themselves also chart these progressions. The first poem selected from 1972’s Footprints is “Love Poem” with the dedication “to Mitch.” Levertov and her husband, the writer Mitchell Goodman, divorced in 1975, and the first poems selected from each of her next three books are “Living Alone” I-III, “A Woman Alone,” and “Talking to Oneself” (from, respectively, 1975’s The Freeing of the Dust, 1978’s Life in the Forest, and 1982’s Candles in Babylon).
I continue to learn about myself through Levertov’s work, and in recent years have been drawn to the later poems about faith and doubt, the mystical and the divine. Her early poems are full of uncertainty and it’s terrifying, things are beyond her control, whether that’s war or love or death. The later poems, especially those from the mid-80’s onward, are full of doubt and unknowing and it’s fascinating, even comforting, to her. Toward the end of her life, Levertov seems to embrace mystery rather than try to understand it. “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus,” one of my favorite of Levertov’s poems these days, is “an agnostic Mass,” she writes in “Work that Enfaiths,” one of the final pieces in New & Selected Essays. The poem begins with an invocation:
O deep unknown, guttering candle,
O deep unknown, guttering candle,
in the obscure heart’s
last recess,
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
have mercy upon us.
I was raised by lapsed Catholics, attended a Catholic high school and a Lutheran college, and my first jobs were at a Jewish Community Center. These days, I’m writing psalms and reading about mystics and prophets. Like Levertov in this poem,
I believe and
interrupt my belief with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief.
I’m not religious, but Levertov wasn’t necessarily religious when she wrote this poem either. “The experience of writing the poem,” she writes, “had also been a conversion process, if you will.”
I find myself wondering how to end this essay, though I’m sure I haven’t learned all that Selected Poems has to teach me, and without that learning there can be no conclusion. This book, and Levertov’s work more broadly, continue to shape my thinking, even as my own poems hardly resemble Levertov’s anymore. If they ever did. Paul Lacey describes Levertov’s imagination as “profoundly assimilative, not imitative,” an aspiration I have for myself.
I didn’t set out to write a personal essay, but the searching and deeply personal nature of Levertov’s poems have the effect of turning a spotlight on the reader, as much as their own subject. Approaching middle age, and with a life that continues to shift and expand in surprising ways, I find it comforting to know that these poems will continue to offer a path toward and through mystery. As she writes in “Beginners” from 1982’s Candles in Babylon, I “have only begun…”
But we have only begun
to love earth.
We have only begun
to imagine the fulness of life
How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.