Sunday, 1 February 2015

1923 - 1997

     Denise Levertov was born on October 24, 1923, in the town of Ilford in Essex, England. Her Welsh mother descended from a line of mystics, and her Russian father was raised as a Hasidic Jew but later converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Levertov grew up in a book-loving, book-filled household. Her mother read Tolstoy and Dickens aloud to the family, and Levertov received all of her instruction at home. Undoubtedly this lively, spiritual, literary atmosphere encouraged Levertov's writing, which began when she was five. Entranced by the poetry of T. S. Eliot, she sent him some of her own work at age twelve, and Eliot returned it to her with his advice and encouragement. Five years later, her first published poem appeared in Poetry Quarterly. During World War II, Levertov cared for injured veterans returning from the front, and in 1946, she published her first full volume of poetry, The Double Image, comprising poems written between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. 
     Nineteen forty-eight married a major  turning point in Levertov's life, both personally and poetically. Married to the American writer Mitchell Goodman, she left her native England and moved to America, settling in New York City. There, largely influenced by the poetry of William Carlos Williams, she began work on new poems that captured a more "American" sensibility. The traditional English forms of The Double Image were dropped in favor of open, experimental forms and a riskier, more expressive range of diction. Within a year, Levertov gave birth to her first son, and by 1956 she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. America proved tremendously stimulating to Levertov. She tapped into the Transcendentalist ideals of Thoreau and Emerson; found inspiration in the poetry of Ezra Pound, Robert Creely, and Wallace Stevens; and like so many others, learned from Charles Olson's seminal essay, "Projective Verse." The first of her American books, Here and Now and Overland to the Islands, appeared in 1956 and 1958, respectively. In 1959, poet and publisher James Laughlin accepted her next book, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, for publication with New Directions. 
     Throughout the course of the 1960s, Levertov produced five more volumes of poetry and became a political activist. Although she apparently perceived the Beats as sexist, she absorbed the spirit of the Beat movement; her poetry grew increasingly socially aware  and prone to passages of sweeping sorrow and rage. In 1965, Poetry magazine ran her highly influential essay, "Some Notes on
Organic Form." In the essay she drew a distinction between free verse, whose primary formal concern was to maintain freedom from all constriction, and "organic" verse, whose primary formal concern was to remain faithful to the nature of perception and experience. Her own "organic" verse continued to evolve politically through the 1970s and '80s. Beginning in 1982, she was a professor at Stanford University, a position she held for a decade; upon retiring, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, and remained a vital, productive poet until her death on December 20, 1997. Her last volumes include Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), The Sands of the Well (1996), and the posthumously published This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999).




Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't 
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.



Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.


When she cannot be sure
which of two lovers it was with whom she felt
this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery
streaking from head to heels, the way the white
flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside
seen from a car across a valley, the car
changing gear, skirting a precipice,
climbing...
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie
talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter
with friends, without worrying
that it's late, dinner at midnight, her time
spent without counting the change...
When half her bed is covered with books
and no one is kept awake by the reading light
and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon...
Then
selfpity dries up, a joy
untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging
of her body�how to deal
with photographs and the mirror. She feels
so much younger and more beautiful
than she looks. At her happiest
�or even in the midst of
some less than joyful hour, sweating
patiently through a heatwave in the city
or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,
toneless, the sound of fatigue�
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe
in her future as an old woman, a wanderer,
seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,
without being watched; not grim nor sad,
an old winedrinking woman, who knows
the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself...
She knows it can't be:
that's Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from 
                                                          The Water-Babies,
no one can walk the world any more,
a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe
she could get to be tough and wise, some way,
anyway. Not at least
she is past the time of mourning,
now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude.


Bibliography:

Gelpi, Albert 1993: Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Michigan: University of Michigan.
Greene, Dana 2012: Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life. Chicago: University of Illinois.
Lacey, Paul (ed) 2013: The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov. New York: New Directions.
Levertov, Denise 1992 (1965): New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions.
������� 2013: Denise Levertov: Antolog�a po�tica (bilingual edition). Madrid: Hiperion.
Rodgers, Audrey, T, 1993: Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.


Webliography:


Youtube:


En espa�ol: