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download audioback GREGORY DONOVAN | 21st Annual Levis Prize
Poetry under the Stars
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In July of 2016—back in the time everyone here by now may have come to think of as the Time Before the Deluge—my excellent colleague Kathleen Graber published an insightful review of the most recent and perhaps final posthumous collection of poetry by Larry Levis, The Darkening Trapeze, subtitled “Last Poems.” In it, she observed that “readers familiar with Levis’s earlier work” would recognize in this new collection “the system of images he spent his creative life exploring: fire, snow, trees, wind, darkness, stars.” And it’s that last item in the list that is of interest to us this evening, so let’s stop a moment to look at the stars.
The size of the observable universe—its diameter—is ninety-one billion light-years, and it’s made up of at least two trillion galaxies, according to the latest studies. Even if we stick to our own neighborhood and consider merely our own galactic home, the figures are astronomical (pun intended): our Milky Way Galaxy, that misty stream of light across the night sky at which humans have been staring ever since there were any humans, is 170,000 to 200,000 light-years in diameter and contains around 200 billion stars, give or take 100 billion.
Because of those facts, as well as the clearly mythic and sacred aspects of our situation under the stars, it’s no wonder that poets and prophets and philosophers have always looked to the heavens for solace and inspiration as well as a blackboard on which to sketch their dreams and fantasies. In addition, ever since poets gained access to more scientific knowledge about the nature of starlight, they have come to know that even stars die, despite their vast and inhuman life spans, so that any serious contemplation of the stars also gifts us with profound and even ironic instructions and intuitions about time and mortality.
Among poets of the modern era, for example, we can turn to the fluid German of Rainer Maria Rilke for a seminal and famous poem involving stars, “Klage,” which can be translated as “Lament,” or as I prefer, in my own translation, “Complaint”:
Complaint
Oh it’s all far away
and long ago gone.
I believe that the star
from which I took in that glittering
has been dead for a thousand years.
I believe that, in the boat
as it passed by,
I heard something terrible being said.
In the house a clock is
striking . . .
But in which house?
I want to step out of my heart
under the immense sky.
I want to pray.
And one among all these stars
must surely exist even now.
I think I know
which among them all
has lasted—
which one, like a white city at the end
of its stream across the heavens, still stands . . .
Rilke combines a number of those cited realizations about the nature of starlight into a potent complaint about the symbolic pain and betrayal implicit in a star’s false shining (since the star may have died eons ago), yet followed by resurgent assertions of awe and belief that take on a defiant, religious quality. In the poem’s ending we find an imagined paradise, the “white city” that is the source of the beam of light to which the poet is witness. Despite its impossible distance in time and space, that sacred source, that magical shining city, Rilke claims, is still standing.
Leaping forward in time to the work of tonight’s prize winner, Kaveh Akbar, we see him also combining these same mythic and symbolic forces in a poem such as “Prayer,” where the poem’s speaker seeks to escape the trap of “self-love” and “the worry” he makes for himself as well as the dangers not only from ever-present “enemies” who always “are replaceable” but also from “some angels” that “are more terrifying / than others”—a passage that echoes the beginning of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where Rilke cautions that “every single angel is terrifying.” In Akbar’s poem, as in Rilke’s, there is a seeking after a sacred source that can be a refuge and a protection of some kind, especially from those enemies who carry “stones behind their teeth” that “glow in moonlight.” Yet against that threat, the poem’s speaker accurately observes that “compared to even a small star / the moon is tiny,” and then he draws a striking parallel, asserting, “it is not God but the flower behind God I treasure.” The star invoked in this prayer has the godlike power to overwhelm the moon, along with those enemies and their mouthfuls of moon-glowing stones, as well as the internal enemy of self-obsession and its reductions.
Naturally, with regard to Levis, we will come to looking at stars again in one of his best-known poems, “Winter Stars,” which is from his poetry collection of the same name, the 1985 publication of which marked his entry into the more mature phase of his later work. Levis shifted the focus away from the often surrealist, “deep image” poems of his first three books and expanded into longer poems often featuring braided strands of narrative, frequently constructing poems as if they were jazz improvisations—laying down a theme via the beginning of a story, working variations on the theme by adding other streams of narrative, imagery, and action. Yet just when the reader might have thought the poem had utterly strayed away from its originating central theme, it returns, to play out in a kind of reprise or coda that takes a fresh, final look at the theme and its story.
Standing behind the stars in Levis’s poetry, not unlike Rilke’s white city in his poem or Kaveh Akbar’s treasured flower standing behind the God in his, is a concept of purity, one that is refined by emptiness and characterized by its persistence. In Levis, the winter stars represent the sort of sophisticated, chilled clarity of vision that leads to a radical sense of individual responsibility and self-determination of the kind espoused in existentialism. Yet the stars also embody spiritual concepts arising in part from his Catholic childhood, including a sense of moral judgment that is unflinching and blunt, the sort of dim view taken of humanity, and of the self, by an imagined and rather distant deity—one that may not be Christian, but more pagan, more an expression of the “natural religion” that would be familiar to the British Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and company.
The beginning of the poem expresses a son’s admiration and dismay regarding his father who is capable of stopping a farm worker from murdering the man’s own father by breaking the “man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor” and then going inside to lay down in the dark and “listen to Vivaldi.” The poem’s speaker, now transplanted to the Midwest, walks out into his own yard to look “at the stars again” and remember his father back in California, who is now declining into dementia and losing his memory of words. The speaker says that from the time of his birth, it became their agreement that they would not speak openly to each other, a familiar awkwardness between many fathers and sons. But now, looking up at the winter stars, the poet realizes he’s made a mistake:
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.
The poet, through the agency of the stars, arrives at an epiphany—the understanding that while they did not share language and intimacy earlier in life, now they do share this: the cold, pure emptiness of a wordless winter sky.
Early in 2016, before the New Dark Ages descended upon us, Graywolf Press issued The Darkening Trapeze, the third posthumous Levis poetry collection. One of the numerous poems in that book that you probably are going to want to read many times is “Ghost Confederacy”—and not only for its connection to Richmond and the history of the Civil War, and not alone for its vivid imagery and its spectacular invocations of tragic ghostly presences, but now, in addition, for its being another work in the registry of remarkable poems by Levis that brilliantly employ one of his favorite motifs—stars—in a memorably powerful and unique way.
The poem deploys a somewhat unusual narrative point of view, as it is spoken by a dead Civil War soldier in first person plural for the most part, his voice representing a host of dead soldiers—and the poem doesn’t bother to make it perfectly clear on which side the soldier was fighting, if it can be said that there actually are any sides anymore in the great kingdom of the dead. (However, it does seem possible that the persona or personae in the poem did fight for the South.)
The poem begins with a statement indicating that the soldiers may have encountered a superior force of enemy combatants under cover of night: “They were the uncountable stars, the first time / We saw them, they were the glitter and the distance.” At first, one might not be able to tell whether the soldiers are simply walking out of the woods into a clearing where they can finally look up and see the stars, but soon we are allowed to understand that those “stars” are the lanterns lighting up the incredibly numerous tents of the enemy: “We were the swimming shapes of trees, that cast / Of shade extending over their tents.” All of the soldiers in this poem share that quality of seeming to be incorporeal and beyond human, appearing as stars or shadows.
Next, the soldier narrating the poem displays a bit of bitterly sarcastic humor, saying, “We hid / In ravines, but not to be one with nature. / We knew what being one with nature really meant.” So, no thank you, the speaker suggests, we did not want to become one with nature by becoming a dead war casualty and in that way “getting back to the land” in a far too literal fashion.
Soon the subject of dust and dirt rises again, and so does a reference to the Catholicism of Levis’s youth. The soldier mentions the loss of a moment of hopefulness as it clouds over and becomes “the throat swollen / With failure and desire mingling there.” Then he adds:
I could taste it in my mouth for days. It tasted
Like the wafer a friend said the Holy Ghost
Came wrapped up in. The Holy Ghost tastes like dust.
That sacrilegious simile may have given the ex–Catholic altar boy in Levis a certain dark pleasure as he wrote it, yet it also gives expression again to the bitterness of a young man taken out of life by a meaningless “minié ball or cannon fire.” Still, the Holy Ghost and the taste of dust “liberates the body from the body so riddled // With rifle holes you can look right through us.” But the fallen soldiers ask:
Look through us to what? To slums and shopping malls?
To one suburb joining another? Who grieves
On minimum wages? . . .
And now the Civil War ghosts begin to fade away under the pressure of the images of that ugly, trashy present, the “sight of the trailer park and the truck stop.” The poem also turns its attention on us, the present day readers of the poem, and proclaims, “That dust you taste in the Holy Ghost is us, // Dust ground into the windows you gaze out of,” and the poem goes still further, telling us that “whether those windows burn or whether lights / Come on again in rows of quiet houses” depends on us and how we treat that captured soldier we now see “sitting over there and still / Bleeding from a bad haircut.” Suddenly that soldier from the past morphs and becomes the captured soldier of the present, or of any time (Levis probably wrote the poem in 1995), or to use an illustration from a time closer to our own, perhaps that image reminds us of a soldier caught up in something like the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse during the war in Iraq, or perhaps the present-day “prisoners of war” who are not even soldiers at all but the detainees, including children, incarcerated in ICE detention centers scattered all over the United States. How will we treat them, the poem asks. Will we be buried beneath the dust of the Holy Ghost, or liberated by it? How will we see things, now that we know we are looking at light coming at us through the sieve of bullet holes in the bodies of dead soldiers, bits of light coming at us like points of starlight, like judgment, out of the vast blackness of the night sky? Will we know then that we are actually looking at ourselves?
So, let’s now hear Larry Levis himself in his poem:
Ghost Confederacy
They were the uncountable stars, the first time
We saw them, they were the glitter and the distance.
We were the swimming shapes of trees, that cast
Of shade extending over their tents. We hid
In ravines, but not to be one with nature.
We knew what being one with nature really meant
~
And we were never the color-blind grasses,
We were never the pattern of the snake
Fading into the pattern of the leaves;
We were the empty clarity one glimpses
In water falling, in water spreading into
A thin white veil on what is never there,
The moment clear and empty as a heaven
Someone has just swept clean of any meaning.
~
If minié ball or cannon fire had a meaning,
We would have had maybe thirty seconds left
Of heaven to pin the right leaves back on trees
In summer and reattach the amputated limbs
Of boys. But the moment, clouding over,
Becomes again only an endless slipping of water
Over the spillways, and falls roaring in the ears
Until they ring, and the throat swollen
With failure and desire mingling there.
I could taste it in my mouth for days. It tasted
Like the wafer a friend said the Holy Ghost
Came wrapped up in. The Holy Ghost tastes like dust.
It liberates the body from the body so riddled
With rifle holes you can look right through us.
Look through us to what? To slums and shopping malls?
To one suburb joining another? Who grieves
On minimum wages? Look through us to that place—
Within sight of the trailer park and the truck stop—
Where Gettysburg could not be reenacted,
Where what was left of us on either side
Lay down our rifles, wept, embraced each other once.
That dust you taste in the Holy Ghost is us,
Dust ground into the windows you gaze out of,
And whether those windows burn or whether lights
Come on again in rows of quiet houses is a matter
Of how you treat him, sitting over there and still
Bleeding from a bad haircut, that captured soldier, that
Enemy, that risen dust, that boy, that stranger, you. 
Gregory Donovan, a senior editor of Blackbird, is the author of the poetry collection Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press, 1993), a collection that won the Devins Award for Poetry. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire, a feature-length documentary on the life and work of Larry Levis. Donovan is a faculty member in Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate creative writing program. His commentary on the work of Larry Levis is an annual feature at the Levis Prize event.