|
RANDY MARSHALL
Suite: Larry Levis
I believe that we learn against
something, perhaps indeed against someone, and quite definitely
against ourselves.
Gaston
Bachelard, L'Engagement rationaliste
One of the first classes Larry Levis taught at Virginia
Commonwealth University, back in the spring of 1993, was a creative nonfiction
workshop in which I was fortunate enough to be enrolled. Among the first
reading assignments Larry gave us was Joan Didion's The White Album.
I had never read any of Didion's work, so the experience of encountering
her for the first time will always be intertwined in my memory with my
earliest impressions of Larry. Over the course of those gradually warming
Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I began to appreciate each of their perspectives
on California, and recent history, and the way writing, any kind of creative,
meaningful writing, gets done. Larry had a great deal to say about Didion's
journalistic preeminence, about how he respected her eye for the telling
detail, and about how he enjoyed her quirky, moody delivery. And he was
quick to opine that it was a certain discernible inflection of the Self
in Didion's work, a willingness on the part of the author to be implicated
in her subject matter that rescued her essays from the banality of mere
reportage. I listened and read carefully. Something in Joan Didion's (and
Larry's) hip, sardonic tone appealed to me. I was learning.
But, to be quite honest, the slightly antagonistic
quality of all the iterations of "against" in the epigraph to
this essay comes pretty close to capturing my initial reaction (as a student)
to Larry's attitude and methods as a teacher. I remember going into his
classroom for the first time, sitting down, taking out some paper and
a pencil. Larry hadn't prepared a course syllabus, but on the chalkboard
he had written his name and some basic information about the location
of his office, his office hours, and his phone numbers. He also had written
down the titles of the required texts for the class, as well as the first
twenty or so entries on a list of titles he strongly recommended to us
for further reading. (This last group of titles is hereinafter referred
to simply as The List). The List continued to grow throughout
the semester as titles of this or that work occurred to Larry as we responded
to each other's essays and discussed the assigned reading. And although
it became more and more unrealistic as an actual expectation for a semester's
work, The List communicated quite effectively Larry's hope that
we would forage widely in the language and take away more than he could
guide us through in the allotted three hours per week.
Larry's voracious, wide-ranging intellect was daunting and could, at times,
lead him to preface certain remarks or observations with perfunctory little
generalizations like, "As everyone knows, George Steiner's comments
shed a great deal of light on this. . . ." These presumptuous remarks
really drove me crazy at first. On this particular occasion, I actually
raised my hand and asked Larry to clarify just who George Steiner was
(as he had not yet made the For Further Reading Hall of Fame . . .) and
I was a little offended at the way Larry's "everyone knows"
excluded me. Larry sighed (not too petulantly) and obliged me with a quick
aside about Steiner while hastily scribbling a couple of titles (Language
and Silence, On Difficulty) on that day's addendum to The
List. I'll admit that I was probably more than a bit overly sensitive
to what seemed a smug assumption on the teacher's part about just how
well-read students in his class should be. Having done the bulk of my
undergraduate work in the Chemistry Department, I felt (and still feel)
a little out of my league on the MFA side of campus. But I came to appreciate,
eventually, Larry's freewheeling enthusiasm for the work we were doing
and his reverence for language, for the power we have to shape it, and
for the vulnerability we share, students and teachers alike, to being
shaped by it in our turn.
My favorite piece in The White Album is a little
memoir titled "On the Morning After the Sixties." In this essay
Joan Didion reminisces about her years as a student at Berkeley, wondering
at how remote her college days seemed to her from the vantage point of
the early seventies. From the far side of the abyss that the sixties had
come to represent for Didion, a decade of "reconstituted" classes
and campus barricades, her own experiences began to take on a strange
tinge. At one point the author muses, "Reconstitution would
have sounded to us then [at Berkeley, in the fifties] like Newspeak, and
barricades are never personal. We were all very personal then, sometimes
relentlessly so, and, at that point where we either act or do not act,
most of us still are." She goes on to tell us about reading Heart
of Darkness, and living in the Tri-Delt sorority house for a while,
and walking in the evening beneath the glowing cyclotron and bevatron
on the hills above the school. And, as her story meanders, we witness
Didion embracing her identification with the Silent Generation, casually,
as if in shock. But she pauses to point out: "We were silent because
the exhilaration of social action seemed, to many of us, just one more
way of escaping the personal . . ." Some observers of the times (like
Joan Didion and Larry Levis) seemed to have a gut feeling that, no matter
what the new theorists of history and literature might say, there was
no such escape.
On the morning after the sixties, Larry was busy chauffeuring
Zbigniew Herbert around Los Angeles and trying to figure out his own way
to break the silence. Larry describes his experiences of that time in
an essay of his own titled "Strange Days: Zbigniew Herbert in Los
Angeles." In this piece, Larry describes 1970 as "a Present
dressed in so many distracting styles that it was possible, in the boundless
vanity of the moment, to believe that history was irrelevant. To many
history meant the literature of failure. Some welcomed its erasure. Some
were boasting of having become post-literate." Erasing history? Escaping
the personal? Getting beyond literature? Could such maneuvers actually
be accomplished? Why would anyone try? Larry seems to have been considering
these very questions on all those long afternoons as he and Zbigniew and
Zbigniew's wife Katrina whizzed by Shell stations and Taco Bells and 7-11's.
At one point in the essay, Larry, the poet at the wheel, takes the time
to tell us a personal story. He explains how, as he and his passengers
rode along, contemplating the death of Charles De Gaulle and discussing
arson as a reasonable response to the sprawling suburbanity of Rosemeade
and San Gabriel and the thousand subdivisions of Angeleno futility, just
as they passed the small roadhouse near the freeway interchange with the
marquee advertising Live Sex on Stage, something amazing happened.
Larry recalls:
For the first time I did not cynically imagine the
performers as a tired, strung-out hippy couple going through the motions
for car salesmen, small-time executives, bitter housewives, professors
who had stopped reading. I imagined that they were both beautiful, that
they loved having sex on stage and being watched as they did so, that
their orgasms were simultaneous, that their hairstyles were reminiscent
of no period of time. Strangely enough, they seemed even less interesting
when I thought of them that way.
Beyond the impeccable sensitivity of such remarks
and the viciously droll note they add to the complex chord of the writer's
empathy, this passage sheds a fascinating light on a characteristic movement
of Larry's mind, an intellectual gesture that an attentive reader may
recognize time and again in his poetic texts. It is indicative of the
sort of scrupulousness that Larry demands of himself, both in terms of
his dedication to his craft and in terms of the imaginative liberties
he takes in its name. At moments like this we witness the Gazer as he
considers the imprecision of his own perceptions, weighing the manner
in which the very subjective act of perceiving alters the objects of his
gazing, no matter how careful the observer nor how mindful he might be
of the sanctity of simple facts.
Simple facts? Like the names of people and places
he loved. These constitute a basic, even primal, lexicon in Larry's work.
Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California,
1967
I'm going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won't mistake him for something else,
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes from a row of vines. The band
On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is,
He would remind you, just a hatband.
His hatband. He would remind you of that.
As for the other use, this unforeseen
Labor you have subjected him to, the little
Snacks & white wine of the opening he must
Bear witness to, he would remind you
That he was not put on this earth
To be an example of something else,
Johnny Dominguez, he would hasten to
Remind you, in his chaste way of saying things,
Is not to be used as an example of anything
At all, not even, he would add after
A second or so, that greatest of all
Impossibilities, that unfinishable agenda
Of the stars, that fact, Johnny Dominguez.
Some point to such features in Larry's texts as evidence
of self-referentiality and judge the result "anti-poetic." "Anti-referential"
may be the more correct term. For, under the gaze defined by much current
critical discourse, the overt subject of the above text has, quite simply,
ceased to exist, thus making any broadly meaningful referential mode impossible.
In Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of A Context,
Mark Poster describes this predicament of Postmodernism as follows:
Workers, conceptualized as the masses, are viewed
as manipulated, depoliticized, and reconciled to capitalist values by
all aspects of popular culture. Jazz, astrology columns, sports, television,
consumer goods generallythe entire panorama of leisure and daily
life since World War IInarcotized and numbed the working class.
Poster goes on to describe how, as these processes
of manipulation and depoliticization progressed, at least in the writings
of the theorists with which he concerns himself, "both the working
class subject and the bourgeois subject began to disappear from history."
I can almost hear Larry replying with an arch "Oh, really?"
to such assertions. His poem is very tender but vehement in its determination
to preserve the figure of the worker here, not merely as an artifact to
be consumed like "the little / Snacks & white wine of the opening
. . ." Larry memorializes the man in the photograph here just as
he did the migrant workers on his father's ranch, like Ignacio Calderon,
Ediesto Huerta, and Señor Solo, all of whom Larry mentions in his
"Autobiography." He does this, not out of some vacuous impulse
to tell us about his own life, but to point out that friendship is a numinous
thing in this world and because, as Larry argues, "oblivion has no
right to claim them without my respect, without their names written down,
here and elsewhere." The simple fact that these people lived is significant
for Larry, to say nothing of the macrocosmic implications of such lives
in Larry's (and Didion's) California, their sheer numbers altering the
landscape like rainfall or gravity. Not in theory, but in fact.
One fact I can't recall now is whether Gaston Bachelard's
name, or the titles of any of his works, ever made The List. But
they came up a number of times later on, in poetry workshops that I took
with Larry, and in our thesis meetings. Larry encouraged me to spend some
time reading around in Bachelard, adding that he himself had studied The
Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Reverie closely.
Looking back, I wonder if Larry's initial impulse to put me onto Bachelard
was, to some degree, a practical joke. Once, when one of my poems was
up for discussion in workshop, Larry made the observation that he could
discern two very distinct dictional modes competing for attention in my
text, adding descriptively that the poem on the table sounded to him like
"Marlin Perkins channeling Georg Trakl." A scientist and a poet.
Bachelard. Myself.
I start with some stories about myself and hope they
work their way outward and manage to reach something beyond the perimeter
of my direct experience, where they begin. It's only by reflecting on
my own personal experiences that I can begin to explain why I always associate
Larry & Joan Didion. It has to do with geography, with the California
landscape they share. But I began to sense how they also seemed to share
certain generational concerns, concerns which grew more stark and urgent
for each of them as the seventies progressed. There are a number of commonalities
in their points of view with respect to post-structuralism and the schools
of thought that were taking root in the academy and in the broader culture
around them as they began their professional lives. Levis and Didion both
shared a healthy suspicion of any ideology that could attain the status
of foregone conclusion so quickly across so many fields of discourse.
They both perceived the endangered status of the Self, and of all things
merely personal, in the wake of the societal upheavals of the Sixties,
and they strove, in their creative lives, to illustrate the ontological
significance of the individual in the face of various collectivities which,
however well-intentioned and however attractively packaged in the theory
du jour, could not, in actual practice, distinguish the baby from
the bath water. It's as if they were both standing at the edge of the
same freeway, watching the same traffic pile up, wondering when the wrecking
crews would finally come to tear down the old theater and the last abandoned
houses.
Eventually Didion broke her own personal silence,
though she couldn't speak for a whole generation. Still, millions of people
heard her. And, some of themstartled auditors of the language like
Larrytook the time to tell a bunch of us who hadn't been paying
attention (or who simply hadn't been there) to take a minute or two and
actually listen to what she was saying. In her preface to Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, Didion comments, "I suppose almost everyone
who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody
out there is listening. . . ." There is, after all, a difference
between hearing and listening. Two people standing in a crowded room hear
the same waves of conversation breaking against the walls, but each may
choose to listen to very different pieces of that conversation, interspersed
as it becomes with snippets of music, feet shuffling, the tinkle of ice
hitting the bottom of a Collins glass. Maybe this explains why the feedback
that inundated Didion upon publishing Slouching Towards Bethlehem
seemed, to the author herself, to be so "universally beside the point"?
Many of the critical responses to Larry's poems that
I've read over the years seem to be, similarly, beside the point. Academics
have, in near unanimity, assessed Larry's poetry as a body of work that
becomes, more often than not, too personal in its revelations. In his
article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Steven M. Wilson
argues that Larry "came to symbolize the self-referential writer
pampered by the academic ivory tower and spending his writing career in
endless exploration of himself." Wilson goes on to quote another
critic, Jeff Schiff, who claims Larry's poetry affords the reader "a
view of some masturbatory relationship the poet has with himself."
Larry's fellow poets generally have been kinder. Diane Wakoski comments
that Larry "is a master of the brief moment of recognition where
the personal is imbedded in the generic." While David Wojahn's response
is to praise, it is tempered by the idea that Larry's poems do exhibit
an unhealthy self-absorption. Discussing the posthumously published Elegy,
Wojahn observes, "The sweep and breadth of the poems causes them
to rise above mere tawdry abjection, and to avoid the self-pity which
characterized a fair percentage of Levis's earlier work."
Such assertions are symptomatic of a fundamental misapprehension
of what lies at the core of Larry's poetics, a poetics that is, ultimately,
not grounded in unmitigated solipsism. I think we should risk taking Larry
at his word when he admits that his poems are personal, but adds the following
caveat: "By personal I do not mean confessional at all. I
mean the creation of a private, familial mythology which intends to be
representative rather than idiosyncratic." In workshop, Larry was
wont to observe that poetry is a technology of memory. Memory is personal.
But the word technology implies instrumentality and manipulation in some
direction. Do we manipulate memory or does it manipulate us? As the poet
quite literally handles the material that becomes the poem, various levels
of representation are rendered inherent to the language that results.
Images are put into play, and narrative, and, to some extent, a persona
which, ultimately, subsumes the speaker. This figurative matrix of the
text creates a space within which words accrue meaning, over time. Even
if the figures derive in large part from the accidental raw material of
the poet's autobiography, the idiosyncratic significance they possess
for the poet is just a starting point.
In a lecture delivered at Warren Wilson College in
1993, while analyzing the work of a number of poets including Ezra Pound
and Robert Lowell, Larry makes some fairly general observations about
this process and concludes that "Poetry seems to need both the persona
(the artifice of persona) and the great weight of the past, of history,
to speak out of. . . . [I]n its descriptive terms . . . it is most adequate
and fulfilling when it is talking about a past, a past that has a sense
of completion about it." Where could such convictions leave a poet
like Larry, a definitively literate figure in an age so eager to erase
history and to label itself "post-literate"? Where does it leave
any of us who still believe, however naively, in the centrality of the
Self as subject, as the originating site of linguistic enunciation, however
contingent that subject position is rendered by a history it did not write
or a culture it did not choose or a society it did not construct? Some
have argued that Larry became nihilistic. To me this seems like an odd
inversion of actual circumstances. It's like seeing someone (let's call
her Barbara) come in from a storm, shivering, soaked to the skin, and
then making a remark to the effect of "Barbara is raining."
The effect. Larry's poetry may be an effect of the nihilistic atmosphere
in which he found himself, but that does not make Larry a nihilist any
more than it makes Barbara a thunder shower. Larry's poetry may, in fact,
be more like a well-made, inexpensive little umbrella carried by the lucky
few who happened to check the forecast before they left home. Larry's
dogged commitment to the poetry of self-exploration becomes an expression
of great hope for better weather to come. In his foreword to The Gazer
Within, David St John notes how the essays in that collection engage
readers with "the most subtle and disturbing questions of the self
to be found in the prose . . . of any contemporary American poet."
These questions follow Larry into his poems where he seems to begin the
process of working out a number of remarkable, moving answers.
But Larry's poetry, even in its flattest, most declarative
moments retains, somewhat, the quality of a question. The interrogative.
The way a dream is interrogative as it unfolds beneath the unconscious
gaze of the dreamer. And the intellectual sophistication of Larry's point
of view is balanced by a firmly rooted humanism. Larry's humanism, like
his concept of the image and the manner in which it functions, was deeply
informed by his reading of Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard was not, despite
his scientific orientation, a rationalist. He considered imagination and
reverie as well as reason to be creative forces in knowing. In reference
to the image, Bachelard argues: "The image, in its simplicity, has
no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naive consciousness; in
its expression it is youthful language. The poet, in the novelty of his
images, is always the origin of language." In these respects, Bachelard's
philosophy can be viewed as a systematic argument in favor of Surrealism.
Many have noted how, especially in his early work, Larry ends up on the
surreal side of the street more often than not. But Larry, reading Breton
through Bachelard, apprehends that "surreal" does not imply
a state of affairs somehow at odds with our "naive consciousness."
Rather it denotes a more absolute and complete synthesis of this consciousness
with its objects through what Larry might have termed our conscientious
"gazing" at the world. The eye of the poet, turned inward, attempts
to reconcile the spheres of dream and conscious thought and reverie. So
much light pours into the vulnerable lens of the eye, lens of the self.
The images we see cast their shadows in language.
Winter
I will stuff a small rag of
its sky into my pocket forever.
This brief lyric illustrates the surrealistic impulse
in Larry's early work. The will of the "I" in this couplet becomes
the ground, the essential foundation of a world. The deep ambiguity of
the preposition here is amplified by the two possessive pronouns, which
raise the issue of ownership without emphasizing it. Obviously the sky
belongs to winter ("its sky"), but a small rag is somehow torn
or taken from the sky by some mystical agency of the speaker. There is
a difference between meeting a perfectly nice Season just hanging out,
minding its own business, carrying around its sky like a big gray sack
stuffed to overflowing with little whitish rags and then harmlessly filching
one of these irresistible swatches as a memento of the encounter. But
if Winter is decked out in its sky like a majestic woman in a cloudy white
dress and you walk up to her and rip off a big chunk of fabric right at
the hemline, well, that just seems rude. It's the difference between assault
and petty theft. The genitive of possession and the genitive of origin.
The literal and the metaphorical. And what exactly is going on forever?
Is it the process of stuffing that will take place endlessly here, or
is the act of stuffing accomplished somehow, instantaneously, and the
rag of sky completely secreted, laid to rest in the speaker's pocket till
the end of time?
The end of time? I began this essay musing about how
I met Larry and how he introduced me to Joan Didion. I wanted to discuss
something I perceived about that coincidence, that accidental arrangement
of three people in space and time. Maybe the arbitrary distinction of
having known Larry near the end of his life somehow gives my memories
of him and all he taught me an eschatological cast. As if he were among
the last surviving witnesses to something significant about which he was
still, in many ways, inarticulate. As time has passed and Larry's absence
has sunk into my psyche, my sense of the talks we had and the ongoing
dialogue I find myself engaged in with his poems bring me time and again
to a consideration of whether Larry (and Didion and the generation of
writers they represent) might represent the last of the Modernists. Or
are they more correctly labeled the first Post-modernists? Are such designations
important? Maybe such questions are inconsequential and the theorists
are correct. Maybe the individual has become a meaningless cipher held
together by the frailest threads of delusion and desire.
Larry himself had some fairly cut-and-dried opinions
about what separates the Modern from what comes after. In one essay he
observes:
Modernism, constellating itself after Symbolismand
despite its disjunctiveness and even its embrace of disintegration as
a modewas nevertheless an attempt at permanence and restorations
of all kinds. . . . For all its formally revolutionary aspects, this
desire for aesthetic permanence in Yeats and others was endlessly recuperative
of a pastByzantium for Yeats, Renaissance Italy for Pound, an
orthodox Christian piety for Eliot, a revisionary dialogue with Romanticism
for Stevensall are attempts at a cessation of time, and with it
a consequent repression of the anxiety of chronological change. . .
.
He goes on to argue, "If the Post-Modern sensibility
retains a desire for permanence, the mode of accomplishing it has changed.
. . . [I]n much Post-modernist work . . . only the unadorned frailty of
the voice sounds convincing. . . ." The If Larry deploys here
is a pregnant one, and it begs a number of questions that seem to underlie
a great deal of his poetic work. Have we overcome, in any essential way,
the anxiety which Larry characterizes here as so definitively Modern?
Or have we merely become more accomplished in the art of repression?
I never thought to ask Larry how he perceived himself
in terms of such categorizations. He probably would have laughed and changed
the subject. But Larry seemed endlessly fascinated by the way written
language allows us to reenter a moment in the past and alter it in meaningful
ways through poetry, the imagination, vision. For Larry these three exist
inextricably, in concert, each always already modifying and complicating
the other as the poet takes up his pen to write. Poetry. Imagination.
Vision.
In a poem from Elegy titled "In 1967,"
Larry observes somewhat wryly how, in 1967, "Anybody with three dollars
could have a vision." But it's not enough to get the joke here, and
chuckle, and hurry on. By the time we reach the beginning of this poem's
second stanza, where the speaker observes how "Some people spent
their lives then, having visions," it's not as easy to interpret
the deadpan tone, even though the humorous note from the earlier stanza
still echoes clearly in the mind. It is as if laughter itself becomes
a contested zone that Larry attempts to negotiate with an eye towards
a more serious goal. It is easy enough to recuperate the text's subtle
references to Vietnam and the drug culture of that era. Still, the speaker
spends some time in the poem's opening lines explaining how, "Some
called it the Summer of Love," and telling us a story about dropping
mescaline and feeling like a cedar waxwing, about flight and ecstasy and
a growing numbness that is not merely a symptom of coming down. The knowing,
jaded quality of the poem's closing lines relies on the clipped, telegraphic
gesture of the appositive, "In the Summer of Love, in 1967,"
to intimate the speaker's growing awareness of just what's at stake at
a time and place where "riot police waited beyond the doors of perception,
/ And the best thing one could do was get arrested." By the end of
the poem it would appear that the moment when explanation might have proved
useful has passed. No alibi suffices. You had to be there.
Larry revisits this particular moment in one of his
late, masterful compositions titled "Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern
in It." This poem, the second of a pair that closes the middle (second)
section of Larry's last collection (the final arrangement of which was
completed by Philip Levine and David St. John) quite poignantly sets the
tone for the book's third and final section, which consists entirely of
elegies. In theme and figure it recollects both "In 1967" and
"Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967." The
re-presentation of the material here is signal; and the poet relies on
the autotelic charge of his tropes to orient the reader within the space
of his longer narratives and to illuminate any moments of heightened abstraction
or opacity of tone. The poem in question gives us our bearings in time
and space rather quickly:
Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss
of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the
city,
I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying
figure of Ediesto
Huerta
Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit
Out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon,
I'm going to let you
Keep your eyes on him as he lifts and swings fifty-pound
boxes of late
Elberta peaches up to me where I'm standing on a flatbed trailer &
breathing in
Tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through
it
So that they seem to swim through the air.
We recognize the familiar scene from Larry's father's
orchard, and the name of his fellow worker is equally familiar, as is
the self-conscious gesture of the speaker who places Huerta before us
in the grit and heat of not-quite-memory. The merely realistic detail
of the tractor exhaust becomes, in this context, a metaphor for everything
that renders memory approximate and tentative, an excuse if you will,
for the necessary incompletions of the text. But, when the poet's gaze
comes to rest upon the hourglass on the belly of a black widow, the poem
shifts gears, gaining traction on the slippery surface of memory by reaching
through it to grasp history and the endless ramification of the universe
out beyond the orchard, just over Ediesto Huerta's left shoulder. "It's
the hourglass on her belly I remember, & the way the figure of it,
/ Figure eight of Time & Infinity, looked like something designed.
. . ." But a design implies a designing will, and the speaker, in
these latter days, seems determined to resist the seductiveness of such
easy logic in order to enunciate his mantra of the inexplicable. This
is elegy with an attitude, one part pure sorrow, one part rage. In such
a mood, the deliberate consideration of the deadly spider's hidden eggs
as metaphor collapses inward, like a star finally consumed by its own
gravity. At this crucial moment the poet is still detached enough to ask
that we consider the absolute scale of the objective correlative he has
chosen. We are stardust. . . . And these eggs, "smaller than
the o in this typescript // Or a handwritten apostrophe in ink,"
these precisely packaged bits of DNA are so small they are almost nothing
at all. And what is an apostrophe if not a symbol for an elision that
we've all agreed upon, something left out for convenience, or by habit.
Something absent but significant in its implication of some design, some
pattern.
What do they represent but emptiness, some gold
camp settlement
In the Sierras swept clean by smallpox, & wind?
Canal School with its three rooms, its bell &
the rope you rang it with
And no one there in the empty sunlight, ring & after ring &
echo.
It magnifies & I can't explain it.
Piedra, Conejo, Parlier. Stars & towns, blown
fire & wind.
Deneb & Altair, invisible kindling, nothing above nothing.
What do they represent . . . ? As the speaker
calls our attention to the most primitive raw material of written language,
the ink and paper and the poet's hand hovering above the page, the literal
surface of the poem seems to bleed toward metatextuality. But the blood
is Larry's, and, aware as he is of the dangers of reducing his subjects
to mere props for supporting his abstractions and his philosophical and
literary musings, he returns to them repeatedly, unapologetically, lovingly,
in the simplicity of their names.
All we are is representation, what we are &
are not,
Clear & then going dark again, all we are
Is the design or insignia that mispresents what we are, & stays
Behind, & looks back at us without expression,
empty road in sunlight
I once drove in a '48 Jimmy truck with three tons of fruit
On it & the flooring beneath the clutch so worn away I could see
The road go past beneath me, the oil flecked light
& shadow
Picking up speed. Angel & Johnny Dominguez,
Ediesto Huerta,
Jaime Vaca & Coronado Solares, Querido Flacco.
~
On July 29, 2001 the headline of the lead story
for the New York Times Arts & Leisure Section read, "Beyond
Multiculturalism, Freedom?" Assuming we could ever reach an agreement
as to what multiculturalism means, the rhetorical question of the headline
seems to imply that the -ism in question is already a thing achieved,
its significance fully pillaged and about to be abandoned like a fallen
city, sacked, about to be left behind in smoking ruins. The author of
this article quotes a woman named Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum
in Harlem, describing the "Freestyle" exhibition which she
curated in 2000 as a "showcase of Postblack art." Even
if we can theorize a point of view from which art can be said to be
"post-ethnic" or "post-Black," does it make sense
on a personal level for the artists themselves, at the surface of their
skins? Or is the surface of the skin just something else we'll have
to escape, erase, leave behind? Like history and literature? I don't
know what all this might portend, but two facts become clearer and clearer
as the days go by. I need to dig out my old class notes and keep plugging
away at The List. And, no matter how many years go by, and no
matter how many miles I travel on the Contemporary American Poetry Expressway,
I don't expect ever to reach a destination that might be called Post-Larry.
That's an exit I never want to take. ![](../../images/bug_print.gif)
Sources
Cotter, Holland. "Beyond Multiculturalism,
Freedom?" New York Times 29 July 2001, Arts & Leisure
Section: 1+.
Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York:
Noonday Press, 1990.
---. Preface. Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
By Didion. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.
Levis, Larry. Elegy. Pittsburgh; University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
---. The Gazer Within. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2001.
---. "Not Life So Proud to be Life: Snodgrass,
Rothenberg, Bell, and the Counter-revolution." American Poetry
Review v 18 (1989). Note: I was working from a text prepared for
inclusion in The Gazer Within and so my page numbers do not correspond
to the APR orginal.
---. Untitled lecture delivered at Warren Wilson
College, 1993. Transcript, prepared by J. Randy Marshall, as yet unpublished.
---. Wrecking Crew. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.
"Levis, Larry." Contemporary Authors,
New Revision Series 80 (1999): 235-237.
McAllester Jones, Mary. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive
Humanist: Text and Readings. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991.
Poster, Mark. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism:
In Search of a Context. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
St. John, David. Foreword. The Gazer Within.
By Larry Levis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. xv-xvii.
Wilson, Steven M. "Larry Levis." Dictionary
of Literary Biography, 3rd ser. 120 (1992): 189-195.
Wojahn, David. "Survivalist Selves." Kenyon
Review ns XX 3/4 (1998): 180-190.
|
|