LEVIS REMEMBERED

Introduction

Welcome to Blackbird's third Levis Remembered, a visit with the poetry and voice of Larry Levis and an introduction to the seventh annual Levis Reading Prize winning poet, David Daniel. The prize is given by Larry's family and the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University to the author of a first or second book of poems chosen by VCU's panel of judges. Join us in discovering David Daniel's remarkable poems and in remembering Larry's matchless witness to the last decades of the twentieth century.

"Poem Ending With a Hotel On Fire" seems particularly apt at a moment when much of our world is consumed with fires of its own and when money seems to drive even our most intimate moments. In the poem, a solitary meditation on a dollar bill morphs into the story of the hotel fire, a story that involves Abyssinian cats, an exotic dancer, a cool bartender, and even a short joke. This poem, however, for all of its understated elements, inhabits a subtle anger not unlike that of the imagined boy who starts the fire, with the "Quick & graceful turning gesture from which the body makes / The thoughtless beauty of a hook shot from mid-court, tossed / A match inside before the door could close." Solitude, lack of imagination, and imagination all seem suspect here; and the poem's effect is to leave the reader uneasy and suspect himself. This video capture of Larry reading brings him back quite wonderfully, but we don't know where the video was made.

We are also pleased to include here Philip Levine's very informal recollections of Larry as his student and friend. We include, with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, "Those Graves in Rome" to accompany these recollections, as they represent Larry's version of a walk in Rome that Phil describes himself.

We are grateful to Larry's sister Sheila Brady for permission to print "Poem Ending With a Hotel On Fire" and to feature the video.

We particularly call your attention to A Condition of the Spirit: The Life & Work of Larry Levis, edited by Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long, just published by Eastern Washington University Press. Edward Byrne’s insightful essay on Larry’s poetry is included in it as well as much of Larry's own prose and other essays about his work, two of which, by Dave Smith and J. Randy Marshall, have also appeared in Blackbird.

—Mary Flinn