|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|||
|
LEVIS REMEMBERED: A READING LOOP Introduction Welcome to Blackbird’s fifth Levis Remembered, a visit with the poetry and voice (audio forthcoming) of Larry Levis and an introduction to the ninth annual Levis Reading Prize winner, Ron Slate. 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 Ron Rlate’s remarkable poems and in remembering Larry’s matchless witness to the last decades of the twentieth century. The three poems highlighted this year appeared together in the book Winter Stars. This book particularly introduces Larry Levis the elegaic poet, and these poems all refer in some way to his father’s death as well as to lost love. As he notes in “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” he and Billy Holiday are singing “of some affair, or someone / Gone, & therefore permanent.” These are mature and wonderful poems, adept at the sidelong glance or the apparently tossed-off comment as well as the rush of rhetorical music. In his reading of “Some Grass along a Ditch Bank” you can hear the intimacy of his knowledge of weeds and of his respect for the details of work. Winter Stars is the book that marks Larry’s place as (as Philip Levine has noted) one of our essential poets. We are grateful to David Baker for returning us to these poems in his appreciation of “In the City of Light.” We invite you to enter Larry’s work, both in Blackbird and in his books, and we thank his sister, Sheila Brady, and his son, Nick Levis, for the opportunity to recognize him here. —Mary Flinn
|
|||
 |
|
|
