NINTH ANNUAL LEVIS PRIZE READING

Terry Oggel
Good Evening. I’m Terry Oggel, Chair of the English Department here at VCU. 

Welcome to the ninth annual Levis Prize Reading, given by this year’s winner, Ron Slate, for his collection, The Incentive of the Maggot, published by Houghton-Mifflin.  The judges come from our English Department faculty and our MFA program in Creative Writing.  Recipients receive an honorarium and are brought to Richmond to present this public reading in celebration of the award.  The roll call of previous prize winners is getting to be quite long: 

Spencer Reece for The Clerk’s Tale
David Daniel for Seven-Star Bird
Susan Aizenberg for Muse
Steve Scafidi for Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer
Nick Flynn for Some Ether
Joel Brouwer for Exactly What Happened
Sandra Alcosser for Except by Nature, and
Belle Waring for Dark Blonde. 

This annual award in Larry’s name goes to the author of the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year.  It’s hard to believe, but this is the ninth award.  As Marcel Cornis-Pope, our previous chair, said last year, in today’s volatile and war-torn world, nine years constitutes a tradition.  The volatility of the world was what Larry’s poetry confronted, and with it, mediated fractured experience. 

With this award we remember a distinguished poet, essayist, teacher, scholar, and above all, mentor for many of us in the department.  Larry was our colleague until his untimely death in 1996.  Along with Larry we are pleased to recognize Larry’s family: mother, Carol; brother, Kent; and sister, Sheila, whose continued generous support makes this event and yearly highlight in the life of our department possible. 

In that vein, I commend the selection committee for choosing such a deserving winner, and to thank Ron Slate for joining us to share his poetry with us; an important tradition can thus continue . . .

Greg Donovan
Every year it’s my pleasure and my honor to invoke the spirit of Larry Levis, who, after all is the person for whom this event constitutes a living memorial. By honoring the poets who win the prize we carry on his memory, a person who was such an inventive and creative poet. 

One of the things that happened when Larry Levis came to VCU is that he took over a writing workshop that had previously been taught by the esteemed poet Dave Smith.  And Dave had set up certain habitual practices in that workshop which those students attempted to carry on when Larry came into it. One of them was that when he walked in the workshop and the workshop began, one of the students would begin the workshop by reiterating what the poem was about and basically kind of narrating the story of the poem.  They often would talk about it as though there was very little distinction between the poet’s biography and the poet’s poem. They would speak of them as if they were the same thing.

When Larry heard this one evening after several evenings of witnessing this habit that these students had, he blew up at them and just stopped the whole class in the middle of it and said, “I don’t give a damn about your petty little life!” And he walked out.  He walked out of the class. Now, there are two interpretations that you can attach to this story. One is that Larry was teaching them extremely valuable lesson that even poetry rooted in autobiography is nevertheless not to be, like journalism, a slave of memory, but instead, is to be a witness of the imagination; however, the truth is that it is entirely possible that he just really needed a cigarette. 

The theme tonight is identity, your life’s story, and how it fits with art.

On another occasion, Larry and I were both present at a faculty meeting when one of the faculty members there was complaining about the nature of student evaluations, and how unfair they were, how unfair they could be, particularly with regard to the difference between how easy it was for creative writing faculty members to get a good evaluation and how difficult it was for teachers of literature, of real literature, to achieve high evaluations. And in my experience, one is just is hard as the other, and I’m not in any way attempting to cast dispersions of my colleagues who teach literature. It is one of the most difficult jobs there is.  But teaching creative writing is also. And at that meeting a faculty member pointed at me and said, “Well, of course, here comes Donovan in his blue jeans and his boots and with all of his touchy-feely way of dealing with the students. And of course they give him high evaluations for his teaching, but the rest of us have to teach really difficult and challenging things that people don’t want to do.”

And she particularly got excited about this idea of me wearing boots. That seemed to be particularly offensive. And Larry waited a little while, as he was in the habit of doing, and then, as he was also in the habit of doing because he was kind of double jointed, he twisted his arms up and the more he twisted his arms up the more you knew something was coming, and he said, “Well, you know I think actually it’s possible that the teaching of literature and the teaching of creative writing are both difficult undertakings.”

And then he pulled he pulled his leg out from underneath the table—and he was tall and he had a very long leg—and he stuck it up on the table and he said, “Oh, and I wear boots too.”  

He had a big black cowboy boot on. 

Well, of course, I loved him dearly for that and that’s part of the reason why I repeat this story but later on there was more to it that was even more fun because we went back up to the offices that he and I shared. And we were both then, as now, forbidden to smoke cigarettes from our various doctors. And so, of course, he went into the drawer in his office, in the desk drawer, and pulled out the forbidden pack and he said, “You want a cigarette, man?”

And I said, “Yeah, I could really use a cigarette after that meeting. That was really something, wasn’t it?”

And he said, “Yeah,  I know that was really something. Okay let’s have a cigarette”

So we had a cigarette together. We smoked a cigarette and we’re standing there smoking a cigarette . . . and for a moment he looked at me with a long dramatic pause. His eyebrows went up as they sometimes did and he got the evil gleam in his eye. He turned the cigarette backwards and started puffing it this way. He looked at me. He looked at my boots. He looked at his boots and he said, if you know The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you know this scene, he said, “Badges, we don’t need no stinking badges.”

The next story I’d like to tell—I unfortunately can’t recall exactly Larry’s side of the story so I’m just going to tell you my side of the story—we often would eat dinner together and share stories from the past and, because we were of a certain age, we both had been long-hairs at a certain time in our life, when that was not a popular thing to be, when it was kind of a dangerous thing to be, as a matter of fact. We sometimes would tell each other stories about things that had happened to us with the police involving our long hair. One night he told me the story of how he had gotten thrown out of a town—he had been told to leave town and never come back. So that solicited from me my own story about that which I’ll tell you very briefly, one day I was actually brought into the move of a friend of mine because, as often happened in those days, I would get brought in on various people’s moves because I was the proud owner of a Volkswagen van. I was helping a friend in St. Louis move a big pile of furniture. And of course because I was a long-hair and he was a long-hair, the police pulled us over because they thought all the furniture was stolen. I spoke to the officer with extreme politeness as I was in the habit of doing in those days because otherwise you might get a billy-club upside the head. 

He took my license and he looked at me and he shined a flashlight in the car and looked at our furniture and he said, “Where’d you get this stuff?”

I said, “It’s his.”

And he said, “Right.”

I said, “No, it’s his furniture and I’m helping him move.”

He said, “Sure.” He said, “Here’s what I want from you. I want you to get out of town by sundown and I don’t want to ever see you in this town again.”

Now, as near as I could tell, he was talking about the city of St. Louis. And I actually did dare to say to him, “This is my hometown! I can’t get out of town.”  

But after a moment, I realized that was very unwise, I said “Okay officer, I will.  I’ll be out of town by sundown I promise.” Because, what else could you say? 

Larry was, like me, familiar with being thrown out of town for who you were. Or maybe it really wasn’t who you were. It’s just who someone thought you were.  And there’s always this difference between the story of your life as you might imagine it and the story as others might see it and the story as you might present it in fiction or in poetry. The interchange between all those things is a life.  It’s a life in the art of writing. 

Larry was particularly inventive in how he made use of autobiographical materials. Other people have been able to do that as well, notably drawing on their own stories to make new stories. Or taking a particular attitude about their own lives. About how they felt about whether or not they wanted to defend their lives. Just for a moment, I’ll give you a sample of somebody who had that attitude:

[plays Billie Holiday]

This is a Larry Levis poem, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire.”
 

David Wohan
It’s a pleasure to introduce you tonight to Ron Slate, whose collection, The Incentive of the Maggot, is the winner of this year’s Larry Levis reading prize, an award endowed by the family of Larry Levis, one that serves a dual purpose.  First, it honors an outstanding first or second book of poetry, published during the previous year, chosen from over 100 entries, many of them already award winning volumes.  Just as importantly, as you’ve heard from Greg [Donovan], it seeks to honor and keep the memory alive of an American poet who was among the most important original and ambitious of the past four decades. 

I think Ron Slate’s collection is an especially apt choice for the award, for it shares many of the things that I look to in Larry Levis’s work: a sly, and pontification-free mixing of the political and the personal, a grown-up sense of irony that refuses glibness just as sternly as it refuses easy consolation, and a masterful ability to move the poem in surprising directions.  Like Levis’s, these poems can be funny and heartbreaking at once, and they are exceptionally learned and cosmopolitan, supremely confident in their capacity to borrow from both high and low culture in a wise and a Horatian sense, wise in all the ways that count, whether the author is writing about a Roman statue of a hermaphrodite on exhibit in the Louvre, about an apparition of the virgin Mary that appears in a hospital window, or about a conversation with an old woman in a supermarket, that is prompted by a cheesy Dean Martin song. 

You all remember the goal James Wright set for himself in a poem: “The kind of poetry I want to write is the poetry of a grown man.”    And that is the kind of poetry we encounter in The Incentive of the Maggot.  Ron Slate has been publishing poetry for over thirty years, and there are some of us in this room who remember a wonderful literary journal he edited in the 1970s called The Chowder Review.  It’s important to also note that his background is in business and not in the academy.  He has been, as the jacket note to his collection notes, the vice president of global communications for a major computer technology company, and the chief operating officer of a biotech startup.  But during this time he was also able to write a splendid collection of verse, one that was awarded the highly coveted Bakeless prize, from the Breadloaf’s writers’ conference in Houghton Mifflin, and which received a slew of glowing reviews.  And which is also one of the finalists for this year’s very prestigious Lenore Marshall prize, an honor that’s very rarely given to a first book.  It’s a terrific pleasure tonight to introduce you to Ron Slate.

Reading, Ron Slate
Thank you.  Listen for a moment to this statement:

What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for half a lifetime, we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred, given the conditions that caused them.  There is no light in it. It is trivial fill gap.  We know the plane will crash, the train derail, and we know why.  No one cares, no one can care.  We get the news and discount it.  We are quite right in doing so.

That is William Carlos Williams, 1951, from an essay called “The Practice.”  
Now listen for a moment to this one:

There’s something elegiac in the whole fabric of our time.  About which I can do nothing.  The time in which I am born is something done to me.  It creates a particular style of thought, and a particular violation of the self, about which one can do nothing.  The time in which anyone is a born is a violation done to him.

That’s Larry, about 30 years later. 

Both of those poets seem to be telling us that between the experience of an actual life lived and the public narratives that are offered to explain and give a sense to that life, there is an enormous gap.  The desolation and the sadness occurs in the space between.  And some of us will do anything to fill that gap–we will follow our politicians to wherever, we will follow the media to wherever, anything to fill that space between a life which is increasingly isolated and alone, and all of this noise on the outside.  But that gap is also an impetus for poetry.  Poems come from an experience which need the poems to comprehend that experience.  It occurs in language, and it occurs in astonishment.  And that’s what Larry was all about.  It was about that astonishment.  It’s kind of a miracle when it occurs.  It’s an addictive thing; you want to go back and experience it again and again. And in that joy, in the language, more than anything else—the recognition comes in the writing—is what Larry was about. 

So when you tell me that I’ve won the Larry Levis prize, given my preoccupations, I want you to know that it means a great deal to me, and I promise you that I’m going to use the energy that comes from this, which is very palpable to me, to continue doing my work.  All kinds of poets win prizes—good, bad, indifferent, mediocre—but this is very very special to me. 

I’m going to go on now and read to you some poems from my book.  This book has had a fortunate little life for the last year and a half.  And I’ve had the chance to read, and tonight I’m going to read some new poems too.  I’m going to start off with a poem called “Writing Off Argentina.”   As David said, I am a business guy; that’s how I make my living.  I did go to Argentina in December of 2000 just before I left my job to go home to write for 18 months, and this poem is called “Writing Off Argentina.”

[“Writing Off Argentina,” by Ron Slate, from The Incentive of the Maggot, published 2005 by Houghton Mifflin.]

I remember in high school, my English teacher defining poetry—she would say, “You know, Wordsworth said, ‘Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility’.”   But Wordsworth never said that.  He didn’t say that.  He said that the origins of poetry are to be found in emotion recollected in tranquility.  The origins.  Which means that you start with memory, but you move from memory.  I think Greg [Donovan] also just touched on that. 

So I went to Argentina on business, and it was a year and a half later that I wrote this poem.  In the writing of poetry you get the insight into what the experience was about.  Otherwise, there’s no need to write a poem.  That’s the problem ultimately with, as Louise Glück has said, with confessional poetry.  If I confess something to you that I know and I put it in a poem, it may make me feel better, I got it off my chest, but I already knew.  I had already discovered the significance of it—there’s nothing new.   It might be titillating to you, but there’s no point in my writing it because I’ve discovered nothing in the writing of the poem.  This next piece is called “Light Fingers,” and it’s about growing up.  It’s about my youth in Quincy, Massachusetts.  I was born there in 1950.  I should say, too, my dad was in . . . he was a liquor retailer.

[“Light Fingers” , by Ron Slate, from The Incentive of the Maggot, published 2005 by Houghton Mifflin.]

I did write poetry in the seventies and into the early eighties.  But I wrote no poetry for almost 20 years, from the early eighties until 2001.  My father-in-law died in March of ’01, I started again in June of ’01, and I quit my job and went home.  I’d worked in that last job for seven years, I had some money in the bank, and I went home to write.  I went from writing nothing to a kind of graphomania, you know, where everything looks like a poem.  That went on for three or four months, and suddenly there was a stack of poems there. 

I really had no expectations of making a book or being able to come here and to talk to you, but I went through a process where I finally learned something about revising work, and about going back as you reviseto the original inspiration of the poem, and not being afraid to look the reader in the eye, not be afraid to make declarative statements, not to rely just on attitude.  I work with someone now.  I show her all of my work and she tells me all my bad habits.  And my bad habits don’t change, they’re always the same, but now I know what they are, so I can get a draft down and then go back and do the pruning that I need to do.  One of the poems that was revised quite a bit is this poem, called “Apparition of the Virgin.”

[“Apparition of the Virgin,” by Ron Slate, from The Incentive of the Maggot, published 2005 by Houghton Mifflin]

I’m going to read a poem now called “Monuments,” and I had the chance to read this a couple of times.  I like the story it tells.  The figure in this poem of Kathe Kollwitz—my wife trained as an art historian and then she became a studio artist.  And years ago, I got a review copy of the letters and diaries of Kathe Kollwitz and it promptly went up on the shelf.  Nancy told me for years, “Open up and read this book.”   I finally did and when I did, I was just amazed by her and her work.  And I know this school is very strong in the arts, so there are probably people here who have studied her.  But she’s in the poem.  Her oldest son died in the first major battle of World War I in Ypres, in Flanders.  And that’s in the poem.  She commemorated his death by creating two monuments, a mother and a father, which stand at the entrance of the cemetery where he is buried there, near Ypres.  This poem is based on this, and it’s called “Monuments.”

[“Monuments,” by Ron Slate, from The Incentive of the Maggot, published 2005 by Hougton Mifflin.]

I should have told you that my mother’s side of the family is where I get my sense of history.  My mother’s family lived through the war in France, and hid from the Germans.  Miraculously, at the end of the war, they all went back to Paris and they all survived, with the exception of one person, who was taken to Auschwitz.  So I lived with that as a kid. And I remember when I was a kid, my two closest buddies were Joey O’Brien, who was in the filching poem that I read, another fellow whose last name was Lombardo—Irish and Italian, both Catholic, very close friends.  And I remember my mother saying to me one day, “They may be friends of yours, but would they save your life?”  

And I thought this was just overdoing it a little bit—it was just Joey and Mark, you know, we were playing soldiers in the backyard.  But I came to understand as the years went by, exactly what she meant by saving a life, and expanded on that idea, because it means not only allowing somebody to hide in your house, but also what it means to preserve your humanity in the face of things.  That’s my mother’s side of the family. 

On my father’s side of the family, there was also a tragedy and a catastrophe which colored my growing up.  My grandmother died in a fire in Boston, the Coconut Grove Fire of 1942.  492 people died as a result of the fire, many in the weeks afterwards from asphyxiation and so forth.  I grew up constantly hearing that if my grandmother had survived that fire, that our family would be different.  And I wrote this poem—I wrote an early version of this poem back in the seventies, and just went back to the whole topic, and wrote a completely different thing after 9/11.  This is called “Coconut Grove.”

[“Coconut Grove,” unpublished.] 

I think we mythologize our lives.  We look back and then we try to figure out what it meant, and poetry’s answers are partial and ambivalent.  Poetry finds joy in that kind of response, in not finding answers but getting a feel for what happened.  Lately, I’ve been writing poems that try to pick apart and explain to myself.  I’m 56 years old, and didn’t write for a long time, so essentially I have to account for myself.  That’s what I’m doing now. 

I think I’ll read this poem first.  This poem is called “Morbidezza,” and Morbidezza is a word—it’s a painterly word that describes a certain delicate way of rendering the flesh in oils.

[ “Morbidezza,” unpublished.]

“Waxing Gibbous” – a phase of the moon.  

[“Waxing Gibbous,” unpublished.]

My grandfather was born in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 1902.  And one of his boyhood friends was the poet Hikmet. Now, my grandfather was a Jew, and Hikmet was a Turk.  But at the time, the Germans were in Turkey.  And the two of them went to a German school.  In fact, Hikmet’s father became the consul to Hamburg.  So my grandfather spoke fluent German; he spoke seven languages.  He was caught by the Vichy in France, and he was thrown into a detention camp.  The Vichy were a bit disorganized.  He was thrown into a camp and yet he was given passes to go north to see his family every so often, and he would come back.  Otherwise, they would just track him down again.  And I thought it would’ve been very easy for the Vichy then to simply follow my grandfather to where the rest of the family was hiding, but it didn’t occur to them, I guess. 

He told me that he lived through the war with this volume of Hikmet’s poetry.  Hikmet also was a socialist, and my grandfather was a raging Democrat. To him, Adlai Stevenson was God.  The Republicans were the people who were going to take away his Medicare and that’s all he cared about when he came here.  So he lived with this volume of poetry of Hikmet, and he would read to me in Turkish, and then he would translate it, and I think that it’s the first poetry I heard.  Which is kind of odd, because these are not poems in our tradition, so to speak, but they’re wonderful poems. 

I think the first poet I really heard was Yeats in high school, hearing the sound of the language.  But the moment I thought I might like to be a poet was when I was in college, and I was taking a Stevens seminar.  The  campus poets would come in, one in each class, and they would come in, and they would read a poem by Stevens, and then the seminar would continue.  One day, James Tate, who at that point was a very young poet—it was 1969—came in.  He didn’t read, he recited, “The Man on the Dump.”   And I thought that was just the most amazing thing, and thought, I just really would like to do that.  I’d like to be a person who can get up in front of people and recite a poem like “The Man on the Dump.”

This poem is called “Strophe.”   Many of my poet heroes are international poets.  One of them is George Seferis.  George Seferis was a lifelong Greek diplomat—ultimately became the Greek ambassador to the court of St. James after World War II,  and always felt this tension between his career, which was very demanding, and very tragic, because the history of Greece in the 20th century is monstrous, and the desire to be a poet and to spend time writing. 

And when he went up to London, he finally got to meet T.S. Eliot.  And, as poets always complain, you know,  about not having enough time to write, he went to Eliot to complain.  He said, “I just don’t have so much time to write.”   And of course Eliot knew what it meant to have a job since he had been a banker and now he was an editor at Faber.  And Eliot said, “No, no, no, no, you must have some other way to be preoccupied.  You must have a job, because poetry comes out of the unconscious.”   He took note of that, and it made him feel a little bit better.  Seferis is a hero to me because he managed to sustain his ability to create and still to relate to his times.  He wrote a book called Strophe.  When he used the word “strophe,” he meant it as a turning point, and sort of as an homage to him, I call my poem “Strophe.”

[“Strophe,” unpublished.]

I think I’ll read one more poem.  This poem is called “The Great Wave.”   You remember the tsunami.  A flood is both an abundance and a catastrophe, at the same time.  This is one of those poems where I’ve read it a couple of times.  It’s one of these where the voice is not exactly my voice, but I heard it as my voice when I was working.  In other words, this character is watching TV, and he sees the imagery we all saw, you know, the constant media images of the tsunami, and it’s called “The Great Wave.”

[“The Great Wave,” unpublished.]

Thank you everyone for coming out tonight in the rain and so forth . . .   

   Contributor’s notes
   Levis Remembered