ELEVENTH ANNUAL LEVIS READING PRIZE

A Reading by Matt Donovan

Terry Oggel

Good evening everyone. I am Terry Oggel, Chair of the English department here at VCU. Welcome to the Eleventh Annual Levis Prize reading, given by this year’s winner, Matt Donovan, for his collection Vellum, 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 this award.

The roll call of previous prize winners is getting to be quite long: Joshua Weiner, for From the Book of the Giants; Ron Slate, for The Incentive of the Maggot; 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, our first Levis Prize winner—for Dark Blonde—in 1998.

This annual honor 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 that this is the eleventh award. Considering the volatility and instability of today’s world, eleven years constitutes a long tradition. The volatility of the world was what Larry’s poetry confronted—and by that means, [his poems] mediate fractured experience. This year’s winner, by exploring the relationship between violence and beauty, follows Larry’s lead.

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 himself, we are pleased to recognize Larry’s family whose support has contributed to making possible this yearly highlight in the life of our department. In that vein, I commend the selection committee for choosing such a deserving winner, and I thank Matt Donovan for joining us to share his poetry with us. An important tradition can thus continue.

Gregory Donovan

It’s my job every year at this event to evoke the memory of Larry Levis in some way, and it’s a job I enjoy, as it gives me a chance to tell some stories about my friend and colleague, who was also the beloved friend and admired colleague of a number of people in this room. All of us continue to miss his lively presence, but this event helps us to keep him around, in some fashion.

I first met Larry Levis in his poetry. And there, not only did I discover engaging bits of striking stories scattered as vignettes throughout his work, but later I also had the special pleasure of hearing some mighty good stories over dinner directly from Larry himself. Including the many stories about his childhood in California, where he grew up on what he always called “the ranch,” south of Fresno in the Central Valley, surrounded by orchards and vineyards where he picked and loaded fruit alongside migrant workers, where he drove a tractor and poisoned weeds with a muttered Dominus vobiscum, and where he sometimes rode horses, which sometimes were worthless horses—which is not to say that those horses did not enjoy his esteem. It might seem a somewhat unlikely connection between us, two college professors with more or less genuine PhDs, but we both did know something about the peculiar lives and days of some particular horses.  

I could identify with Larry’s stories because I had spent a considerable amount of time in my own childhood working on my grandfather’s farm in central Missouri, where he not only raised corn and wheat and hay, but he also bred registered Polled Hereford cattle, and sometimes I rode horses, some of whom I could also, on occasion, have to call worthless. I can recall quite distinctly a tall copper-colored quarter horse named Duke, a horse on which I herded cattle and rode fence lines. The horse was a remarkable cow pony, an agile cutting horse, but Duke was eccentric and temperamental and, like most horses, he could be incorrigibly lazy and downright uncooperative.

My grandfather was in the habit of riding that horse out to the location he actually called the “south forty,” a forty-acre patch of land a half-mile down the gravel road and separate from the main part of the farm. And when he was going to work that patch with a tractor or a combine which he had parked there, he would arrive in the field, dismount, and slap the horse on the behind and let it run back to the house on its own. The horse was then free for the rest of the day to graze on the lawn until my grandfather came back to unsaddle him and put him in the barn.

One day my grandfather told me to ride out to the south forty to check on a fence line where some Angus cattle had recently jumped or broken down the fence and had gotten onto his land from a neighbor’s pasture. My grandfather did not tell me about his habit of swatting the horse and letting him gallop home. Duke had been objecting to taking this trip out to the south forty the entire way, walking ever more slowly and balking and stumbling as if there was something terribly wrong with him, but although the horse was certainly no longer young, he was not yet in any sort of decrepit state of old age and I knew very well that he was faking it. Eventually, as we drew near to the south forty, he became almost totally impossible to handle, acting as if he was going to fall down completely, and I gave him a swat on the rear to get him to behave. The horse reared up with what I could swear was a smile on his lips; he wheeled around on his hind legs and took off for home at a blazing galloping speed—the fastest I had ever seen him run—flying along the road, kicking up gravel and dust, with me hanging on for dear life on his back, shouting and jerking back on the reins, but nothing I did fazed him in the least and he sped along at a spectacular clip like one of the champion steeplechase horses from which he was descended. My grandfather was an excellent judge of horses, and he always had one very good, very spirited horse on the place.

When we got near the farmhouse, the horse—who was completely beyond my control at that point—veered off the road and took a shortcut under the trees lining the edge of the front yard. One of the low-hanging branches caught me square in the forehead and knocked me nearly unconscious and mostly out of the saddle, and I only kept myself from getting dragged by hanging on to the pommel. When I arrived in the backyard, my grandmother walked out the backdoor to see her city-slicker grandson hanging limply off to the side of the horse, one foot hung up in a stirrup and one slipping from the top of the saddle, my forehead bleeding. She caught me as I fell off and laid me down in the grass and she looked at me there for awhile. And then she said, “My land, can’t you ride any better than that?”

In Larry’s beautiful poem “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand,” we find him engaged in an extended meditation on the memory of several of the dearly departed among the horses he has known, with a particular focus on an old bay cow horse named Querido Flacco. I’m not sure who the “dear” person was after whom the horse was named, but it was a bay horse. So if you want to see it clearly in your mind, such a horse has a reddish-brown body along with a mane, tail, ear edges, and lower legs which are black. And a “washed-out” palomino—basically, they’re the ones with the cream-colored body and white mane and tail. And that horse was named Misfit, perhaps after the character in the Flannery O’Connor story, I don’t know. His [Levis's] parents and family, unlike my grandparents and family, were rather well-read people.

Those two horses, Querido Flacco and Misfit, misbehaved in the way of all horses, especially older horses, but Larry seemed to have been particularly fascinated, as always, by the far-off dreaminess and utterly self-contained attitudes they exhibited. Those were attitudes with which Larry himself clearly and strongly identified, I believe. And so the horses were kindred spirits and likable companions and, in the poem, when the horses misbehave as he’s trying to ride either of them bareback, he just slips down off the horse and lets them have their way, walking them “slowly back, letting them pause when they wanted to.” That’s definitely not a way of working with horses that either his father or my grandfather would have approved at all. Larry saw those horses as being “other worlds. Worlds uninhabited / And without visitors,” Looking at them in the moonlight, considering their oncoming and inevitable deaths, he discovers that he can easily reject the idea of any sort of heaven, which he figures as a kind of rider to be thrown off one’s back, and as a bunch of “splintered lumber no one could build anything with.” A Catholic boy throwing off the idea of heaven is no light matter, as I well know, having been one myself.

But for Larry in the poem, the horses are exemplars, and he recalls the way that race horses at the track “made it all seem effortless, / . . . the way they were explosive and untiring” and then he captures the vast feeling of emptiness after the race is over, an inescapable loneliness which is, in the end, always the way of the world, “that grandstand with its thousands of empty seats,” seats that once held the living and which now, in the poem’s ending, represent the dead, including Misfit and Querido Flacco, who have by now answered the call of death “with its bridle of clear water in hand.” In the end, in a quite strange and inventive manipulation of point of view, he manages to be everyone and no one, as he answers the voice of the broken king who has come to whisper this question:“Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment // Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility and the fleeing of flesh?”

And the answer of Larry Levis sounds out not only the cry of carpe diem, seize the day, and his answer not only speaks for us all in this very moment, but it also continues to speak for him from beyond the grave. Who desires this moment?

“Me. I do. It’s mine.”

[Larry Levis reading “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand” reprinted by permission of The University of Pittsburg Press.]

Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand

One was a bay cowhorse from Piedra & the other was a washed-out palomino
And both stood at the rail of the corral & both went on aging
In each effortless tail swish, the flies rising, then congregating again

Around their eyes & muzzles & withers.

Their front teeth were by now yellow as antique piano keys & slanted to the angle
Of shingles on the maze of sheds & barn around them; their puckered

Chins were round & black as frostbitten oranges hanging unpicked from the limbs
Of trees all through winter like a comment of winter itself on everything
That led to it & found gradually the way out again.

In the slowness of time. Black time to white, & rind to blossom.
Deity is in the details & we are details among other details & we long to be

Teased out of ourselves. And become all of them.

The bay had worms once & had acquired the habit of drinking orange soda
From an uptilted bottle & nibbling cookies from the flat of a hand, & liked to do
Nothing else now, & the palomino liked to do nothing but gaze off

At traffic going past on the road beyond vineyards & it would follow each car
With a slight turning of its neck, back & forth, as if it were a thing

Of great interest to him.

If I rode them, the palomino would stumble & wheeze when it broke
Into a trot & would relapse into a walk after a second or two & then stop
Completely & without cause; the bay would keep going though it creaked

Underneath me like a rocking chair of dry, frail wood, & when I knew it could no longer
Continue but did so anyway, or when the palomino would stop & then take

Only a step or two when I nudged it forward again, I would slip off either one of them,
Riding bareback, & walk them slowly back, letting them pause when they wanted to.

At dawn in winter sometimes there would be a pane of black ice covering
The surface of the water trough & they would nudge it with their noses or muzzles,
And stare at it as if they were capable of wonder or bewilderment.

They were worthless. They were the motionless dusk & the motionless

Moonlight, & in the moonlight they were other worlds. Worlds uninhabited
And without visitors. Worlds that would cock an ear a moment
When the migrant workers come back at night to the sheds they were housed in

And turn a radio on, but only for a moment before going back to whatever

Wordless & tuneless preoccupation involved them.

The palomino was called Misfit & the bay was named Querido Flacco,
And the names of some of the other shapes had been Rockabye
And Ojo Pendejo & Cue Ball & Back Door Peter & Frenchfry & Sandman

And Rolling Ghost & Anastasia.

Death would come for both of them with its bridle of clear water in hand
And they would not look up from grazing on some patch of dry grass or even

Acknowledge it much; & for a while I began to think that the world

Rested on a limitless ossuary of horses where their bones & skulls stretched
And fused until only the skeleton of one enormous horse underlay
The smoke of cities & the cold branches of trees & the distant

Whine of traffic on the interstate.

If I & by implication therefore anyone looked at them long enough at dusk
Or in moonlight he would know the idea of heaven & of life everlasting
Was so much blown straw or momentary confetti

At the unhappy wedding of a sister.

Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form
It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with.

Heaven was a weight behind the eyes & one would have to stare right through it
Until he saw the air itself, just air, the clarity that took the shackles from his eyes
And the taste of the bit from his mouth & knocked the rider off his back

So he could walk for once in his life.

Or just stand there for a moment before he became something else, some
Flyspeck on the wall of a passing & uninterruptible history whose sounds claimed
To be a cheering from bleachers but were actually no more than the noise

Of cars entering the mouth of a tunnel.

And in the years that followed he would watch them in the backstretch or the far turn
At Santa Anita or Del Mar. Watch the way they made it all seem effortless,

Watch the way they were explosive & untiring.

And then watch the sun fail him again & slip from the world, & watch
The stands slowly empty. As if all moments came back to this one, inexplicably
To this one out of all he might have chosen—Heaven with ashes in its hair

And filling what were once its eyes—this one with its torn tickets
Littering the aisles & the soft racket the wind made. This one. Which was his.

And if the voice of a broken king were to come in the dusk & whisper
To the world, that grandstand with its thousands of empty seats,

Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment

Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?
He would have to look up at quickening dark & say: Me. I do. It’s mine.

David Wojahn

It’s my pleasure to introduce you tonight to Matthew Donovan, the author of Vellum, which is the 2008 winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, and last year was also selected by Mark Doty as the winner the prestigious Bakeless Award, and published by Houghton Mifflin. He has also won a number of important awards and fellowships, among them an NEA [National Endowment of the Arts], and his poems have appeared in many of the country’s most prestigious journals, among them Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches in New Mexico at the College of Santa Fe.

You know, when our students and faculty narrow down the submissions to the Levis Contest—and this year there were one hundred and fifty published first and second books we considered for the competition—our first criteria is excellence; we want to honor the best book. But we also want to do honor to the memory of Larry Levis, whose work has been a profound inspiration to so many of us, and whose importance to American poetry continues to grow as the years go on.

And Matthew Donovan possesses many of the virtues we associate with Larry’s work. He has something of Larry’s ability to mix erudition and street savvy, a big frame of reference that can incorporate Charlie Chaplin, Stalin, Houdini, The Lumiere Brothers, and places like East Toledo and The Cactus Lodge Hotel. And he also, as you see in a graceful memorial for a friend entitled “Shapes of Stone and Prayer,” has something of Larry’s elegiac concerns and, above all, Larry’s deep sense of the tragic—for Vellum is a book that unflinchingly reckons with tragedy. It explores the manifold and often seductively beautiful ways that we allow the world to reduce and dehumanize us. And, as a poem like “Montezuma’s Painters” attests, art itself, the very thing which we poets hold so dear, is as often as not an unintentional instrument of that dehumanization. And Donovan understands that it is human error and our failings, and not art itself, which are to blame for this condition.

Art never lies, but we can lie to it, just as we can lie to the world and lie to history. And in this election season, we’re reminded again and again of how easy that is to do, how you can hide demagoguery and false counsel by calling yourself the “original maverick,” or by insisting that you’re chasing the moneylenders from the temple while at the same time they’re throwing huge wads of cash at you. Larry Levis would have hated that. He hated that pettiness and cynicism, and told us that the poet’s task is to stand against that sort of falsehood, and instead be willing to enter what he called “the swirl and vortex of history.” Matthew Donovan, I’m sure you will now see, is willing to enter that same maelstrom, and we’re really lucky to have him tonight.  

Matt Donovan

Thank you so much for coming. I cannot tell you how honored I am to be here.  There is no contemporary writer that means more to me than Larry Levis, there is no writer that I dip back into more than Larry Levis, there's probably no writer that I steal more from than Larry Levis. It means a tremendous amount to me to be here, so many thanks to VCU for everyone that's facilitated my visit here and thanks to you for coming. I'll read a number of poems from the book and then I'll also read a couple of new poems I think too. So I’ll start with what is more or less the title poem of the collection and it takes as its starting point one of those old beautiful illuminated manuscripts that are rendered on a page of vellum, which of course is parchment made from animal skin, and then this poem is also a meditation on the knife as a source of both violence and beauty. This is called “Saint Catherine in an O: A Song About Knives.”

On a page of vellum—Saint Catherine in an O—within
a letter made of vine-sprawl, imbricate bulbs, & the scarlet
interlaced whorl of petal cupping calyx cupping stem, a woman

offers her neck. It’s a kind of ready-made scene—the saint kneeling
on a cropped wedge of earth, someone with a crown in a tower,
& a swordsman who is only a frocked booted boy pulling back

his robe for his work—& seems carelessly done, as if the illuminator
chose death to be a kind of afterthought to vermillion. To leaf-curl,
areola, awl-shaped stems, his blossoms’ dazzling tangle. As if

this were response enough. O, omphalos. Meaning center & navel,
meaning the first time a blade touches flesh. And meaning here
a frame of plenitude through which we witness again.

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:
                                                                     think of the knife
that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped
to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

          Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.
          A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan
          of reform was The Future’s In Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrists, asking
How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe.
The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,
slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.
Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker, bayonet, shiv.

Because in Waco, behind Benny’s Gas & Go, a man plays slide guitar
with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs—
one about light, the Lord moving on water, about what will be

by & by; how blood, he knows, will make him whole, & blades
that changed into doves.
                                         Or because this splendor of color ends
on the parchment in a burnished gold resembling a cluster of burrs,

          the kind of thing that would have snagged in a cow’s mottled hide
          as it grazed on grass tufts or slogged its way home. Staring, bewildered
          in the stillness, it may survive this way for a few days more

          before it is bled & flayed & turned, as was always its purpose,
          into the page of this psalm. Here, near the margin, are traces of it still:
          patterns of skin, a texture like velvet, follicles, the throat’s scalloped curve.

[“Saint Catherine in an O: A Song About Knives,” Matt Donovan, Vellum, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, also appears with permission of the publisher in this issue of Blackbird.]

The next poem centers on John Keats’s last days. He travelled to Italy knowing he was dying and he travelled with his friend and the artist Joseph Severn who did a number of drawings along the way. And I think one of the things for me that’s most moving about those last letters of Keats’s is there’s a kind of expansive rapture, an expansive sense of beauty that you can see in those last gestures, even as he knows that his life is closing down and coming to an end. He studied as a medical student before he was a poet and he knew, as he said, that death was very imminent and this poem uses as sources the drawings of Severn and also letters written by Keats quoted from Severn here, too. This is called “Those Two Sketches by Severn in Italy.”

[“Those Two Sketches by Severn in Italy,” Matt Donovan, Vellum, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.]

I had the really good fortune of studying with an amazing music teacher that I met even when I was fourteen, and this poem in the book is dedicated to him, William Appling. I just learned a few weeks ago that he passed away. He was an enormous influence on my life, and he introduced me at the time, kind of begrudgingly, to the music of Brahms and Schubert; he also sat me down and made me listen to John Coltrane for the first time. He had me listen to Charles Mingus for the first time which, you know for a freshman in high school it was a mind-blowing experience. And I think much to his disappointment it also led me to a lot of really raunchy tenor-wild R & B songs as well that I still have a lifelong passion for. This poem is a meditation on one of those songs. It also swerves into Sonny Liston’s early and violent life but especially because this poem is dedicated in the book to him, I wanted to read this tonight for William Appling. I feel as if he taught me how to listen to music.

[“Night Train: A Listener’s Guide,” Matt Donovan, Vellum, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.]

I’m going to read a two-part poem—reading some new work. The poem is called “Audubon Diptych,” and the first part takes a moment from Audubon’s journals that is meditated upon and also begins with a series of legends and myths associated with swallows and the second part is borrowed from a biography from Richard Rhodes a number of years ago. He wrote about Audubon and among many other things one thing he captures so well are Audubon’s kind of early, awkward years where he’s fumbling after his technique, where he is still trying to rarify how it was that he was going to bring these birds alive on the page. And, I have to say, at least in my work, those are the artists I’m most drawn to, where they are hard-earned moments of grace versus someone like Mozart who seemed to be writing operas and sonatas at the age of like one and half and the effortless nature of that. So the second part interweaves those kind of—what I think of as really wonderful failings—with one of Ovid’s creation stories.

[“Audubon Diptych,” Matt Donovan, Vellum, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.]

I’ll read a couple new poems. Here’s another poem about an artist in kind of a creative purgatory. John Singer Sargent, of course, is an artist known most for his portrait work and he was also commissioned late in his life and late in World War I to be a war artist by the British government. And I think what drew me to this part of Sargent’s biography was this convergence of the world of that iconographic, Madam X portrait with the scandalous black gown dress strap hanging over her shoulder, that juxtaposition with the real horrors of WWI. And most of this poem kind of centers on Sargent’s uncertainty as an artist about how he’s going to render this material—what he’s actually witnessing in the war. And the premise of the poem also pivots on a direct address to Vulcan, the Roman blacksmith god, and the reasons for that I think will be clear when I read the epigraph in which Sargent—rather oddly given the circumstances—links his failure as an artist to render this subject matter to the famous myth of Vulcan composing—and creating rather—the net where he ensnares his unfaithful wife and her lover on his own couch, by God. I’ll read the epigraph first and then I’ll read the poem. This is “Sargent Adrift at the Trenches.”

[“Sargent Adrift at the Trenches,” unpublished.]

I also have been thinking about the vortex of history.

[“Randy Mandy’s Lame Ass Allegory of History: A Corrective,” unpublished.]

I’ll just end with one last short poem. Charlie Chaplin had a really odd coda to his life. He was a victim of a grave-robbing and two Eastern European mechanics stole his body with the plan of selling it back to the family in the hopes of getting a garage that they dreamed of. And they botched it really horribly, the whole crime. It was described like a Keystone Cops caper but, for a small period of time when the body was held in a field in the south of France, and one of the lovely things about this story, I couldn’t get this into the poem, but Chaplin’s widow, after the body was restored and returned to the gravesite, she would always return to that field as a place of remembering her husband. That, for her, held much more resonance—that spot, than the actual grave marking. And this is this story. I remember hearing this, or reading this at some point and I had it in my head for years not sure how I was going to use it, not sure how I was going to employ it, but wanting to get it somehow. And I realized, after a while, that it’s a story of resurrection and the hope for an afterlife. I mean, to die and end up in the south of France, even for a few days, seems like a pretty big deal and maybe the most we can hope for.

[“Charlie Chaplin Dug Up and Ransomed: A Prayer,” Vellum, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.]

Thank you very much. Thank you for coming.  

   Contributor’s notes

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