The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov

The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov (New Directions, 1973)

Jacket photo of the author’s desk by Suzy Groden. Image description: a photograph of a hand holding a book with a black and white cover. There is a photograph on the cover of an author’s desk, messy with books, papers, glesses. Above the desk is a window, through which a tree is visible nearby, with buildings in the background.

I somehow missed Denise Levertov in my early poetry education, but I’m making up for lost time. I was recently telling my friend Peter how I came to Levertov’s work in part through the side door of her friendship with Robert Duncan, who is one of the ‘many-gendered mothers of my heart.’ When I read, I often like to triangulate between poetry, biography and memoir, and poetics. Reading an author’s poetry is the most direct way to know their poetry, but biography and memoir cue readers into an author’s context, and an author’s writing on poetics can teach readers how to read their poetry.

For example, when I was having a Mandelstam moment a few years ago, I was reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, translated by Max Hayward, and Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Andrew Davis, as well critical pieces like his, “Conversation About Dante,” translated by Jane Gary Harris. Each text illuminated the other. So it is that while I was still halfway through The Poet in the World, I started reading Levertov’s Poems: 1960-1967 (which—and I know this doesn’t really matter to anyone except me, I bought at The Old Bookstore on Masonic street with my friend Una, who liked to browse there while her laundry was tumbling next door), because I was hungry to experience the poetry which undergirded her statements about poetics.

And The Poet in the World does have lots of interesting things to say about poetics—pedagogy and politics, too—but it starts with poetics. Levertov begins by explaining her reasoning for bringing together these assorted prose works. For her the most compelling reason is on behalf of her students, but she also mentions being asked to comment on this or that matter and finding that she has already articulated herself better elsewhere. This is a phenomenon that is becoming known to me. While I may often find myself thinking and writing on, for example, the ways in which my relationships with poetry, divination, and femininity are linked, my best articulation of it was a short piece called, “Notes on Female Visionary Poetry,” written at the invitation of my friend Yosefa Raz for a panel that—alas—was not to be. I’m glad Levertov did bend to the calls of her students and other readers.

“Some Notes on Organic Form” develops the poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins (you know: the sprung rhythm guy) and its terminology of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ to develop what Levertov calls organic poetry:

A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory.

(I should mention here that Levertov really leans on the old universal ‘man’ and generally seems to pronoun the poet as ‘he’ which was standard at the time but gave slight hiccups to my reading experience.)

If the above definition feels a bit abstract, one of Levertov’s strengths in articulating her poetics is the clarity and generosity with which she grounds them in an elaboration of her process:

How does one go about such a poetry? I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long past thought or event associated with what’s seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history; and what he has been dreaming—whether or not he remembers it—working in him. This is only a rough outline of a possible moment in a life. But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes from “templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.” It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a word meaning “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breath in.

Levertov continues to follow the phenomenological process from the phase described above of coming to a poem into the phase of composition. I’m fascinated by this description of poetry as a drive as much as vocation. It makes sense: the calling must start in the body as the seat of experience and its elaboration calls into operation embodied rhythms in concert with mental faculties, only some of which are known to us.

Levertov is adept at conjuring this crystalline matrix of factors held together in tension because she slows down for our benefit processes that often happen in quick succession or even simultaneously. The truism that sometimes those who do can’t teach has a grain of truth to it: aptitude is often a matter of doing something quickly, unconsciously. When we are good at something, we might shrug that it comes naturally. Levertov’s gifts as a teacher include both an attentiveness to metacognition and an understanding of how much narrating her metacognitive processes benefits her students and readers.

This is further illustrated by, “Work and Inspiration: Inviting the Muse.” In this essay, Levertov begins from the premise that there are poems that arrive through inspiration and ones that are labored over. She chooses, “…to tell the history of three poems from The Sorrow Dance—'The son,’ I and II, and ‘A Man’—as examples of what happens, of how the laboriously written poem evolves and how the labor can sometimes lead to the entire ‘given’ poem.” Levertov admits that she only chose these poems because she kept the drafts.

…I wish to point out that the process I have described does not take place in a condition of alert self-observation. When I looked through my worksheets I remembered what I had been doing, what I thought I was after, in each case; but the state of writing, although intense, is dreamy and sensuous, not ratiocinative; and if I had thrown away the worksheets, I would not have been able to reconstruct the history of the poem.

Levertov has her teachers, too, scattered across the prose pieces that form this book. They pinged my attention when they appeared multiple times. For instance, she is very fond of a quote by Ibsen, from his Speeches and New Letters, "For a student has essentially the same task as the poet: to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions which are astir in the age and in the community to which he belongs." She explores these questions in “Origins of a Poem,” bringing Olson and Rilke and Donne and Heiddeger’s famous remark about Hölderin, “that to be human is to be a conversation,” in order to help shape the questions and shape her answers. Forgive me for quoting at length! I find her answers very beautiful.

The poet’s task is to hold in trust the knowledge that language, as Robert Duncan has declared, is not a set of counters to be manipulated, but a Power. And only in this knowledge does he arrive at music, at that quality of song within speech which is not the result of manipulations of euphonious parts but of an attention, at once to the organic relationships of experienced phenomena and to the latent harmony and counterpoint of language itself as it is identified with those phenomena. Writing poetry is a process of discovery, revealing inherent music, the music of correspondences, the music of inscape. It parallels what, in a person’s life, is called individuation: the evolution of consciousness toward wholeness, not an isolation of intellectual awareness but an awareness involving the whole self, a knowing, (as man and woman “know” one another), a touching, a “being in touch.”

All the thinking I do about poetry leads me back, always to Reverence for Life as the ground for poetic activity; because it seems the ground for Attention. This is not to put the cart before the horse: some sense of identity, at which we wonder; an innocent self-regard, which we see in infants and in the humblest forms of life; these come first, a center out of which Attention reaches. Without Attention—to the world outside us, to the voices within us—what poems could possibly come into existence? Attention is the exercise of Reverence for the “other forms of life that want to live.” The progression seems clear to me: from Reverence for Life to Attention to Life, from Attention to Life to a highly developed Seeing and Hearing, from Seeing and Hearing (faculties almost indistinguishable for the poet) to the Discovery and Revelation of Form, from Form to Song.

There’s a certain centeredness that pervades this book. I really get the feeling of person behind it who is in tune. Levertov seems to have a more sober (in the sense of unhurried, calm; not excessively fanciful) personality than her friend and correspondent Robert Duncan, such that when Levertov honors the poet’s vatic role, she is not wrapping the poet’s work in myth but rather elaborating a spiritual aspect that inheres in poetry. Readers who are not spiritually inclined can choose to interpret that spirituality as those aspects of the circuit of transmission and translation linking world, poet, reader, and language which are difficult to perceive consciously or are inaccessible to the writer while she is writing (as addressed in “Some Notes on Organic Form”). The poet of The Poet in the World models attention to the world’s apparent and occult, because she knows that knowing the world and singing it require both.