The Poet in the World: Life at War
The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov (New Directions, 1973)
Read part one here.
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.
When Denise Levertov was writing the pieces collected in the second section of The Poet in the World, “Life at War,” the war in Vietnam was still going on. I appreciate the radicalism of her politics, and the way that she sees her role as poet, activist, and human as continuous with each other. Invited to offer comment on the Vietnam War for a television, Levertov’s remarks were rejected for broadcast, but included in The Poet in the World. The follow passage exemplifies the continuity between roles I perceive in Levertov’s career. As I read it, I held in mind Levertov’s remark in “Origins of a Poem” that, “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.”
One of the obligations of the writer, and perhaps especially of the poet, is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language. I and most of my fellow American poets nowadays find ourselves inevitably—of necessity—writing more and more poems of grief, of rage, concerning the despoilment of the earth and of all life upon it, of the systematic destruction of all that we feel passionate love for, both by the greed of industry and by the mass murder we call war. We are living at war: the shame and horror of being citizens of the country which, in its ruthless imperialism, is not only ravaging Southeast Asia but, with its military bases, its Polaris submarines, the machinations of its CIA, and the tentacles of its giant corporations, is everywhere the prime force of antilife and oppression—this shame and horror cast their shadow over all we say, feel, and do. The spring sunshine, the new leaves: we still see them, still love them: but in what poignant contrast is their beauty and simple goodness to the evil we are conscious of day and night. And this evil, this blight, this war in which our whole lives are being spent, is present at home, here in the U.S., as well as abroad, in the form of racism, of gross injustice, of poverty and hunger in the midst of the very richest country in the world. As corrupt and self-seeking politicians bring us daily closer to outright fascism, the poet is turned away from his impulse to sing, to testify in patterns of words to the miracle of life, and is driven willy-nilly to warn, to curse, to gnash the teeth of language; and at the same time, living always in the war shadow, to struggle, Davids to the Goliaths of capitalism (the expression of man’s green) and imperialism (the expression of man’s lust for power); to celebrate the courage and tenacity of the so-called ‘enemy’ in Southeast Asia, and of all who here at home resist the system—people like Angela Davis, Dan and Phil Berrigan, Cesar Chavez; and to declare solidarity with them and with all who share their struggle.
“Life at War” also includes a speech Levertov delivered at a 1970 rally at UMass Amherst. (Having been a UMass student, I’m very curious about the circumstances of the rally. How big was it? Who were the other speakers? Was the climate of the campus more radical than it is today?) In this speech, Levertov writes:
Today, I believe we cannot bring the wars to an end—and I use the plural ‘wars’ because there are wars going on in many countries, and in all these wars the United States has a hand—we cannot bring the wars to an end without bringing the capitalist-imperialist system to an end. These wars, whether in Asia or in Latin America or wherever they erupt, are wars of national liberation, in which people are fighting for self-determination against America’s puppet governments, America’s CIA and its ‘advisers,’ America’s napalm, America’s giant corporations, even when American troops are not involved.
Fifty-two years later, the US is still involved in declared and undeclared warfare in many countries, and even the ones with which the US is no longer at war are living through war’s long afterlife: continued military presence, intergenerational trauma, environmental degradation, landmines… To get on my little soapbox: I agree with Levertov that we still need to bring the capitalist-imperialist system to an end!
“Life at War” really made me curious to learn more about the anti-war movement in the US in the 60s and 70s. I was born in the 80s and have always found it to be such a mythologized era that it can be difficult to tease out the histories from the myths and get a reasonably accurate sense of the zeitgeist. Some of the basic differences between the post-2001 anti-war movement and the anti-war movement of Levertov’s time include the media. Many people of that gen—including my paternal grandmother, Jane Tuck—were radicalized by gruesome images of warfare broadcast on national TV. However, the 2003 invasion of Iraq included ‘embedded journalists’ whose coverage was editorially subject to the US military—my sense that fewer unmediated depictions of the conflict came through.
Likewise, a phenomenon that feels almost unimaginable now is that sympathetic celebrities, most famously Jane Fonda, but also Levertov herself (with Muriel Rukeyser and Jane Hart), were invited by the North Vietnamese government to witness the destructive effects of the war. Levertov’s contribution to the canon of US reportage from these visits is included in “Life at War” in the piece “Glimpses of Vietnamese Life.” The reflections in the epilogue of this piece, grounded in Levertov’s encounters during her visit, still ring true:
Self-reproach can be a form of self-indulgence…I came to see, during that week, that revolutionary optimism is the fruit of serious struggle…
In other words, the impetus to our own development toward the social change which alone can bring peace, can come more strongly from the knowledge of how humane, kindly, joyful, and constructive it is, after all, possible for human beings to be, than from grief, anger, and remorse, when these emotions are separated from such positive knowledge.
This is not a call to what we would now term ‘toxic positivity’ but an incitement to a holistic long-term struggle encompassing a full spectrum of affective stances and resources.
“Life at War” also includes a short charming piece inspired by the Elm-Seed Theater, “An adult puppet theater, created in Cambridge, Mass., by Art Wood” in which “Healthy elm seeds are given out to the audience at its performances.” I’m imagining something like the Bread and Puppet Theater which, as far as I know, is still doing its thing up in Vermont. This is another instance of the notion that Levertov put forward in the initial section on poetics of reverence for life as a starting point. And not “idiot reverence” (a la Chögyam Trungpa’s concept of “idiot compassion”) but a reverence that acknowledges, for instance, that Dutch elm disease (or construction, or drought, or…) might take the trees planted by the audience but urges people to have the moral courage to in some small way commit to hope for the future.
Incidentally, Levertov mentions the disappearance of the native American chestnut tree which once grew over a huge span of the North American continent. This reminded me of a reading CAConrad gave at UMass, in which they talked about the disappearance of the chestnut and its potential reintroduction due to a hybridized strain developed in China. My memory is a little vague, but this seems potentially related to their Resurrect Extinct Vibrations project. In any case, let Levertov’s anti-war elms and CAConrad’s revived chestnuts comingle!
PS Since I’m writing from this book’s future: if you were present at the Elm-Seed Theater in the 60s or early 70s, please reach out! Next time I’m in Cambridge, I will be keeping my eyes peeled for fifty year old elm trees.