Larry Levis has always been my idea of a poet’s poet. Partly because he was the first poet a professor ever recommended to me when I made it clear I was serious about writing, loaning me her copy of The Afterlife (1977) and drawing particular attention to the extraordinary sequence “Linnets,” which closes out the collection. Reading his poems, both then and now, tends to be an instructive experience. So often, I come away from a Levis poem thinking, How did he do that? before returning to the start, even more invigorated by the mystery, determined to see the artistry behind the art. While preparing to write this review, it occurred to me that, in a way, “Linnets” demonstrates the whole of Larry Levis’ vision for what a poem could be: unrestrained, recursive, rooted in memory while looking ahead, and all delivered by a speaker whose penchant for structural precision and intimacy in detail creates the ultimate sense of authenticity. We’re compelled to believe the speakers in Levis’ poems because they so effortlessly imitate the way human beings think—“the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice,” as Wallace Stevens might say. Perhaps no other poet has constructed such an accurate imitation of the consciousness winding its way around the darkened archives of the mind.
Of course Levis’ most famous works are those from the latter half of his career. Any reader even marginally acquainted with his poems will likely, if asked, sing the praises of Winter Stars (1985), especially “The Poet at Seventeen” or “My Story in the Late Style of Fire.” Much like “Linnets,” these poems create the unshakable sense of authentic thought, balancing sweeping revelations with minute personal details that seem crystalized in the speakers’ memories. The overall effect is structural, and precisely what makes the style of Levis from Winter Stars onward so dynamic and seemingly inimitable. In a way, Levis plays a poem like an accordion, expanding and contracting constantly: developing a sense of enormity when faced with the big ideas poetry has been honed to consider: time, death, love, and self, but zooming in on small details—specific recollections rendered as sense memory to transform what is seemingly ungraspable into that which can be visualized, felt, stored, and considered in light of the day. We see this style continue to develop over subsequent collections, beginning with The Doll Maker’s Ghost (1981) all the way through to the (until now) final posthumous collection Elegy, assembled by David St. John in 1997. This is the phase of Levis’ career largely remembered and celebrated, and which is taught and revered in MFA programs across the country. The long-awaited reprinting of these early pieces, along with the poems and fragments newly curated for the book, position Swirl & Vortex as the definitive and most complete volume of Levis’ poems available, and the perfect companion to the now sadly out of print A Condition of the Spirit (2004)—a collection of the poet’s essays, reviews, and interviews.
Having said all this, however, I now believe the true boon of Swirl & Vortex is the long overdue reemergence of Levis’ early poems, those collected in volumes that have been out of print for years, and many of which were excluded from the 2013 Selected Poems. These newly reprinted volumes present us with an alternate side of Levis’ approach—poems much different from the lengthy meditations of his more-often anthologized pieces and yet still infused with the same liveliness and structural precision of his later-period work.
During these early years of his career, Levis showed himself a young master of the short to medium sized lyric. His style was marked by punchy pieces which burned brightly and vanished quickly. The senses of menace and surrealism which often lurked in the dark spaces of his later poems take much more prominent positions in the earlier work, with images of talking animals, uncanny lookalikes, and random dismemberments popping up without warning to turn the emotional register of a poem upside down and back again. More specifically, this is where we see Levis first experiment with the kinds of drastic poetic turns—structural maneuvers that steer the poems into unexpected places—that would become his penchant. As a primer for understanding this element of Levis’ craft, these poems are indispensable.
Take, for example, the wonderfully bizarre “Inventing the Toucan” from The Afterlife. The poem begins calmly enough: “You sail placidly down the Orinoco in a white dress./ You cross your legs and accept a drink from a stranger (87).” It’s almost like a dream vacation—the tropical setting, the leisurely white dress, the laidback posture, the sense of trust in a stranger. As an opening image, it certainly creates an atmosphere. You can relax here, it says. The waters are smooth—have a drink! However, before you can even take a swallow of your Guarapita, the poem takes an unsettling turn: “But then your mother and father, dragging the dead mule/ Out of the shade, begin waving and calling.” The sudden juxtaposition of the exotic and the familiar imply the poem takes place in a kind of dream space, and as reality increasingly intrudes on the dream, the speaker “…grip[ping] deeply, until there is no future but this…” watches the world of the imagination collapse around him, until suddenly propelled across time and space:
You think of your rented house trailer,
Of the smoke that is rising bashfully
Out of all the chimneys at once in Boise, Idaho. (CP 87)
It’s this instant creation of space—here, the unexpected expansion of the poem’s geography to include both a vessel on the Orinoco River and trailer homes in Boise, Idaho—that so compactly mirrors the kinds of widening Levis would later accomplish in his later, longer works. These catapulting turns are not limited to physical space or the perception of time, either. The poem’s entire world seems to widen both physically and thematically. The exotic butts up against the domestic. The luxury of a tropical vacation collides with the working-class Midwest. The interesting thing to note here is that the implications of space, time, and theme growing beyond what seem to the boundaries of the poem are not a direct function of the poem itself getting longer. Instead, it is accomplished through a calculated series of subtle poetic turns that manage to make such fantastic leaps within a line or two. Seeing these kinds of turns isolated in Levis’ shorter lyrics makes it easier to track them when they play out in the later books and poems, where, combined with his willingness to meditate at length, entire universes are created.
A similar “bigness” is created through structural maneuvering in “The Morning After My Death,” also from The Afterlife. A poem in two parts, the first begins from the perspective of the recently deceased: “My body is a white thing in the sun, now (97).” And assuming this perspective, Levis keeps his speaker’s observations limited to what happens around the body itself: “flies sleeping on doorsills,” a child who flees the room after touching the corpse and learning “how heavy a dead man is..,” the sun that keeps on shining “though I don’t especially need it/ Anymore.” These images of limited perspective, along with the speaker’s interiority and the implication that no one can hear these thoughts but the reader, create a feeling of claustrophobia—we are, in a sense, trapped behind the eyes of this speaker. In doing so, death is presented as something perhaps worse than stagnant—it’s boring. (“How little I have to say;/ How little desire I have/ To say it.”)
But the second part opens by sweeping us “Far off,” where “a band is playing Sousa marches (97).” If we are to understand that the speaker in 1 is the same in 2, then we can imagine the sound of the band traveling over the sun-drenched palms where it is perhaps barely audible in the room where the speaker lay. However, with the sonic image of the band comes more information, things the speaker couldn’t possibly observe:
And as the conductor, in his sun stained
Uniform, taps his baton for silence, and all
Around him the foliage is getting greener,
Greener, like the end of things,
One of the musicians, resting
His trumpet on his knee, looks around
A moment, before he spits and puts the horn
Into his mouth, counting slowly. (CP 97-98)
The effect is remarkable, especially in such a small space. The reader is catapulted from a static and particularly limited perspective into a passage that becomes increasingly minute and precise, as though we’re falling toward the ground and seeing things clearer and clearer the closer we get. This feeling of being deliberately limited, followed by a huge widening in perspective, and then a collapse back to the minute and precise is a structural sequence we can identify in later poems, such as “For a Ghost Who Once Placed Bets in the Park,” and “South,” wherein the speaker “begin[s] with this moth,/ Its tan wings…unchanging (211),” before spiraling out spatially and thematically, and ultimately landing again on a minutia that mirrors the opening: “The simplest detail, a fly,/ a drop of water (217)…”
Earlier still, we see how Levis creates perhaps not physical space, but temporal and historical space through careful manipulation of structural expectations like plotting. In some of his shortest early lyrics, Levis nonetheless creates the illusion of depth in both character and situation, gently implying a narrative lurking just outside the boundaries of the poem. Take the 6-line “Wound,” from Wrecking Crew (1972) as an example:
I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight
on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches gently. (CP 13)
In this case, the subtleties of language create the illusion that the poem is but a single slice of a larger, more complex situation—one that began sometime before the speaker made the utterance and continues after the final line. In this context, “I’ve loved you,” for example, has far more dynamic implications than “I love you.” The latter indicates love as a constant, whereas the former implies the speaker’s love as conditional and uneven. This tracks nicely with the “wound” metaphor that follows: the man cherishes the body’s reminder of violence. What’s more, the wound was incurred in a fight between two people armed with razors, which makes the speaker complicit in whatever hurt emerges from his love. What strikes me as particularly interesting is how Levis adds to the complexity of the speaker’s love not by returning to the situation’s reality after the simile concludes in line 4. Instead, the speaker sends us back into the metaphorical moment, insisting on its reality, demanding the reader look closer. While we don’t return to the love the comparison is ostensibly meant to characterize, the continued insistence of the metaphor, in turn, further complicates—rather than elucidates—the speaker’s love, which ironically makes the emotional resonance of the poem feel more difficult to pin down and, as such, more authentic.
Even further, the seeds of his signature style of structural expansion are found in the early sequence experiments—poems stitching together short bursts of thought to build a kind of skeletal representation wherein the readers fill in the dark spaces on their own. “Delwyn Creed,” for instance, seems like a descendent of E.A. Robinson’s plot-driven lyrics, such as “Rueben Bright” and “Richard Corey.” In Levis’ hands, this approach creates even more space for the speaker’s history to take shape. Whereas Robinson leans into contrasting and otherwise ironic turns to imbue his subjects with humanity, Levis’ turns are more drastic and fragmenting.
Returning to “Delwyn Creed,” the poem begins with a brief portrait of the subject, a working-class man “swallowing beer” and “clearing land for tract homes (71).” Then, in the second part, titled “His Son,” we suddenly jump away from Creed himself to focus on a portrait of his apparently grown son. Interestingly, this section is much longer than the first, presenting Creed’s son as an amphetamine user who, “on methedrine… doodles/ halos, snakes, stars,” who dreams of “hunting alone” to the point of physical exhaustion. After watching him hunt and skin “a wolf thin with disease,” we are left with this image, the only information to directly tie things back to the elder Creed: “For days/ he refuses to eat or speak.// Wearing wolf fur he waits to be fatherless (72).” The reader, at this point, is left to imagine what the relationship between the two must be like. What scars must Delwyn Creed have left on his son’s psyche to transform him into the animalistic figure we see in the poem, wrapped in the skin of a sick wolf, awaiting his father’s death in determined silence? It’s a brilliant structural maneuver, and something of a gambit, to shift focus away from the stated subject to instead examine the effect the subject had on his child. By insisting on a connection between the father, of whom little is known, and the son’s harsh disposition, the reader is compelled to imagine the history they shared. This kind of turning creates a sense of complexity and, with it, authenticity, and which is simultaneously based in concrete details from the text and largely supplied by the reader’s imagination. The third and last section of “Delwyn Creed” leaps even further, now shifting perspective to another speaker-character who watches both Delwyn and his son from a distance, observant of how the son “waits for years while/ his father spits and blinks into small fires (72).” The final stanza turns entirely to this observer’s voice—which, we come to realize, may have narrated the entire poem—and draws a final parallel between the speaker’s life and that of Delwyn Creed:
When Delwyn Creed married Sharon Bloodworth,
I was a child warming my hands
Around the exhaust pipe of a Ford tractor—
And we drove the Koreans into the Arctic Sea,
And my brother snapped a rooster’s beck
Skillfully between his thumb and index finger
And turned and smiled slowly. (CP 72)
While it begins with the eponymous Creed and his marriage, these turn out to simply be time markers for the speaker, who remembers being a child at the time. While all this was happening with the Creed family, similar unsettling events were playing out in the life and family of the speaker. This might be read as an Auden-esque statement on the nature of suffering, how it always happens while no one else is looking. It might also be read as a testament to the ripple effect of violence, except rather than a single set of concentric circles moving outward, it’s more like the overlapping ripples of raindrops on a still pond. Either way, it’s a masterful manipulation of poetic structure that, even early in his career, shows Levis experimenting with the kinds of turns that would come to define his style of poetry.
And this is the true achievement of Swirl & Vortex. By finally having all of his work in one place, it becomes easier to see what makes a Levis poem so different from those that came before or after. While of course no one element can be singled out as the defining factor of his work, I would argue that his careful attention to the structural unfolding of his poems as a most important feature. Not only are the turns of his poems surprising, but they are also dynamic—they work to create meaning through deliberate juxtaposition and emphasis on causality. Having the ability to access his earliest published poems all the way through to the until-now unpublished last works finally presents readers the opportunity to track Levis’ structural development from a young poet infatuated by the possibilities of the lyric to one of the meditative heavyweights of the 20th century. In short, this is a collection long overdue.