New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  An important understanding we have belatedly begun to gain is that the issue of peace (in the sense of freedom from military conflict) and the issue of social justice (with its economic, racial, and educational dimensions, and its outstanding deficits such as hunger, homelessness, crime, violence, abuse, and lack of medical care) not only cannot be separated from each other but cannot be rationally considered without an equal focus on ecology. The poetry of ecology (and the related prose of a number of current writers too) is not a poetry of peace, in the depictive sense which I maintain is not possible “ahead of itself,” but it is as important to the cause of peace as anything now being written.

  John Daniel, in his book Common Ground, writes of the mystery of there being anything at all, and of love for the earth:

  Of Earth

  Swallows looping and diving

  by the darkening oaks, the flash

  of their white bellies,

  the tall grasses gathering last light,

  glowing pale gold, silence

  overflowing in a shimmer of breeze—

  these could have happened

  a different way. The heavy-trunked oaks

  might not have branched and branched

  and finely re-branched

  as if to weave themselves into air.

  There is no necessity

  that any creature should fly.

  that last light should turn

  the grasses gold, that grasses

  should exist at all,

  or light.

  But a mind thinking so

  is a mind wandering from home.

  It is not thought that answers

  each step of my feet, to be walking here

  in the cool stir of dusk

  is no mere possibility,

  and I am so stained with the sweet

  peculiar loveliness of things

  that given God’s power to dream worlds

  from the dark, I know

  I could only dream Earth—

  birds, trees, this field of light

  where I and each of us walk once.

  This is a clear example of the kind of poem, the kind of perception, which must for our time stand in for a poetry of peace. It is an epiphany both personal and universal, common to all conscious humans, surely, in kind if not in degree. Whether they remember it or not, surely everyone at least once in a lifetime is filled for a moment with a sense of wonder and exhilaration. But the poem’s poignancy is peculiar to the late twentieth century. In the past, the dark side of such a poem would have been the sense of the brevity of our own lives, of mortality within a monumentally enduring Nature. Eschatology, whether theological or geological, was too remote in its considerations to have much direct impact on a poetic sensibility illumined by the intense presentness of a moment of being. But today the shadow is deeper and more chilling, for it is the reasonable fear that the earth itself, to all intents and purposes, is so threatened by our actions that its hold on life is as tenuous as our own, its fate as precarious. Poets who direct our attention to injustice, oppression, the suffering of the innocent and the heroism of those who struggle for change, serve the possibility of peace by stimulating others to support that struggle. Yesterday it was Vietnam, today it is El Salvador or Lebanon or Ireland. Closer to home, the Ku Klux Klan rides again, the Skinheads multiply. Hunger and homelessness, AIDS, crack and child abuse. There are poems—good, bad, or indifferent—written every day somewhere about all of these, and they are a poetry of war. Yet one may say that they are a proto-peace poetry; for they testify to a rejection which, though it cannot in itself create a state of peace, is one of its indispensable preconditions. For war is no longer (if it ever was) a matter of armed conflict only. As we become more aware of the inseparability of justice from peace, we perceive that hunger and homelessness and our failure to stop them are forms of warfare, and that no one is a civilian. And we perceive that our degradation of the biosphere is the most devastating war of all. The threat of nuclear holocaust simply proposes a more sudden variation in a continuum of violence we are already engaged in. Oil spills are events in that ongoing war. Deforestation is a kind of protracted trench-warfare.

  Our consciousness lags so far behind our actions. W. S. Merwin has written about this time-lag:

  Chord

  While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests

  while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing

  through the forests …

  while he thought of the Grecian woods, they bled under red flowers

  while he dreamed of wine the trees were falling from the trees …

  while the song broke over him they were in a secret place and they

  were cutting it forever …

  when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for

  cannons

  when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down

  and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language

  The tree has become a great symbol of what we need, what we destroy, what we must revere and protect and learn from if life on earth is to continue and that mysterious hope, life at peace, is to be attained. The tree’s deep and wide root-system, its broad embrace and lofty reach from earth into air, its relation to fire and to human structures, as fuel and as material, and especially to water which it not only needs but gives (drought ensuing when the forests are destroyed) just as it gives us purer air—all these make it a powerful archetype. The Swedish poet Reidar Ekner has written in “Horologium” as follows:

  Where the tree germinates, it takes root

  there it stretches up its thin spire

  there it sends down the fine threads

  gyroscopically it takes its position

  In the seed the genes whisper: stretch out for the light

  and seek the dark

  And the tree seeks the light, it stretches out

  for the dark And the more darkness it finds, the more light

  it discovers

  the higher towards the light it reaches, the further down

  towards darkness

  it is groping

  Where the tree germinates, it widens

  it drinks in from the dark, it sips from the light

  intoxicated by the green blood, spirally it turns

  the sun drives it, the sap rushes through the fine pipes

  towards the light

  the pressure from the dark drives it out

  to the points, one

  golden morning the big crown of the tree

  turns green, from all directions insects, and birds

  It is a giddiness, one cone

  driving the other

  Inch after inch the tree takes possession of its place

  it transforms the dark into tree

  it transforms the light into tree

  it transforms the place into tree

  It incorporates the revolutions of the planet, one after the other

  the bright semicircle, the dark semicircle

  Inside the bark, it converts time into tree

  The tree has four dimensions, the fourth one memory

  far back its memory goes, further back than that of Man,

  than the heart of any living beings

  for a long time the corpse of the captured highwayman hung

  from its branches

  The oldest ones, they remember the hunting people, the shell mounds,

  the neolithic dwellings

  They will remember our time, too; our breathing out,

  they will breathe it in

  Hiroshima’s time, they breathe it in, cryptomeria

  also this orbit of the planet, they add it to their growth

  Time, they are measuring it; time pieces they are, seventy centuries

  the oldest ones carry in their wood

  Ekner causes us to perceive the tree as witness; and when we are stopped in our tracks by a witness to our f
oolishness, the effect is, at least for a moment, that which A. E. Housman described when he wrote,

  But man at whiles is sober.

  And thinks, by fits and starts;

  And when he thinks, he fastens

  His hand upon his heart.

  No; if there begins to be a poetry of peace, it is still, as it has long been, a poetry of struggle. Much of it is not by the famous, much of it is almost certainly still unpublished. And much of it is likely to be by women, because so many women are actively engaged in nonviolent action, and through their work they have been gathering practical experience in ways of peaceful community. Ann Snitow, writing in 1985 about the Greenham Common Peace Camp in England, said that,

  … In a peace in the Times Literary Supplement … “Why the Peace Movement Is Wrong,” the Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky [has] charged the peace movement with being a bunch of millenarians waiting for the apocalypse. Certainly there are fascinating parallels between the thinking of the peace women and that of the radical millenarian Protestant sects of the 17th century. Both believe that the soul is the only court that matters, the self the only guide, and that paradise is a humble and realizable goal in England’s green and pleasant land. The millenarians offered free food just like the caravans now on the Common: Food, says one sign. Eat till You’re Full.

  But the women are not sitting in the mud waiting for the end, nor are they—as Brodsky and many others claim—trying to come to terms with their own deaths by imagining that soon the whole world will die. On the contrary … the women believe that the dreadful sound [of the last trump] can be avoided, if only we will stop believing in it…. They, too, have imagined the end, and their own deaths, and have decided that they prefer to die without taking the world with them. Nothing makes them more furious than the apathy in the town of Newbury, where they are often told, “Look, you’ve got to die anyway. So what difference does it make how you go?” These are the real millenarians, blithely accepting that the end is near.

  In contrast, the women look very hardheaded, very pragmatic…. They refuse to be awed or silenced by the war machine. Instead they say calmly that what was built by human beings can be dismanded by them, too.

  … Where is it written, they ask, that we must destroy ourselves?

  A poetry of struggle and vision must be informed by an equally passionate refusal to accept the worst scenario as inevitable— but only after facing the fact that we have come very close to the brink. And it is sobering to reflect that it may be harder by far to halt the ecological catastrophe we have brought about than to dismantle our arsenals.

  There can be, then, a poetry which may help us, before it is too late, to attain peace. Poems of protest, documentaries of the state of war, can waken or reinforce a necessary recognition of urgency. Poems of praise for life and the living earth can stimulate us to protect it. (The work of Gary Snyder, of Wendell Berry, comes to mind among others.) Poems of comradeship in struggle can help us—like the thought of those shared gloves in the Margaret Randall poem—to know the dimension of community, so often absent from modem life. And there is beginning to be a new awareness, articulated most specifically in the writings of Father Thomas Berry, the talks and workshops of people like Miriam McGillis or Joanna Macy, that we humans are not just walking around on this planet but that we and all things are truly, physically, biologically, part of one living organism; and that our human role on earth is as the consciousness and self-awareness of that organism. A poem by John Daniel, who almost certainly had not read Thomas Berry, shows how this realization is beginning to appear spontaneously in many minds (perhaps rather on the lines of the story of the hundredth monkey):

  … a voice is finding its tongue

  in the slop and squall of birth.

  It sounds,

  and we, in whom Earth happened to light

  a clear flame of consciousness,

  are only beginning to learn the language—

  who are made of the ash of stars,

  who carry the sea we were born in,

  who spent millions of years learning to breathe,

  who shivered in fur at the reptiles’ feet,

  who trained our hands on the limbs of trees

  and came down, slowly straightening

  to look over the grasses, to see

  that the world not only is

  but is beautiful—

  we are Earth learning to see itself …

  If this consciousness (with its corollary awareness that when we exploit and mutilate the earth we are exploiting and mutilating the body of which we are the brain cells) increases and proliferates while there is still time, it could be the key to survival. A vision of peace cannot be a vision of a world in which natural disasters are miraculously eliminated: but it must be of a society in which companionship and fellowship would so characterize the tone of daily life that unavoidable disasters would be differently met. Earthquakes and floods do, anyway, elicit neighborliness, briefly at least; a peaceful society would have to be one capable of maintaining that love and care for the afflicted. Only loving kindness could sustain a lasting peace.

  How can poetry relate to that idea? Certainly not by preaching. But as more and more poets know and acknowledge (as I believe they are already starting to do) that we are indeed “made of the ash of stars,” their art, stirring the imagination of those who read them (few, perhaps, but always a dynamic few, a thin edge of the wedge) can have an oblique influence which cannot be measured. We cannot long survive at all unless we do move towards peace. If a poetry of peace is ever to be written, there must first be this stage we are just entering—the poetry of preparation for peace, a poetry of protest, of lament, of praise for the living earth; a poetry that demands justice, renounces violence, reveres mystery. We need to incorporate into our daily lives this psalm from the Hako (Pawnee, Osage, Omaha) tradition:

  Invoking the Powers

  Remember, remember the circle of the sky

  the stars and the brown eagle

  the supernatural winds

  breathing night and day

  from the four directions

  Remember, remember the great life of the sun

  breathing on the earth

  it lies upon the earth

  to bring out life upon the earth

  life covering the earth

  Remember, remember the sacredness of things

  running streams and dwellings

  the young within the nest

  a hearth for sacred fire

  the holy flame of fire

  * * *

  * From “Making Peace,” Breathing the Water, New Directions, 1987.

  From a lecture given in the 1989 Boston University “Celebrating Peace” series. A version of the text is included in Volume II of the Boston University Studies in Philosophy & Religion, published by Notre Dame University Press in 1990.

  Biography and the Poet

  (1992)

  I WANT TO TALK about the relationship of certain kinds of poems to a current trend in literary biography, and to pose some questions I think readers and writers should be asking about this relationship, its causes and its implications. The kind of biographies I’m thinking of are those which explore and reveal whatever in the subject’s life was dubious, scandalous, sensational. Such accounts of the lives of poets are popular, and are read by thousands of people who are not habitual readers of poetry: the skeletons dragged out of the poet’s closet (in one case with the collusion of her heirs and psychiatrist) are apparently far more compelling to them than poems, and if they do go on to read the poems too it is often with the same prurient curiosity stimulated by the biography.

  Writers of what is called “confessional” poetry—poetry which voluntarily makes public, often in startling, emphatic imagery, experiences and perceptions which once were considered private—are not the only poets whose lives are investigated in this manner, but “confessional” poems do seem to give tacit encouragement in the trend. If the auth
or was willing to disclose intimacies, has not the biographer thereby been given license to do so? This question leads to others, and indicates, I believe, that we need to learn to discriminate better between works of art, which though sometimes openly self-revealing attain aesthetic integrity, and works which, wholly or in part, are manifestations of exhibitionism. (When the latter happen to concern experiences similar to the reader’s own, the distinction may be hard to make, for the content will be undeniably emotive; in readers who have not had analogous experiences, that content may elicit pity or empathic compassion.) Before we look further into this matter, however, let us turn to that of biography.

  In considering the nature of biography (and I'll restrict this to biographies of poets, though it obviously applies to others as well) we need to reflect on its funtion or functions. First, we must suppose the subject’s creative opus is of such quality that a biography is called for at all; or else that his or her relation to a movement, to other more important writers, or some similar historical or sociological reason, merits such study. Second, we must ask if the book is intended as a work of reference, in which, by consulting the all-important index and chronology, we can find dates and facts relating to the subject’s work. Whether the subject exchanged ideas with X, Y, or Z, or was influenced by them; or at what date a certain poem was composed and whether an earlier version of it exists—information of this kind may expand our understanding of the poems themselves. And third, if the biography is one which attempts, through the use of letters, diaries, interviews, and the biographer’s own impressions and opinions, to describe the poet’s states of mind, physical presence, personality, medical history, and sexual experiences, we must ask whether this “inside” information, like the “bare facts” of the well-indexed reference book, adds valuably to what we receive from the subject’s own creative opus. It is natural that if we enjoy the work, or think it important, we feel some interest in the person who made it. But we know virtually nothing of Shakespeare’s life, and that little is held to be unverifiable; would the millions who have been affected by the plays be even more deeply enriched if every episode of his life were to be found documented in some antique hoard of papers? I think not. Yet there are biographies that truly instruct and delight.