New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Depression is boring, I think

  and I would do better to make

  some soup and light up the cave.

  To recognize that for a few years of her life Anne Sexton was an artist even though she had so hard a struggle against her desire of death is to fittingly honor her memory. To identify her love of death with her love of poetry is to insult that struggle.

  Originally published in the Real Paper, Boston, Massachusetts, 1974, and reprinted in Ramparts.

  Some Duncan Letters—A Memoir and a Critical Tribute

  (1975)

  IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1948 I was living in Florence, a bride of a few months, having married American literature, it seemed, as well as an American husband. Both of us haunted the U.S.I.S. library on the via Tomabuoni— Mitch to begin rereading at leisure the classics of fiction he had been obliged to gallop through meaninglessly at Harvard, I to discover, as a young writer of the British “New Romantic” phase of the 1940s, the poetry of what was to be my adopted country. I had read at that time a minimal amount of Pound (anthologized in a Faber anthology) and Stevens (“discovered” in Paris a few months before when Lynne Baker lent me a copy of The Blue Guitar). William Carlos Williams I had found for myself in the American bookstore on the Rue Soufflot, near the Sorbonne, but though I knew with mysterious certainty that his work would become an essential part of my life, I had not yet heard enough American speech to be able to hear his rhythms properly; his poems were a part of the future, recognized but held in reserve. The rest of American poetry was terra incognita, except for Whitman (in the William Michael Rossetti edition of 1868) and a few poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg—again, anthology pieces only. I had read Eliot; but like most English readers at that time, I thought of him as an English poet (and of course, the fact that it was possible to do so was precisely what made Williams so angry with him, as I later understood). Also I had read and loved, at George Woodcock’s house in London a year or so before, a few poems from Rexroth’s Signature of All Things.* Those were the limits of my acquaintance with U.S. poetry.

  The American library was not, to my recollection, rich in poetry; but among my findings were some issues of Poetry, Chicago; and in one of these, a review by Muriel Rukeyser of Robert Duncan’s Heavenly City, Earthly City. Both these people, then just names to me, were to become, in varying ways, close friends who influenced my history—as did Dr. Williams. Thinking back from the present (1975) I realize how destiny was sounding the first notes, in that cold Florentine spring, of motifs that would recur as dominant themes in the fifties and sixties (and in the case of Muriel Rukeyser, with whom I visited Hanoi in 1972, into the seventies) and which, indeed, are so interwoven in my life that whatever changes befall me they must be forever a part of its essential music.

  In Muriel’s review of Heavenly City, Earthly City, she quoted:

  There is an innocence in women

  that asks me, asks me;

  it is some hidden thing they are

  before which I am innocent.

  It is some knowledge of innocence.

  Their breasts lie undercover.

  Like deer in the shade of foliage,

  they breathe deeply and wait;

  and the hunter, innocent and terrible,

  enters love’s forest.

  These lines, and the whole review, so stirred me that I convinced myself no one in Florence needed that particular issue of Poetry more than I did, and I not only kept it out for months but, when we left for Paris, took it with me….

  Retrospectively, I see that I was drawn to Duncan’s poems of that period not only by their intrinsic beauty but because they must have formed for me a kind of transatlantic stepping stone. The poems of my own first book (The Double Image, 1946) and those that Rexroth included in The New British Poets (New Directions, 1949) belonged to that wave of Romanticism which Rexroth documented, an episode of English poetry that was no doubt in part a reaction against the fear, the drabness, and the constant danger of death in the daily experience of civilians as well as of soldiers in WWII. While the subject matter of the poems of the “New Romantic” movement may often have been melancholy and indeed morbid, the formal impulse was towards a richly sensuous, image-filled music. When the war ended, English poetry quickly changed again and became reactively dry, as if embarrassed by the lush, juicy emotionalism of the forties. But though not many individual poems of the New Romantics stand up very well to time and scrutiny, they still seem preferable to the dull and constipated attempts at a poetry of wit and intellect that immediately succeeded them, for their dynamic connected them with a deeper, older tradition, the tradition of magic and prophecy and song, rather than of ironic statement. And it was to that old, incantatory tradition that Duncan, then and always, emphatically (and, as I did not then know, consciously) belonged. So here, I must have intuited, was an American poet whose musical line, and whose diction, were accessible to me. It must have made my emigration, which I knew was not far distant, seem more possible, more real.

  In a 1964 letter, after talking about a then new poem of mine called “Earth Psalm,” Duncan says it caused him to reread “To Death,” a poem in my 1946 volume (now in Collected Earlier Poems). “I began to conjure,” he said, “the Tudor, no Stuart (something between King James’s Bible and Bunyan) dimension (a fourth dimension of you) with figures from a masque…. Haven’t we, where we have found a source, or some expression of what we love in human kind, to give it a place to live today, in our own gesture (which may then speak of nobility or ardour)—Well, if Orpheus can come forward, so, by the work of the poem. Death and His Bride in brocade—“How many correspondences there are,” he goes on to say, “between your Double Image, 1946, and my Medieval Scenes written in 1947. In this poem 'To Death’—“brocade of fantasy’: in ’The Banners’ where the ’bright jerkins of a rich brocade’ is part of the fabric of the spell; or in ’The Conquerors’ compare ’The Kingdom of Jerusalem’….” And after a few more lines of comment he begins, right in the letter, the poem “Bending the Bow”:

  We’ve our business to attend Day’s

  duties, bend back the bow in dreams as we may,

  til the end rimes in the taut string

  with the sending …

  I’d been

  in the course of a letter—I am still

  in the course of a letter—to a friend,

  who comes close in to my thought so that

  the day is hers. My hand writing here

  there shakes in the currents of … of air?

  of an inner anticipation of …? reaching to touch

  ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her.

  But here, noting the life-loom caught in the very act of its weaving, I anticipate. In 1948 I had nothing of Duncan’s but those quotations in Poetry, fragments congenial and yet mysterious; and when I arrived in New York for the first time in the fall of that year I was too passive, disorganized, and overwhelmed by unrecognized “culture shock” (the term had not yet been invented) to do anything so methodical as to try and find his book or books: so that when I did happen upon Heavenly City, Earthly City on the sale table outside the Phoenix Bookshop on Cornelia St., just a few blocks from where I was living, it seemed an astonishing, fateful coincidence—as in a sense it was.

  The book enlarged and confirmed my sense of affinity and brought me, too, a further dim sense of the California of fog, ocean, seals, and cliffs I was by then reading about in Robinson Jeffers.

  Turbulent Pacific! the sea-lions bark

  in ghostly conversations and sun themselves

  upon the sea-conditiond rocks.

  Insistent questioner of our shores!

  Somnambulist, old comforter!

  Duncan wrote in the title poem; and:

  Sea leopards cough in the halls of our sleep.

  swim in the wastes of salt and wreck of ships,

  and:

  The sea reflects, reflects in her evening tides

&n
bsp; upon a lavender recall of some past glory,

  some dazzle of a noon magnificence.

  Much, much later—in 1966, it must have been, when I visited Carmel and Monterey—there was possibly some recall of those lines in a poem of mine, “Liebestodt”: “Where there is violet in the green of the sea …”

  But the impact of Duncan’s rich romanticism was perhaps less powerful by the time I found the book, for I was also beginning to get a grip on William Carlos Williams’ sound by then, able to “scan” it better now that I was surrounded by American speech, no longer baffled by details like “R.R.” (railroad—in England it is railway) or obstructed in reading by the difference in stresses (e.g., the first American menu I saw announced “Hot Cakes” which I ordered as “hot cakes ”).*

  Now I was quickly, eagerly, adapting to the new mode of speaking, because instinct told me that to survive and develop as a poet I had to. Williams showed me the way, made me listen, made me begin to appreciate the vivid and figurative language sometimes heard from ordinary present-day people, and the fact that even when vocabulary was impoverished there was some energy to be found in the here and now. What I connected to, originally, in Duncan, was a music based in dream and legend and literature; and though my love of that music has proved to be enduring, it was not uppermost in my needs and pleasures just then when I was seeking a foothold in the realities of marriage, of keeping house in a tenement flat, raising a strenuous baby, buying groceries at the Bleecker Street Safeway.

  Meanwhile Duncan, unknown to me still, was changing too, on the other side of the continent. There was of course this big difference in us, a thread of another texture in among those that we held in common: he had a sophistication I lacked, which gave to his romanticism an edge, not of the type of wit academics of the period cultivated anxiously—like a young man’s first whiskers—but of an erotic irony such as Thomas Mann adumbrates in his essays on Goethe and elsewhere. He was not only a few years older than I: he had already an almost encyclopedic range of knowledge, had studied history with Kantorowitz, had read Freud; and he lived in a literary and sexual ambience I didn’t even know existed. Whatever he wrote was bound to include an element of complex consciousness; indeed, I can see now that while my task was to develop a greater degree of conscious intelligence to balance my instincts and intuitions, his was, necessarily, to keep his consciousness, his diamond needle intellect, from becoming overweening, violating the delicate feelings-out of the Imagination. It was just because his awareness of every nuance of style, of every double meaning, was so keen, that he has, through the years, been almost obsessively protective of the gifts of chance, of whatever the unconscious casts upon his shore, of “mistakes” which he has cherished like love-children.

  My first direct contact with Duncan came in the early fifties and was almost a disaster. By this time I had become friends with Bob Creeley and Origin had begun to appear. Mitch and I had gone back to Europe on the G.I. Bill in 1950, when our son was just over a year old, and in 1951 the Creeleys came to live a mile or two away from us in the Provencal countryside. Sitting on the ground near our cottage, by the edge of a closely pruned vineyard under the slope of the Alpilles, Creeley and Mitch would talk about prose, and Creeley and I about poetry: Williams, Pound, Olson’s “Projective Verse” which had just come out; how to cut down a poem to its sinewy essence— pruning it like the vines. I learned a lot; and am not sure what, if anything, I gave in exchange, though I know I was not merely a silent listener. Duncan had not yet met or been acknowledged by either Olson (with whom Creeley was corresponding) or Creeley,* and though he had not been dislodged from my mind I don’t recall mentioning him. After I was back in New York, and just before Cid Corman included some poems of Duncan’s in Origin (l952) I received a communication from a San Francisco address signed only “R.D.” It was a poem-letter that (I thought) attacked my work, apparently accusing it of brewing poems like “stinking coffee” in a “staind pot.” When the letter spoke of “a great effort, straining, breaking up all the melodic line,” I supposed the writer was complaining. How I could have misread what was, as Duncan readers will recognize, “Letters for Denise Levertov: an A muse ment”—how I could have so misinterpreted his tribute, it is difficult now to imagine. I’ve never been given to paranoia; perhaps it was simply that the mode of the poem, with its puns, lists, juxtapositions (more Cubist than Surreal) was too sophisticated for me to comprehend without initiation. I had at the time not even read half the people he mentions in the poem as sources, or at any rate as forming an eclectic tradition from which I thought he was saying I had unwarrantably borrowed (but to which, in fact, he was joyfully proclaiming that I belonged): Marianne Moore, Pound, Williams, H.D., Stein, Zukofsky, Bunting, St.-J. Perse. Of these, I had by then read only Williams, Marianne Moore and Perse in any quantity; I knew Pound’s ABC of Reading pretty well but had not tackled the Cantos. Of H.D. I knew only the anthologized Imagist poems of her youth, and of Stein only “Melanctha”; of Zukofsky and Bunting, nothing. Duncan also speaks in the poem of Surrealism and Dada: and I was at least somewhat acquainted with French Surrealism (and the English poet, David Gascoyne’s book about it) but with Dada not at all. So much of the corresponding intellectual background, in the simplest sense, was lacking in me as a recipient of the letter.

  I wrote to “R.D.” enquiring plaintively why he had seen fit to attack me for a lack of originality, for I took phrases like

  Better to stumb-

  le to it,

  and

  better awake to it. For one

  eyes-wide-open vision

  or fotograph

  than ritual,

  as stem admonitions, when, of all the names he cited, only Williams was to me a master, and from him I believed myself to be learning to discover my own voice. I concluded my letter by saying, in all innocence, “Is it possible that the initials you signed with, R.D., stand for Robert Duncan? You don’t sound like him!—But in case that’s who you are. I’d like to tell you I loved Heavenly City, Earthly City, and therefore hope it’s not Robert Duncan who dislikes my poems so much.” I quote from memory, but that’s a pretty close approximation. It is a wonder that Duncan was not furious at my stupidity; especially at my saying he did not sound like himself. If he had been, I wonder if our friendship would ever have begun? Certainly if it had not, my life would have been different. But luckily he responded not with anger (or worse, not at all) but with a patient explanation (on the envelope he added the words, “It is as it was in admiration”) of his intent, including his sense—central to an understanding of his own poetry—that “borrowings” and “imitations” were in no way to be deplored, but were on the contrary tributes, acts of faith, and the building stones of a living tradition of “the communion of poets.” This concept runs through all of Duncan’s books. It is most obvious in the Stein imitations, or in his tiding books Derivations, or A Book of Resemblances, but is implicit in every collection, though not in every poem; and it is closely tied to his recognition of poetry (and of all true art) as being a “power, not a set of counters” as he put it in a section of “The H.D. Book” that deals with H. D.’s detractors, the smart, “bright” critics. If Poetry, the Art of Poetry, is a Mystery, and poets the servers of that Mystery, they are bound together in fellowship under its laws, obedient to its power. Those who do not recognize the Mystery suppose themselves Masters, not servants, and manipulate Poetry’s power, splitting it into little counters, as gold is split into coins, and gaming with it; each must accumulate his own little heap of manipulative power-counters—thus so-called originality is at a premium. But within the Fellowship of the Mystery there is no hoarding of that Power of Poetry—and so-called borrowings are simply sharings of what poetry gives to its faithful servants.* By the light of this concept we can also understand Duncan’s often criticized “literariness,” his frequent allusions to works of literary and other art and his many poems that not only take poetry itself as theme but overtly incorporate the �
��languaging” process into their essential structure—as he does even in this very first “Letter” in the sections subtitled “Song of the Languagers,” and later in such poems as “Keeping the Rhyme,” “Proofs,” “Poetry, A Natural Thing” or “The Structure of Rime” series, and so many others.

  Some readers—even deep and subtle ones—object to poems about poems (or about the experiencing of any works of art) and about writing and language, on the grounds that they are too inverted. I have never agreed (except in regard to conventional set pieces which seem written in fulfillment of commissions or in the bankrupt manner of British poets laureate celebrating Royal weddings). If much of a poet’s most passionate and affective experiences are of poetry itself (or literature more generally, or painting, etc.) why should it not be considered wholly natural and right for him to celebrate those experiences on an equal basis with those given him by nature, people, animals, history, philosophy, or current events? Poetry also is a current event. The poet whose range is confined to any single theme for most of a working life may give off less energy than one who follows many themes, it is true—and if any single thing characterizes those whom we think of as world poets, those of the rank of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, it is surely breadth of range. But Duncan, although in tribute to the Mystery he is avowedly and proudly “literary,” cannot be accused of narrow range, of writing nothing but poems about poetry.

  It was in 1955 that I first met Duncan. He spent a few days in New York on his way, with Jess, to spend a year in Europe—chiefly in Majorca, near to Robert Creeley with whom he had by this time entered into correspondence but still not met. I am not able to locate the letters that preceded this joyful meeting, nor do I remember our conversation. But the tentative friendship that had begun so awkwardly was cemented by his visit, and I recall with what a pang I watched him go down the stairs, he looking back up the stairwell to wave farewell, I leaning over the banister.* I gave him a notebook for his journey; he used it as a drawing book and gave it back to me full of pictures a year later; and still later I wrote captions for them.