New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Whatever had passed between us before that time—and Duncan years later claimed that “we must have been in full correspondence by fall of’54”—it was now that the exchange of letters which continued into the early seventies began in earnest. Somehow, in the course of a busy life and many changes of dwelling, a few of the letters Duncan wrote to me have been mislaid, though I am confident that they are not irretrievably lost, for I always treasured them. I have a stack of letters for every year from 1955 to 1972. The written word was not the only dimension of our friendship: from time to time Duncan would come East; in 1963 he and I were both at the Vancouver Poetry Conference; and three times I was in the San Francisco Bay Area (in 1969 for six months). At these times we would have the opportunity to “talk out loud” rather than on paper and I have happy memories of visits to museums and galleries, to the Bronx Zoo and the Washington Zoo, and of walks in the Berkeley Hills. Over the years we acquired many mutual friends; and during my son’s childhood Duncan and Jess befriended him too, sending him wonderful old Oz books they would find in thrift shops. But it was the correspondence, with its accompaniment of poems, newly finished or in progress, that sustained the friendship most constantly and importantly.

  Looking through these letters from Robert I am confirmed in my sense of their having been for me, especially in the first ten years, an extremely important factor in the development of my consciousness as a poet. POndering what I gave Duncan in exchange, besides responding in kind to his admiration and love, I recall his speaking of how writing to me and to Creeley gave him “a field to range in,” and in a 1958 letter he writes of me as serving as a “kind of artistic conscience” (not that he needed one). I had, certainly, the great advantage of not being connected to any “literary world” in particular, and being quite free from the factionalism so prevalent in San Francisco.

  Both Duncan and I are essentially autodidacts, though he did have a high school and some college education while I had no instruction after the age of twelve, and the education I received before that was unconventional. I had a good background in English literature, a strong sense of the European past, and had read widely but unmethodically. Duncan read deeply in many fields I was ignorant of—the occult, psychoanalysis, certain areas of science. He did not teach me about these matters, which were not what I was really interested in— but he did give me at least some awareness of them as fields of energy. Because of my family background I knew a little about Jewish and Christian mysticism, so that when Duncan mentioned the Shekinah or Vladimir Solovyóv I recognized what he was talking about. The Andrew Lang Fairy Books and the fairytales of George MacDonald (and some of his grown-up stories too) were common ground, along with much, much else—many loves in literature and art. It was in those areas of twentieth-century literature, American poetry in particular, of which at the time of that first “Letter” I had been ignorant, and—more importantly—in the formation of what I think of as “aesthetic ethics,” that Duncan became my mentor. Throughout the correspondence there run certain threads of fundamental disagreement; but a mentor is not necessarily an absolute authority, and though Duncan’s erudition, his being older than I, his often authoritative manner, and an element of awe in my affection for him combined to make me take, much of the time, a pupil role, he was all the more a mentor when my own convictions were clarified for me by some conflict with his. Perhaps there was but one essential conflict—and it had to do with the role of a cluster of sources and impulses for which I will use “convictions” as a convenient collective term (though no such term can be quite satisfactory). Although, having written poetry since childhood (beginning, in fact, several years before Duncan wrote his first poems), I had experienced “lucky accidents” and the coming of poems “out of nowhere,” yet I needed, and was glad to get from him, an aesthetic rationale for such occurrences—reassurances to counter the “Protestant ethic” that makes one afraid to admit, even to oneself, the value of anything one accomplishes without labor. Nevertheless, then and now (and I fully expect to so continue) my deepest personal commitment was to what I believed Rilke (whose letters I’d been reading and rereading since 1946) meant in his famous admonition to Herr Kappus, the “Young Poet,” when he told him to search his heart for its need. The “need to write” does not provideacademic poem-blueprints, so there was no conflict on that level; but such “inner need” is related to “having something” (at heart) “to say,” and so to a high valuation of “honesty.” Our argument would arise over Duncan’s sense that what I called honesty, he (as a passionate anarchist or “libertarian”) sometimes regarded as a form of self-coercion, resulting in a misuse of the art we served. He saw a cluster, or alignment, that linked convictions with preconceptions and honesty with “ought” while the cluster I saw linked convictions with integrity and honesty with precision. Related to this was my distrust of Robert’s habit of attributing (deeply influenced as he was by Freud) to every slip of the tongue or unconscious pun not merely the relevation of some hidden attitude but, it appeared to me—and it seemed and still seems perverse of him— more validity than what the speaker meant to say, thought he or she said, and indeed (in the case of puns and homonyms noticed only by Duncan) did say. To discount the earnest intention because of some hinted, unrecognized, contradictory coexisting factor has never seemed to me just; and to automatically suppose that the unrecognized is necessarily more authentic than what has been brought into consciousness strikes me as absurd. Jung (whom I was reading throughout the sixties—Duncan disliked his style and for a long time refused to read him)* had made the existence of the “dark side,” and the imperative need to respect it, very clear to me. It was Duncan’s apparent belief that the dark side was “more equal,” as the jest puts it, that I could not stomach.

  However, the first time I find this matter touched upon in one of Robert’s letters it was not in a way that affronted or antagonized me but one which, on the contrary, belongs with the many ways in which he opened my mind to new realizations. I had been puzzled by some ballads of his, inspired, in part, by Helen Adam (to whose fascinating work he soon introduced me). I found them, I suppose, a curious retrogression from the exciting pioneering into the “open field” in which we and a few others were engaged. What was the Duncan of Letters, the Duncan who in a letter of that same summer (1955) was excited by my poem “The Way Through” (printed in Origin) and who shared my love of Williams, what was he doing being so “literary”?—I must have asked. For I myself was engaged in “de-literarifying” myself, in developing a base in common speech, contemporary speech rhythms. “I don’t really understand your ballads,” I wrote (I quote now from Duncan’s transcriprion of part of my letter in his preface for a projected volume to be called Homage to Coleridge ), “why you are writing that way. It seems wasteful both to yourself and in general … when I remember what else you have written, even long since, as well as of late especially, I can’t quite believe they aren’t like something you might have written very long ago.” My hesitations about questioning anything he did are evident in the circuitous syntax and its qualifiers—“I don’t really”—“I can’t quite”—“it seems”…. And in his reply he wrote,

  … it is the interest in, not the faith, that I wld take as my due. Ideally that we might be as readers or spectators of poetry like botanists—who need not tell themselves they will accept no matter what a plant is or becomes; or biologists—who must pursue the evidence of what life is, haunted by the spectre of what it ought to be [though] they might be. As makaris we make as we are, o.k., and how else? it all however poor must smack of our very poorness or if fine of our very fineness. Well, let me sweep out the old validities: and readdress them. They are inventions of an order within and out of nonorders. And it’s as much our life not to become warriors of these orders as it is our life to realize what belongs to our order in its when and who we are and what does not. I can well remember the day when Chagall and Max Ernst seemed bad to me, I was so the protagonist of the formal (like
Arp or Mondrian) against the Illusionary. The paintings have not changed. Nor is it that I have progressed or gone in a direction. But my spiritual appetite has been deranged from old convictions.

  This openness was something I was happy in; and indeed, in such passages Duncan often sounded for me a note of “permission” to my native eclecticism that some shyness in me, some lack of self-confidence, longed for. Yet even this liberation was in some degree a source of conflict—not between us, but within me. For years no praise and approval from anyone else, however pleasant, could have reassured me until I had Robert’s approval of a poem; and if I had that—as I almost always did—no blame from others could bother me. “The permission liberates,”wrote Duncan in 1963 (about a procedure of his own, relating to a habit of “reading too much the way some people eat too much” as he put it elsewhere) “but then how the newly freed possibility can insidiously take over and tyrannize over our alternatives.”

  Duncan’s wit is not a dominant note in the letters but it does flash forth, whether in jest or in epigram. In September 1959 for example, he complains that Sobvyóv had been, alas, “a Professor of Philosophy—that hints or sparks of a life of Wonder can show up in such a ground is a miracle in itself. What if Christ’s disciples had not been simple fishermen and a whore, and he the son of a carpenter, but the whole lot been the faculty of some college?” Of a highly cultured friend he wrote in 1957, “he has enthusiasms but not passions. … He collects experience [but he doesn’t] undergo the world.” He described San Francisco audiences for poetry readings (preparing me for my first public reading anywhere, in December 1957, which he had gone to considerable trouble to arrange): “The audiences here are avid and toughened—they’ve survived top poetry read badly; ghastly poetry read ghastly; the mediocre read with theatrical flourish; poets in advanced stages of discomfort, ego-mania, mumbling, grand style, relentless insistence, professorial down-the-nosism, charm, calm, schizophrenic disorder, pious agony, auto-erotic hypnosis, bellowing, hatred, pity, snarl and snub.”

  Among recurring topics are friendships and feuds among fellow writers: his publishing difficulties (due in part to his very high standards of what a book should look like and in what spirit its printing and publication should be undertaken); and— more importantly—his current reading and its relationship to his work; as well as his work itself. Sometimes poems would have their first beginnings right there on the page, as “Bending the Bow” did; or if not their beginning, the origins of poems enclosed are often recounted. (These, however, I do not feel inclined to quote; they are a part of the intimacy of communion, not to be broadcast—not because they say anything Robert might not say to someone else or to the world in general, but because in their context they are said in an expectation of privacy.)

  It is not easy to isolate from the fabric some threads of the essential, the truly dominant theme I have already named— clumsily but not inaccurately—the “ethics of aesthetics”; for the pattern of the whole is complex: negatives and positives entwined and knotted. Everywhere I discover, or rediscover, traces both of the riches Duncan’s friendship gave me and of the flaws in mutual confidence which by the 1970s impoverished that friendship.

  Perhaps a point at which to begin this drawing-out of one thread is what he says about revision. I had read the notebook excerpts, printed in a S.F. broadside, in which the beautiful phrase occurs, “My revisions are my re-visions.” In the beginning I supposed it to mean it was best never to work-over a poem, but instead to move on to the next poem—the renewed vision. But taking it to myself as the years passed, I have come to know its meaning as being the necessity of constant revisioning in the very act of refining: i.e., that changes made from outside the poem, applied as a reader would apply (supply) them, cannot partake of the poem’s vitality: the valid, viable reworking of a poem* must be as much from within, as seamlessly internal to the process, as the primary working. Duncan himself in May 1959 explicated:

  I revise (a) when there is an inaccuracy, then I must re-see, as e.g. in the Pindar poem—now that I found the reproduction we had someplace of the Goya painting, I find Cupid is not wingd: in the poem I saw wings. I’ve to summon up my attention and go at it. (b) when I see an adjustment—it’s not polishing for me, but a “correction” of tone, etc., as in the same poem “hear the anvils of human misery clanging” in the Whitman section bothered me, it was at once the measure of the language and the content—Blake! not Whitman (with them anvils) and I wanted a long line pushed to the unwieldly with (Spicer and I had been talking about returning to Marx to find certain correctives—as, the ideas of work) Marxist flicker of commodities. (c) and even upon what I’d call decorative impulse: I changed to gain the pleasurable transition of I to l-r and f to f-r.

  follow

  obey to the letter

  freakish instructions

  The idea in back of no revisions as doctrine was that I must force myself to abandon all fillers, to come to correct focus in the original act; in part there’s the veracity of experience (… the poem “comes” as I write it; I seem—that is—to follow a dictate), but it’s exactly in respect to that veracity that I don’t find myself sufficient…. I had nothing like “I write as I please” in mind, certainly not carelessness but the extreme of care kept in the moment of a passionate feeling…. My “no revisions” was never divorced from a concept of the work. Concentration…. I’ve got to have the roots of words, the way the language works, at my fingertips, learned in the nerves from whatever studies, in addition to the thing drawn from—the sea, a painting, the face of Marianne Moore—before there’s even the beginning of discipline. And decide, on the instant, that’s the excitement, between the word that’s surrounded by possible meaning, and the word that limits direction.

  Copying this out in December 1975 I find the dialogue continuing, for I feel I want to respond to that last sentence: ah, yes, and here I see a source of the difference in tendency between your poetry and mine (though there is a large area in which our practices overlap): you most often choose the word that is “surrounded by possible meanings,” and willingly drift upon the currents of those possibilities (as you had spoken in “The Venice Poem” of wishing to drift) and I most often choose the word that “limits direction”—because to me such “zeroing in” is not limiting but revelatory.

  In August of the same year (1958) Duncan resumes the theme:

  I’ve found myself sweating over extensive rehaulings of the opening poem of the field and right now am at the 12th poem of the book which I want to keep but have almost to reimagine in order to establish it…. It’s a job of eliminating what doesn’t belong to the course of the book, and in the first poem of reshaping so that the course of the book is anticipated. I mistrust the rationalizing mind that comes to the fore, and must suffer through—like I did when I was just beginning twenty years ago—draft after draft to exhaust the likely and reach the tone in myself where intuition begins to move. It comes sure enuf then, the hand’s feel that “this” is what must be done….

  He quotes Ezra Pound saying in a 1948 manifesto, “You must understand what is happening”; and makes it clear the significant emphasis is on “what is happening,” the presentness, the process. “Most verse,” Duncan comments, “is something being made up to communicate a thing already present in the mind— or a lot of it is. And don’t pay the attention it shld to what the poet don’t know—and won’t [know] until the process speaks.” He quotes the passage from T. S. Eliot’s Three Voice of Poetry in which Eliot, alluding to a line from Beddoes, “bodiless childful of life in the gloom/crying with frog voice, ’What shall I be?’” noted that there is “first … an inert embryo or ’creative germ’ and, on the other hand, the language … [The poet] cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order.” And from Eliot he passes directly to a recent poem by Ebbe Borregard—

  What Ebbe’s got to do is to trust and obey the voice of Tbe Wapitis. Where obedi
ence means certainly your “not to pretend to know more than he does.” But the poem is not a pretention to knowing; it is not, damn it, to be held back to our knowing, as if we could take credit for the poem as if it were a self-assertion. We have in order to obey the inspired voice to come to undersand, to let the directives of the poem govern our life and to give our minds over entirely to know[ing] what is happening.

  Most of this rang out for me in confirmation of what I believed and practiced. But I question one phrase—that in which he opposes, to the trusting of a poem’s own directives, the communication of “a thing already present in the mind”; for unless one qualifies the phrase to specify a fully formed, intellectualized, conscious “presence in the mind” I see no true opposition here. The “veracity of experience” does not come into being only in the course of the poem, but provides the ground from which the poem grows, or from which it leaps (and to which it fails to return at its peril). “The sea, a painting, the face of Marianne Moore,” are indeed the “things drawn from.” What the writing of the poem, the process of poetry, the following-through of the radiant gists (in W. C. Williams’ phrase) of language itself, does for the writer (and so for the reader, by a process of transference which is indeed communication, communion) is to reveal the potential of what is “present in the mind” so that writer and reader come to know what it is they know, explore it and realize, real-ize, it. In the fall of 1965, commenting anew on my “Notes on Organic Form” which he had read in an earlier, “lecture” form, he quotes with enthusiasm: “whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and in to a central focus or axis … discoverable only in the work, not before it.” In that phrase, however, I meant “discoverable” quite precisely—not “that which comes into being only in the work” but that which, though present in a dim unrecognized or ungrasped way, is only experienced in any degree of fullness in art’s concreteness: The Word made Flesh, Concept given body in Language. One cannot “discover” what is not there. Yet the poem is not merely a representation of the thing discovered—a depiction of an inscape seen; it is itself a new inscape, the seen and the seer conjoined. And it is in the action of synthesizing, of process in language, that the poet is voyager, sailing far beyond that lesser communication, the conveyance of information, to explore the unknown. Duncan seems always on the brink of saying one does not even start off from the known.