Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Larry Levis’s poems taught me to bring an experience into a poem in a way that felt intimate but not creepily confessional. Levis died at a relatively young age, 50, and his legacy is still on the rise in American poetry.
What about Larry Levis’s Winter Stars?
Larry Levis’s poems taught me to do the thing Dunn had wanted me to do. They taught how to bring an experience into a poem in a way that felt intimate but not creepily confessional. At least that’s my goal and that’s how his poems seem to me. Levis died at a relatively young age, 50, and his legacy is still on the rise in American poetry.
What has he bequeathed? His poems have the dynamic shifts that one also finds in a poem by Charles Wright, for instance, but the places his mind goes with each turn are darker, psychologically deeper, and less sensibly linked to one another than the places Wright’s mind tends to go. The connections between the elements in a Levis poem are ‘intuitive’. The poems are very thrilling as a result of their wildness or associative leaping. It is not always possible to say simply why the assembled moments feel ‘right’ together. Levis reaches back into his own personal autobiography (or some imaginative version of it) more often than Wright. There is also something nearly surreal is some of Levis’s poems: an extended image will often be a rabbit hole the reader and poet tumble down. When we emerge, we find we have been changed in some strange way that logic alone could not have achieved.
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Kathleen Graber was a Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton. Her first book, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Poems from her latest collection, The Eternal City, have appeared in The New Yorker, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review and elsewhere.
