Awards | Calendar | Journal | Poetry in Motion | What's American? Home | About | Membership | Resources

Back

In the following essay, Robert Creeley honors his beloved friend and fellow poet Denise Levertov, who died at the age of 74 on December 23, 1997.

Hard to believe we met about fifty years ago in New York, when she and Mitch had first married and she had returned from Europe with him in the classic manner to start her own life over again. Certainly as a poet she had to. The distance between her first book, The Double Image, and the second, Here and Now, published by City Lights in its Pocket Poets series ten years later, is a veritable quantum leap. Kenneth Rexroth, editing The New British Poets for New Directions, thought her most able and, when he saw her, declared her Dante's Beatrice incarnate. W. C. Williams, writing of "Mrs. Cobweb" in Here and Now, said that one can't really tell if she's utterly virginal or if she has been on the town for years and years. Everyone was intrigued!

Was it Denise's long training as a dancer, when she was a child, that gave her such particularity of movement--her phrase and line shifting with the fact of her emotion, the rhythms locating each word? In a sense she was a wide-awake dreamer; a practical visionary with an indomitable will; a passionate, whimsical heart committed to an adamantly determined mind. It wasn't simply that Denise was right. It was that her steadfast commitments could accommodate no error.

I remember, when we were neighbors in France, riding our bicycles in Aix from the villages we lived in just to the north. There was a week-long celebration of Mozart. Denise's bike lost its brakes at the top of the three-mile hill into the city and down she came, full tilt, careening through early evening traffic, to come to rest finally at the far side near the railroad station. Was she terrified? I recall our going to the concert--so seemingly she soon recovered. Balance, quick purchase, passional measure rather than didactic, mind an antenna, not a quanitifier merely. Her voice was lovely. Her laughter, particularly her helpless, loud giggles, were what finally must define "humanness." Her whole body took over. We used to sit out at the edge of the orchard near her house in Puyricard, rehearsing endlessly what it was Williams was doing with the line. We were fascinated by how the pace was managed, how the insistent breaking into of the grammatically ordered line made a tension and a means more deft than any we had known. That bond of recognition, shared between us, never lessened.

Back in the States, then to Mexico, as I also shifted about to Black Mountain--then to New Mexico, Guatemala, and Canada--Mitch's and Denise's son Nick grew and grew, as our own children did. Thanks to Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (with Denise ostensibly the one woman of Black Mountain's company, despite the fact that she never went there, even to look), we began to have a public condition, as they say. The Vancouver Poetry Festival of 1963 and the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965 were the greatest collective demonstrations.

Necessarily the Vietnam War and its politics bitterly changed our world. Insofar as that determinant in Denise's life is a solid fact of the period's history, there's no need now to rehearse it. I was closest to the poems of The Jacob's Ladder and O Taste and See. Repeatedly she found voices for our common lives.

Years passed, of course. We saw one another all too rarely and yet her presence, her stalwart integrity, were always a given. Work to offset the world's real ills became an increasing occupation, forcing a more generalized community, on one hand, and also an increased singularity as her son moved into his own life and she and his father separated. She has written poignantly, healingly, of this time.

Now and then we would intersect on our show biz travels, once in Cincinnati, then a few days later in New York. Finally we were together at a Poetry Society of America awards dinner--we'd been judges--after she had moved to Seattle. Nick was with her; they were both solid and happy. There was always much I wanted to talk to her about--[Robert] Duncan, for example; my own confusions; the life I now lived with my family; the increased rigors of teaching. But we no longer seemed to find time or occasion to write. Last fall at Stanford, I got the news from friends that her cancer treatment seemed to have gone well. She had visited just a short time before and appeared much better.

Then bleakly, irrevocably, she was dead. No more chance to talk except in the way one finally always had--in what she wrote, what one had hoped to say, what one remembered.

--Robert Creeley

The Jacob's Ladder The stairway is not a thing of gleaming strands a radiant evanescence for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and need not touch the stone. It is of stone. A rosy stone that takes a glowing tone of softness only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting night gray. A stairway of sharp angles, solidly built. One sees that the angels must spring down from one step to the next, giving a little lift of the wings: and a man climbing must scrape his knees, and bring the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him. The poem ascends. --Denise Levertov

In 1979, Denise Levertov addressed a group of students at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan. The speech was published in her 1981 prose collection, Light Up the Cave.

I was asked to talk about the life of a poet. Some of you will not find poetry at the very center of your lives though no doubt it will go on being a profound resource--both writing it and reading it. Others will find that it is indeed a dominant force in their lives--it has been for me. I started very young. The primary impulse for me was always to make a structure out of words, words that sounded right. And I think that's a rather basic foundation of the poet's world. Of course, one also is motivated by the desire or need to "express one's feelings"--and it is essential that the poet has something he or she passionately wants to say--or rather, to sing, since poetry is closer in its essential nature to music than to expository prose. But without the impulse to make a thing out of words, as a sculptor makes a freestanding thing out of clay or wood or stone, a poem will remain only self-expression. Poetry is an art, not a form of therapy, and if a person with a love of poetry, a love of language, recognizes this early, it helps. Because then that person's natural gifts will be put at the service of the art, instead of the art being put into bondage and utilized as a "vehicle" for opinions or emotions. The arts are not vehicles, they are not like bicycles or bomber planes!

I was lucky--as you are--in starting early, because when you begin to write early you avoid some of the self-consciousness that people who only begin later in life tend to suffer from. You just plunge in, not knowing what you're doing, and find that you've done something, made something. It's exciting and encouraging to take oneself by surprise like that. But even a strong talent needs nourishment: don't ever feel that if you read other people's poetry you'll lose your originality. You have to trust it--your talent. If it could be so easily destroyed it wouldn't be worth much anyway. It's useful to be influenced--after a while an influence will be absorbed into your own style. Read widely and deeply. But also use your eyes and ears. Try to avoid vague general statements about your feelings, and instead practice accurate description of things you see. You will find that because you are seeing them through your emotions, as if through tinted glass--blue or rose!--the way you evoke a picture of your street or your friend or the sky will convey more about your feelings than any statement can. And thus another person reading it will feel what you feel instead of just being informed about how you feel. When one discovers that one has a gift for writing poetry it's a solemn and also a deliriously exciting moment. Maybe many moments--because sometimes you don't believe it and then you discover it over again. One feels chosen--and if one has an adequate recognition of poetry being something larger than oneself, one feels a sense of dedication to the calling of poet. It's a secret feeling and you don't have it all the time, but it's there. And because of this dedication a poet learns to revise, to work at his or her poem until it is as perfect as it can be. Not in order to show off, to compete with others, to demonstrate personal cleverness, but for the sake of poetry itself. You can't make a poem happen, but once it begins to happen you can help it become complete. It's a little bit as if the poet were a sort of photograph developing medium, which makes the mysterious hidden image appear from the negative and become clearer and clearer. (You've probably watched a Polaroid photo appearing as if by magic while you look.) This task of working at and with the poem is what really grabs one. I think the people who go on writing all their lives are those for whom that process is itself utterly fascinating. For the poet, not having written a poem, but the experience of writing it, is what matters. And somehow, if your gift goes on growing and making its demand on you, you will try to find the ways of living that will be most suitable for you as individuals to go on doing your work in poetry--you will find your talent giving shape to your lives.

Back