I came late to Larry Levis. It was only in 2016, with the posthumous publication of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, that I encountered his transcendent voice. The book, edited by the poet David St. John, Levis’s friend and a fellow child of Fresno, closed with “God Is Always Seventeen,” which remains among the most astonishing pieces of poetry I know.
Here’s how it begins:
This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want
To finish it. I’d rather go to bed & jack off under the covers
But I’d probably lose interest in it & begin wondering about God,
And whether He’s tried the methamphetamine I sent Him yet, & if He still
Listens to the Clash & whether the new job He got for Mozart
As a janitorial assistant in Tulsa is working out.
Running another 20 stanzas, the poem appears, initially, to meander, following its own loose flow of memory and thought. Then it tightens. “I have a child who isn’t doing well in school,” Levis confides at about the three-quarter mark. “He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t / Return my calls.” The poet recalls their most recent meeting, when father and son visited a Times Square record store. “There was / Some music playing,” he concludes, “& something inconsolable // And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget / Being there with him & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.”
As it happens, “God Is Always Seventeen” is also the last poem in Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems, which gathers the five collections Levis put out during his lifetime, in addition to his posthumously published work. Also edited by St. John (who, full disclosure, is a friend and colleague at the University of Southern California), the book is a labor of love, one poet safeguarding the legacy of another who died too early and too young. At the same time, the depth and power of that legacy make “labor of love” too narrow a lens. What we have, instead, is Levis: not just a great poet but also a crucial one. Swirl & Vortex, then—the title comes from a poem in The Widening Spell of the Leaves, the last collection released before Levis’s death of a heart attack, at 49, in 1996—is a reclamation project in the broadest, most fundamental sense. It is a work that seeks to situate the poet within a lineage encompassing both his own career and the larger movements of 20th-century American poetry.
“In some ways,” St. John explained during a recent Zoom conversation, “the poems are essentially posthumous from the beginning. In a couple of them, he literally seems to be his own ghost. There is the presence, the embodied speaker, who is of the material world, sensual, and yet there is also an almost [Wallace] Stevens–esque interiority.” It is this we see in “God Is Always Seventeen,” which is, to borrow St. John’s framing, “declarative and musical but unstable and accumulative. The phrases gather and build, one on the other. But [Levis is] a master of misdirection. You feel he is beginning to take you toward one sort of thought, but really, it’s about the movement of the mind, consciousness in process, which is reflected in the movement of the lines, the way in which the phrases reframe what’s come before.”
Such a pattern emerges particularly in the longer poems that increasingly engaged Levis during the latter part of his life. I think of “Winter Stars,” which begins: “My father once broke a man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor.” That opening is pure prose, or it appears to be, although the poem is not exactly narrative. Rather, it is impressionistic, intuitive, elegiac. “I never understood how anyone could risk his life, / Then listen to Vivaldi,” Levis writes about his father, but this is less a conclusion than a question, an unlikely kind of opening.
What the poet is addressing, after all, is not the older man’s past but his present—or, more accurately, his presence in the imagination of his son. Fathers and sons again, which represents another form of lineage, neither coincidental nor fully intentional but rooted in the poem’s interior logic. “And for years I believed / That what went unsaid between us became empty, / And pure, like starlight,” Levis continues, “& that it persisted. // I got it all wrong. / I wound up believing in words the way a scientist / Believes in carbon, after death.” The result is to bring us to an in-between space, autobiographical but also capacious, in which the machinations, the slings and arrows of living, enlarge into a kind of myth.
It’s not quite accurate to refer to this as late style, both because there are antecedents in the early work and because Levis didn’t live long enough. This is what makes the posthumous work so necessary, with its indications of where he might have gone. Take a poem like “Prayer,” published for the first time in Swirl & Vortex and evoking the poet’s mother in old age. “One of the criticisms of his work,” St. John recalled, “was that there were always these great poems about his father, but where’s his mother? And when we found that poem, which was unknown, it was like, Oh my god, this is it.”
In “Prayer,” Levis turns once more to the elegiac. “I know / That everything I look out upon will vanish,” he insists, “But I have / Always been astonished at any sort of permanence, & so, Thank You. / Before everything I look out upon has vanished: Thank You.” There it is again, that sense of space, of breadth, the blurring of the personal into the universal. There it is again, that voice, colloquial and incantatory at once. This is a poem that understands it is also an occasion. Such is the nature of the elegy. That was the title Levis originally suggested for the collection he did not live to complete, the poems of which are presented in Swirl & Vortex as a volume in their own right: A Hotel on Fire.
The provenance is complex. On the one hand, much of the material in A Hotel on Fire appeared in The Darkening Trapeze and an earlier volume called Elegy, which Philip Levine, Levis’s mentor, edited in 1997. On the other, there is the responsibility inherent in any such posthumous reconstruction, when speaking for one who can no longer speak for himself. And yet, if Levis’s writing was often retrospective (“essentially posthumous from the beginning”), there is something inevitable at work as well. “It’s always been my argument,” St. John told me, “that all of the posthumous poems belong together. And that some of the finest poems are in elegy.” For this reason, A Hotel on Fire builds to a suite of a dozen elegies showcasing Levis’s bittersweet lyricism. “The only surviving son of Jesus Christ,” he writes in one of them, “survives now / Mostly in English departments & untended graves.”
I defy anyone to read those lines without feeling the presence of the poet. We sense him alive in the language as he’s writing, even as he reminds us that to move through this world is already, in its way, to be gone. That’s a difficult tension to sustain, let alone from which to write. And yet, for Levis, there is but “Dust. / Puzzles for the woman turned to a doorstep,” as he observes in “Unfinished Poem.” “Over which / you carried all the dead at the moment of your birth.” •
