Denise Levertov Memorialized at Elliott Bay Books

by Wendy Blake

Denise Levertov, American poet and cultural icon, died on December 20, 1997, eight years after making Seattle her home. On December 19, 2002, several dozen of Levertov’s friends and admirers gathered in the brick- and book- lined cellar of Elliott Bay Books to recall her strength through the spirit of her words. Many authors have come to the downstairs antechamber beside the café to read to appreciative audiences, including Levertov herself. By way of introduction, our host reported, "If she were here today, she’d be here, today."

Selected Poems, a new collection of Denise Levertov’s work, was released in November of 2002, presenting a chronological span of more than a half-century of writing. And on this quiet Thursday night, several voices read from the new volume, its source texts, and other, unpublished works, filling the room with poems about the ironies of war, faith, hope, and the tenacious grasp of life on Earth. Encased in images of sunflowers reaching toward the sky while battles rage above, or the journey of a marigold from North Vietnam across the world to be replanted in the hope of drawing life from death-soaked soils, Levertov’s words bring a sense of harmoniousness to the discordant terms of the growth and cultivation of our contradictory species.

In her poem "Scenario," Levertov writes stage directions for the wedding of a wounded Vietnamese woman to an uninjured soldier. Unraveling the narrative thread into a dramatic visualization, she gives us irony and empathy as the soldier begins "to shudder, to shudder, to ripple with shudders." With a sharp focus on this moment of combined beauty, life, ugliness, and promise, she shows us a human side of war. In a later poem, writing of another war, she makes a more blatant political statement: "When it was claimed the war had ended, it had not ended." Here, the irony outlives the poet, as the poem speaks of the conflict we have come so recently to call the First Gulf War.

Moving to more ethereal topics, the Levertov readers brought us two poems about angels and the burdensome baggage of their wings. Heavy and elusive, "could all that weight be the power of flight?" In her "Wings in the Peddlar’s Pack," Levertov plays with scriptural forms, assembling the poem in the manner of the Talmud, with the poem itself on the left side of the page and comments about it—explication, interpolation, or fabrication, perhaps—on the right. The poem is concerned with beauty: the aspiration to be angelic. The comments deal with inspiration: the poet’s father and the artist Marc Chagall. The reader was unsure of how to approach the poem, so she showed us the form of the words on the page and gave us a choice of how to listen, how to hear the words spoken. If Levertov were there, she might have read it in the way she intended it to be read. Or maybe she wouldn’t have read it at all, leaving it instead quietly on the page because some poems, like angels, can’t be articulated. Some poems are best read with the eyes rather than the ears.

As the reading continued, trading voices from time to time, Levertov’s words washed the room clean of bemused innocence, dressing us in an ironic hope, "a hope so ancient it had almost become dry parchment." The irony became pervasive: wars built upon honorific life, life sprouted from excruciating pain, hope crackled from disused sequestering. Yet that life, that hope, does endure, her poems remind us. One written in 1966 describes the harassment of women, and the same ironic hopefulness resides in it, too. A woman on the street is groaned at, dehumanized by leering men. Yet this praise, however hideous, is life-giving, empowering, emboldening. So she’ll take it, and walk more proudly both in spite of it and because of it.

From there, we launched into Levertov’s mountain poems, and envisioned the clouds in "Presence" as "filmy guardians" of the ever-present, strong-shouldered mountains. These images lingered as the reading began to close, and were coupled with the message of the last poem in the Selected, "Enduring Love," which describes a dream the poet had of her parents climbing stairs, "the long dead visiting from eternity." In the balance between dreams and guardian clouds; strong-shouldered mountains and eternal parental love, lies the heart of Levertov’s teaching: We are here to notice and to comment, to develop our relationships with life between our collective beginning in non-existence and demise in death, reverent of our place in the natural world and mindful of our damaging inconsistencies. As the last reader turned his last page, Levertov’s images and messages hung in the air, quiet but for the clatter of the café beyond the door, and we rose and scattered after the host’s closing remark, "Thank you for being here. The book is the book."

Read more about Denise Levertov on The Academy of American Poets website.