(1923 - 1997)

Quoting a bit from the biography:

Early in her career, Levertov became associated with the poets of the Black Mountain school, and she credited the spare, clear, objective work of the poet William Carlos Williams with helping her develop her own vital American style of composition. She tended to avoid the use of metaphor and allusion, preferring instead the direct and immediate description of objects, perceptions, and feelings in the rhythms of ordinary speech.

This is by no means an easy style to master - consider how devoid it is of all the things one tends to associate with poetry; the aforementioned metaphor and allusion, rhyme, metre, and, in general, ‘poetic’ language. And yet this is by no means ‘prose with interesting line breaks’. The images are carefully chosen and evocative, and the very economy of words indicates the care with which each one is selected.

Focusing on today’s poem, note the way the structure is built up on several levels. The dominant images towards the start are the soothingly reinforced of the white bear and the snow. The ‘pees, dyeing’ enters as a background note, until it suddenly splashes¹ into prominence with the highly contrastive ‘saffron’.

The second verse adds a whole new level of contrast, with the sudden, radical scene change to images of jungles and buried gods. (‘Generations of leaves’ is, incidentally, an absolutely lovely image IMHO.) And then, in the final verse, the ‘as you read’, hitherto merely a narrative device of sorts, springs in its turn into focus, as it is reflected in the sea’s ‘turning pages’².

And finally there are lots of nice effects provided by the repetition of the last line, but they’re not too hard to see so I won’t bother pointing them out³.

tense of the poem

Biography

Levertov, Denise

   b. Oct. 24, 1923, Ilford, Essex, Eng.
   d. Dec. 20, 1997, Seattle, Wash., U.S.

English-born American poet, essayist, and political activist who wrote deceptively matter-of-fact verse on both personal and political themes.

Levertov’s father was an immigrant Russian Jew who converted to Christianity, married a Welsh woman, and became an Anglican clergyman. Educated entirely at home, Levertov became a civilian nurse during World War II, serving in London throughout the bombings. Her first volume of verse, The Double Image (1946), was not very successful. She married the American writer Mitchell Goodman in 1947, moved with him to the United States in 1948, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955.

Early in her career, Levertov became associated with the poets of the Black Mountain school, and she credited the spare, clear, objective work of the poet William Carlos Williams with helping her develop her own vital American style of composition. She tended to avoid the use of metaphor and allusion, preferring instead the direct and immediate description of objects, perceptions, and feelings in the rhythms of ordinary speech.

Levertov’s first important poetry collection, Here and Now (1957), was followed by Overland to the Islands (1958), With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959), and several others. She opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War and was active in the War Resisters League, for whom she edited the collection Out of the War Shadow (1967). One of her finest volumes of poems, The Sorrow Dance (1967), reflects her opposition to the war, while The Freeing of the Dust (1975) alternates antiwar poems with confessional poems about her personal life. Her subsequent volumes show a sympathy with Third World cultures and an involvement with feminism.

Levertov’s later efforts included essays and prose, as in The Poet in the World (1973), and the verse collections Candles in Babylon (1982) and Breathing the Water (1987). She taught at Stanford University from 1981 to 1994.

– EB

And a bit on the Black Mountain school…

By the mid-1950s, however, a strong reaction developed. Poets began to turn away from Eliot and metaphysical poetry to more romantic or more prosaic models, including Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and D.H. Lawrence. A group of poets associated with Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, as, for example, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, and Denise Levertov, treated the poem as an unfolding process rather than a containing form. Olson’s Maximus Poems (1953-68) show a clear affinity with the jagged line and uneven flow of Pound’s Cantos and Williams’s Paterson. Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory, prophetic “Howl” (1956) and his moving elegy for his mother, “Kaddish” (1961), gave powerful impetus to the Beat movement. Written with extraordinary intensity, these works were inspired by writers as diverse as the biblical prophets, William Blake, and Whitman, as well as by the dream-logic of the French Surrealists and the spontaneous jazz aesthetic of Ginsberg’s friend, the novelist Jack Kerouac.

– EB again

Links: http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/dleverto.htm