Remembering Denise Levertov

BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC

This past December, a friend came up casually and asked, "Did you hear Denise Levertov died?" It was news to me. My friend thought I'd be interested because of Levertov's place as a leading poet and political activist. She didn't know that Denise Levertov was also my writing teacher at the Stanford University Creative Writing Program seven years ago.

I came to Levertov with admiration and ambivalence. She was notorious as a fierce and dogmatic teacher. "Denise Levertov teaches rhythm by pounding on the floor," said a college professor. "Levertov is a crusader" for her own brand of poetry, warned another when she learned I was going to study with her.

Levertov was not always imposing. She had a disarming cackle, rode an old bicycle around campus, and wore skirts and practical shoes. But the warnings weren’t unfounded. Though I never saw her pound on the floor, she did not lose arguments, even when she was probably wrong. Students who showed her poems in rhyme and meter (which she called "anachronisms") or prose poetry (which she said didn't exist) suffered her wrath.

Having witnessed her outbursts, I remained wary of Levertov until the buildup to the Gulf War. Then things changed. One day in workshop, a friend of mine admitted he was having trouble concentrating because he was so upset. "What are we going to do about this?" asked Levertov. Her question implied responsibility, and a task.

It was uplifting to be organized by a woman with nearly thirty years' experience in the anti-war movement. Every Saturday, a dozen or so of her students and friends met in front of the Stanford Quad with homemade signs that read, "Poets for Peace." We took the train together to San Francisco and marched with church groups, anarchists, stilt walkers in black and white makeup, and thousands of other citizens.

On campus during the week, we organized read-ins against the war. They started small--we read to ourselves the first night. But as word spread, the library where we held them filled up. Our read-ins became a regular announcement at campus rallies.

Levertov was a committed protester, but not a dominating one. Once she had set us in motion, she let us go. At the rallies in her trenchcoat and sunglasses, she stood back from the crowds, an interested smile on her face. At the read-ins, she would sit at the far side of the room, silent and listening.

Levertov wrote her first overtly political poetry during the Vietnam War, at a time when the U.S. poetry establishment was deeply anti-political. The presence of such writing alongside poems written in her well-known lyric voice seemed disruptive to her critics. Most reviews either made small mention of the political poems or panned them as a group.

Those reviewers should have been more painstaking. Take, for instance, "Modes of Being":

Near Saigon,
in a tiger-cage, a woman
tries to straighten her
cramped spine
and cannot.
• • •
Joy
is real, torture
is real, we strain to hold
a bridge between them open,
and fail,
or all but fail.

Or take "A Note to Olga," Levertov's expression of grief both for the war and for her dead sister:

. . . Your high soprano
sings out from just
in back of me--
We shall--I turn,
you're, I very well know,
not there,
and your voice, they say
grew hoarse
from shouting at crowds. . .
yet overcome
sounds then hoarsely
from somewhere in front,
the paddywagon
gapes.--It seems
you that is lifted
limp and ardent
off the dark snow
and shoved in, and driven away.

Levertov was careful about "the social responsibility" of writers. "If they are inspired to write about their political concerns, that is good," she said in a 1983 radio interview. "If they are not inspired to do so, they have exactly the same responsibility as any other citizen, any other conscious adult with a moral conscience--and that is to participate in any way they can.

. . . Because you can’t make a good poem out of 'ought to.'You cannot. And you can’t make a good poem out of opinion and good intentions."

Levertov managed to develop an aesthetic large enough for politics. She also created a supple poetic line, which she used to evoke hesitations, momentary questions, an intake of breath during an instant of wonder:

Everywhere among the marigolds
the rainblown roses and the hedges
of tamarisk are white
butterflies this morning, in constant
tremulous movement, only those
that lie dead revealing
their rockgreen color and the bold
cut of the wings.

from "The Dead Butterfly"

Levertov's poems are also remarkable for their overt celebrations of female sexual appetite. Thanks in part to Levertov, erotic joy is now an available subject for women writers:

. . . quiet and slow in the midst of
the quick of the
sounding river
our hands were
flames
stealing upon quickened flesh until
no part of us but was
sleek and
on fire

from "Eros at Temple Stream"

I have never grieved for someone who has left behind so much of herself. There are the thirty books of poetry, translations, and essays from sixty years of almost daily work.

Then there are the video recordings, and the odd experience of relief at seeing her whole again, with her gap-toothed smile, the high cheekbones, the controlled ringlets, a blue knit dress, and two necklaces (one a cross) draped from her neck.

In her essay on her mentor Muriel Rukeyser, which appears in her collection Light Up the Cave, Levertov remarks: "It would be inappropriate to memorialize her, however briefly, without mentioning her humor." The same is true of Denise Levertov. During a radio interview fourteen years before she died, the questioner asked Levertov what her epitaph would be. "I have sometimes thought of having an epitaph which would say my name and dates of birth and death," Levertov answered. "And then it would say, 'She knew how to cure the hiccups.'"

Levertov's cure is this: "You hold your ears very tightly closed while gently sipping water."

Many of Levertov's friends knew of her lymphoma, though she rarely talked about it. She went through treatments about two years before her death, then repeatedly said she was fine. The day she went to the hospital for the last time, she went not for cancer treatments, but for an operation on an ulcer. That day, the story goes, she was herself--not a tired woman or a woman in pain (though she may well have been both), but a woman with a loud laugh.

When the surgeons opened her body, they found lymphoma everywhere. They closed her up without carrying out the operation, woke her, and asked if she wanted life-support. She refused it, and died later that day.

A favorite phrase of Levertov’', from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, concerned the "unlived life, of which one can die." Denise Levertov did not die of an unlived life.
 

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.