I’ve been reading Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World (which features this essay), a book that was once an influential text in terms of teaching poetry in college and MFA programs. The other night, sleepy, just drifting off, I was reading the conclusion of a talk Levertov delivered in 1970 entitled “Great Possessions,” and I found myself waking up, because what she says in the following paragraphs is so true, so pertinent to now, and I feel like so few academics are brave enough to say what Levertov says, and how she says it.
The TL;DR: poetry is not at all about our safety or our comfort—but about our authentic living, our surviving as communities, about the quality of our life together on this fragile earth.
Even briefer TL;DR: you want to write good poetry? You have to risk (your time, your money, probably what you think of as your reputation).
Writing prompt: after reading the below excerpt from Levertov’s talks (I promise you, it is worth it—WORTH. IT. FOR. YOUR. SOUL!) write a poem where you RISK, where you SAY what you would not SAY to ANYONE ELSE. You are not SHOWING this POEM to ANYONE. You are WRITING IT. You are SAYING THE THING, WHATEVER IT IS. You are RISKING. You can burn the poem after, (safely!) in your sink or backyard firepit or something. You can keep it in your journal. You can put it under your pillow and sleep on it and let it seep into you and make you braver. But you will have risked and articulated and accomplished some incredibly important selfwork for you and your poetry. You need to ride that language edge out—you need to dare. If your nerve deny you, wrote Emily Dickinson, go above your nerve. Bonus points if you add a living flower or shrub or plant in your poem—name it. It will be your witness plant.
Happy National Poetry Month!
Since I believe there is a most intimate relationship between the quality of a person’s life, its abundance or sterility, his integrity, and the quality of his poetry, it is not irrelevant to say that, judging by some—not a few—I have met on my travels, the people who write banal poetry and, to almost the same extent, those who in desperation make up a fake surrealism, usually seem to be the same academics who talk a liberal line concerning education and politics (and often, as teachers, are genial and popular) but who, when it comes to some crucial issue, such as a student protest, will not commit themselves far enough to endanger their own security. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is their poetry banal because their lives are banal, or vice versa? I think it works both ways. If these people committed themselves, took risks, and did not let themselves be dominated by the pursuit of “security,” their daily lives would be so changed, so infused with new experiences and with the new energy that often comes with them, that inevitably their poetry would change too (though obviously this would not ensure better poems unless they were gifted in the first place). But on the other hand, if they could manage to put themselves in a new, more dynamic, less suppressive relationship to their own inner lives and to the language, then they might discover their outer lives moving in a revolutionary way. So the process is dual, and can be approached from either direction.
Denise Levertov, “Great Possessions”
And for myself—not without anguish, not without fear, not without the daily effort of rousing myself out of the inertia and energy—apping nostalgia that would cling to old ways, to that dying bird-in-hand that’s falsely supposed to be worth two free ones chirping in the bushes—I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political.
If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new—a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to—we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. If it is indeed revolution we are moving toward, we need life, and abundantly we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the revolution. And if instead it be the Last Days—then we need to taste the dearest, freshest drops before we die-why bother with anything less than that, the essential?
Wallace Stevens wrote, “The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything.” We must not go down into the pit we have dug ourselves by our inhumanity without some taste, however bitter, of that abundance. But if there is still hope of continued life on earth, of a new life, the experience of that abundance which poetry can bring us is a revolutionary stimulus. It can awaken us, from our sloth, even yet.
The Line Break 
Leave a comment