John's Response to Levis

The dark, intelligent, moving images of Larry Levis’ poetry is oh so alluring for many reasons I do not understand. Many of Levis’ poetry is about death and the understanding of death, yet he also gracefully puts what I would consider hope in his poems. Levis may have a very aggressive nature towards poetry but he also adds many intellectual references to his works. I believe combining these three features of hope, aggression, and intellectuality produce very well rounded thought provoking poetry. Levis’ “Elegy with a Bridle in its Hand” even though a much easier read then most, certainly has moments of confusion. In the fifth and sixth stanzas Levis writes, “Deity is in the details & we are among other details & we long to be teased out of ourselves. And become all of them” I took these several lines as an explanation of why Levis writes. This I believe is the hopefulness in which Levis writes. If a deity is among the details, and according to Levis, we are among the details then someone among us must be a deity. When Levis says, “we long to be teased out of ourselves” he means we long to stand out from the rest of the masses.

“Boy in Video Arcade” another poem of Levis, is simple in form yet ambiguous in meaning. The poem’s line structure is quite irregular. The irregularity, however I believe adds a certain flow to the reading of the poem. Every stanza seems to be a different image Levis is trying to depict. The first lines, “Some see a lake of fire at the end of it, or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched” immediately made the impression the poem was going to be dreamlike or deal with surreal images. Because Levis toys with the theme of death and absence, I perceived this poem as dark because of the ambiguity of the images. The images themselves may not be dark in nature, but the poem considered as a whole, thematically is dark.

Overall I very much enjoyed Levis. Of the poets we have read so far I believe Larry Levis made us think the most.