Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis

There is no poet I’ve reread more than Larry Levis, and no poem I’ve reread more than “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex” from his long sequence, “The Perfection of Solitude.” The poem opens with an ekphrastic description of Caravaggio’s David & Goliath and expands from there, braiding together the painter’s exile from Rome after being accused of murder, the Vietnam War, and Levis’s high school friend who died in that war after stepping on a landmine. It’s also about something else altogether: the lyric’s ability to suspend time, to contort it, so that Renaissance Italy and an American teenager backflipping into the pool of an empty model home happen simultaneously on the page. The poem opens:

In the Borghese, Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,
Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,
And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of David a look of pity

Mingling with disgust.

This sentence exemplifies much of what I love about Levis: the maximalist sinew of his syntax, the unspooling parenthetical clauses, the stacking adjectives, the precise images. Just when it feels like weaving together these disparate threads might become unwieldy, Levis sticks the landing with quiet authority:

When I think of [my friend], I get confused. Someone is calling to him, & then

I’m actually thinking of Caravaggio ... in his painting. I want to go up to it

And close both eyelids. They are still half open & it seems a little obscene

To leave them like that.

I was twenty years old when I first read this poem. Although I fancied myself a fiction writer at the time, I was taking a poetry workshop to meet the requirements of my degree. In that class, I was assigned Levis’s The Widening Spell of the Leaves, the 1991 collection in which the Caravaggio poem appears. I had been reading in the library at the University of Maine; it was peak foliage, and the leaves, as Levis would describe in that book, were “the colors of horses: roans, sorrels, duns.” As I made my way two miles outside of town to the sagging steps of my apartment next to a hair salon that no one seemed to ever enter or leave, I couldn’t bring myself to go inside and be among my roommates. I had been haunted, and I knew then that whatever this was, it was the kind of spell I’d been chasing in literature—one I hoped, someday, I’d have the craft to cast myself.

This was 2006, and Levis had been dead for a decade. Despite that gap, he has remained for me and many contemporary poets—including John Murillo, Devon Walker-Figueroa, Jeffrey Thomson, Corey Marks, Terrance Hayes, and Analicia Sotelo, to name a few—a cornerstone. The upcoming release of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems feels less like the consolidation of a historical archive and more like a recognition of Levis’s enduring influence. His lasting power is, I believe, partly because of the way he ignited a new mode of confessionalism. We often associate confessionalism with the midcentury shock-the-bourgeoisie poems of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, and while there are moments of blunt surprise in Levis’s work (“Because they could not blind him twice, they drove a pencil/Through the blind king’s ear” from “The Smell of the Sea,” for example), I refer to “confessionalism” in its original, religious definition.

Levis is, to my mind, a deeply Catholic poet, though not for his imagery or motifs or even his Catholic upbringing. Rather, there is a catechistic logic to Levis’s poems: memory, confession, penance. The emotional texture of his later work often derives from the need to reckon with one’s choices and with time. Even his diction hums with liturgical vocabulary: loss, testify, darkening, late, exile. An anxiety over banishment from a kind of Eden haunts his poems, serving to fuse this mythological archetype with his own intimately personal account. Another way to put it: he seeks absolution through language. “My only advice is not to go away./Or go away,” he writes in “City of Light,” “Most/of my decisions have been wrong.” In a Levis poem, there’s often the sense that a paradise exists, one that could be inherited or cultivated, and that the poet has, by his own volition, already lost it.

In “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” a surrealistic moment occurs, as it frequently does with Levis, after the speaker confesses his affair. He states that if his house caught fire and if one of the bystanders asked if he knew this other woman, he—like Peter denying Jesus—would say no. But if that fire eating his home had addressed him directly, he would confess the truth:

if that flame could speak,
And it said to me: “You loved her, didn’t you?” I’d answer,
Hands in my pockets, “Yes.” And then I’d let fire & misfortune
Overwhelm my life.

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:

there was
Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

Additionally, as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man, Levis modeled a way to write with political empathy not rooted in performance. Having grown up on the farms and vineyards of Central California, where he worked side-by-side with laborers from Mexico, his poems offer a tender awareness that is needed in our own political moment. Take this excerpt from “Elegy with a Sprawl of a Wave Inside of It”:

A mile from where I was born, there was a labor camp
That housed a thousand migrant families

In chicken sheds, white leftover feathers & the stucco
Of dung still there,

With its odor of ammonia rising into the dust & spreading
Into the light & air.

It made it hard to breathe it in,

Their fingers, clinging to chicken wire as they stared out,
Whole families, waiting.

.................................

“What was that, anyways?” That was 1955,

Whole families in cages.
“It was a disgrace,” I answered.

And yet it would be wrong to categorize Levis as a political poet. While his early work has a decidedly political bent, he escapes easy categorization. He’s a personal as well as a public poet, deep-image yet cerebral, a confessionalist and a surrealist. His lines and sections sprawl, yet there’s a tight tension, a flammable friction between his line breaks, woven narratives, motifs, and juxtapositions. His poems are somber and contrite, yet at times they can be funny as hell, too, as in these lines from earlier in “Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside of It”: “August Sebastiani kept a pair of black squabbling swans./He was friendly, they were not.”

A memory: every Monday after workshop during my MFA, poets would rendezvous at The Old Fashioned, a whiskey bar in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, where we’d order pitchers of Spotted Cow and plates of deep-fried cheese curds and talk shop. Those conversations, touching on everything from poetry gossip to debates over aesthetics to who’s the Whitman of the modern era (Levis, obviously, I argued), were my education as a poet. Walking home during the winter, I sometimes cut across the surface of frozen Lake Monona, and trudging across that wide, pale field of frozen water and looking at the stars that thickened above me, at times felt like being inside a Levis poem. On one of those nights at The Old Fashioned, I remember us talking about Levis’s choice in his later work to swap out the coordinating conjunction “and” for the ampersand. To me, it wasn’t just a stylistic flourish; it said something more about his work at large.

This shift toward the ampersand came at a pivotal moment in Levis’s career. While his first three books offer glimmers of the poet he’d become, it isn’t until Winter Stars—when the ampersand first appears—that his vision and style crystallize into the virtuoso work we know today. The ampersand embodies one of Levis’s signatures: yoking together two surprising ideas or dyads to complicate and expand each through their pairing. Take lines like “the missing & innumerable stars” from “Anastasia & Sandman,” or “having to imagine everything/In detail, & without end” from “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” or “My father died, & I was still in love” from “In the City of Light,” or “The morning will be bright, & wrong” from “Gossip in the Village.” But if we zoom out, this technique is also emblematic of how he fuses different recursive narrative threads, images, and motifs across his long poems and collections. Consider, for example, how the phrase “the sprawl of a wave,” a shape whose image mirrors the curling glyph of the ampersand itself, echoes across all of his later books. The ampersand, quicker than the coordinating conjunction, accelerates the pairing, blurring their edges until they deepen each other.

Is it because we lost Levis so early and so unexpectedly that we continue to hold his poems in such high esteem? In “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” he describes Billie Holiday as “someone/Gone, & therefore permanent,” a phrase that now, in hindsight, one might use to describe Levis himself. But what gives his work its lasting gravity isn’t its mythologization but the way his voice resists that. Nearly three decades after his passing, we continue reading Levis because he presents himself as a fully red-blooded speaker, flawed and vulnerable:

You were young, and you had
Plenty of time:
Going west,

You slept on the train and did not smile.
Under you the plains widened and turned silver.

You slept with your mouth open.

You were nothing.
You were snow falling through the ribs
Of the dead.

You were all I had.
—From “The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing”

When I think of Levis, I think about his observation that Caravaggio painted his self-portrait onto both the decapitated Goliath and the pitying David, who by “murdering the man, is murdering his own boyhood.” Levis’s work operates in this vein, as he casts himself penitently on the page. “Couldn’t it destroy time if [Goliath] offered himself up like this?” Levis asks David. If being read as widely, closely, and reverently as Levis has is one way to destroy time, then he has answered his own question.