A FEW LINES OF POETRY in a book or magazine—though nothing pressed on you, nothing you’ve been prepared for—cast your way like the glance of the dream-love to the dreamer. There on the page, something changes your consciousness of the page. No longer looking down at a thing held open, you’re suddenly unsheltered, exposed to the heart of the matter, as if hearing for the first time the word we mean to say when we say “yes.”
When the world takes its place again, altered somehow, if you live where I do, you go bookstoring the way others go hunting or clubbing: hopeful, wondering if you can still get lucky.
Once I got lucky with Philip Levine. At this distance I don’t remember the lines that won me or where I came across them, but that same day in a used bookstore I found one early volume, took it from the shelf and inspected it with the intensity of a kid with a new comic book. There was Levine’s name—until then he’d been just another poet I hadn’t read; there was the cover photo, a detail from a ninth-century Assyrian relief, the credit informed me, of a lion penetrated by arrows; and inside the front cover was the handscrawled name of the last owner, a local poet who no doubt had tossed the pearl from the maw of debt. But then, like other rare things, poetry is best passed hand to hand. And anyway, it was a book to be found in person, not asked for by title.
They Feed They Lion. If ever a thing was doomed at the moment of its naming. The title of Levine’s fifth volume of poetry should have assured its eventual loss after a short life of being misheard, misordered, miscatalogued. But my 1972 Atheneum edition was the fifth in five years, which suggests that the book bore its burden well. What killed it was what kills so many of the great poets’ early volumes—selectedness. (As I write, I’ve learned that Knopf has just reissued They Feed They Lion and Levine’s seventh volume, The Names of the Lost, in a single volume, though the Assyrian lion has not survived.)
Only twelve of They Feed They Lion’s twenty-six poems were included in Levine’s New Selected Poems. Left out are not only some wonderful pieces, but the whole volume in the sense of a particular world particularly contained.
Here Levine plays variations on a narrow, often seven-syllable line that falls differently every time into a tactile language, hard, heavy, often cold.
The poems are not so much urban as modern. The seventy-six pages hold a lot of violence (“The Children’s Crusade”), its portents (“How Much Can It Hurt?”) and its aftermath (the title poem, written after the ’68 riots in Detroit). They also contain some of Levine’s best poems about the working life, especially “Detroit Grease Shop Poem” and “Angel Butcher.” We meet the body at work, labouring and aware. We have the sense of poems proceeding not from imagination, or even memory, which is a trick of the mind, but from remembrance, a state of the being. Levine’s poems show up so much of contemporary literature as lacking a breadth of experience. The lives in these poems are not only intimate but various, and together they lend the book an unusual amplitude.
As for the mind at work, whatever his subjects—social, personal, political—Levine is physical without lapsing into the tired anti-intellectualism that is still a trap for some American writers lured by what Philip Rahv long ago called “the cult of experience.” In Levine’s lines there’s evidence of exactly what Olson and Williams point to as the blood of poetry. Not thoughts, but the play of thought. The play is endlessly inventive, but it comes down to a poet who shatters all expected things with an image, a line break, a phrasing, as in the movement from the prosaic to the poetic, from the sentential to the linear, effected at times simply by the decision to withhold a preposition or article.
This stanza opens “The Space We Live”:
Light shrugs at the last dreams
of cops and whores. The three cold stacks
above the tire factory climb
the dawn. An old man, home from work,
sits on the bed, unlacing.
How small the space a man lives,
elbows on guard, the fingers
curled, the head tucked.
Heart of the cottonwood
I chopped in October. The red ants
streaming away from the face
of the axe. A dark soft year,
I trace it with my finger, a year
when the grasses turned
downward and poured into
the roots, a year still
in the white yielding heart.
The poems are funny, necessary, sad, perfectly strange. Whatever its place in our times, the best poetry often seems like the last worthwhile form of public utterance. When it’s lost, the mundane encroaches without making the smallest claim on our attention. But regained, in a bit of chance mixed with faith, though nothing’s forgotten, nothing is familiar.