a late style of fire

larry levis is my favorite poet

I don’t quite know how exactly I found my favorite poet Larry Levis, although I am pretty sure that the first time it happened was online. Probably, I was at my desk, and the poetry would have been on my second monitor. Nights are a hard time for me to accept new poetry, so I am going to guess that I was reading it in the daytime. Otherwise, the moment has been forgotten, enveloped by a very contemporary amnesia, in which some series of hyperlinks led me to the life-changing moment when I first read “My Story In A Late Style of Fire,” a path impossible to retrieve as my browser history has gradually effaced itself in a further accumulation of hyperlinks.

Because I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing, my memory of the experience is mostly around what I felt at that time. These feelings are heightened, because I am certain that I first read “My Story In A Late Style of Fire” around when a terrible event happened to me, the most terrible event of my life. Afterwards I experienced a searing, numbing pain for months. It has all passed now, and the pain will never return. I’m actually grateful it happened, because, as I learned to manage the pain that came from it, I also slashed-and-burned much of what I had stepped around for the decades of my life before.

I am free and light, maybe for the first time in my entire time. Recently, I saw a photo of a twelve-year-old me, a little stressed with two braids and a furrowed brow, wearing a pink puffer jacket, and I thought to myself: I think that furrowed brow has now relaxed. I am happy, and I couldn’t ask for any improvements. I have a beautiful life, wonderful friends and family, so many blissful moments a day.

And I have Larry Levis, a poet who I love more than any other poet in the world. I would be happy to be buried next to his books, although I think I’ll likely ask to be cremated. When I read A Late Style of Fire now, I feel like I am looking at a sentimental object, one of the objects that I hid under for safety during the horrible months when the whole field was afire.

What I also remember is how difficult writing had become for me when I found that poem. I have passed that point now, I think. But I couldn’t write about the Terrible Event, at all. I probably never will. Maybe when I’m sixty-five, if you’d like to follow along with my newsletter until then for the big reveal. I could only talk about it with friends, and only sometimes. But I could not put what exactly had happened to me into words. I would tiptoe around it,, and the more I avoided it, the more it would force its way into my writing. Often, it would appear in some abstract shape that I would only recognize when I returned to my writing later. I found its presence grotesque. I didn’t know who was writing these thoughts. I began to hate what came out.

I felt I had severed that connection between brain and word once and for all. It was gone, and therefore permanent. I took to calling my writing my “late style,” like Larry did in “A Late Style.” Not because, like the popular definition of “late style,” I felt that I was producing work at death’s doorstep. But rather, because I no longer felt “early.” My writing had kicked itself out of my grasp, and there was no path back to it. It was gone from me for good.

My favorite Larry poem, “A Late Style” has some of this middle-aged feeling. A narrator, an “I,” has a vague sense of guilt. He would like to admit that he has done something wrong. But the sentences, which are long, prose-like, sometimes unspooling in time, other times plunging into images, waver enough to make the confession insincere; back into the past, lamenting an affair he’s left behind in New York; then, into the hypothetical future, in which a fire burns down his home and he stands alongside his current wife and child as the flames ask him if he still loves that woman he left; then, to the time of the confession, whenever “you” will be reading it and ready to judge him.

It’s not really a great confession. We don’t know what the narrator’s real crime is. ItBut it doesn’t even matter. The flames have been steadily rising throughout the lines, asking questions out of the scherzo of fire, watching invisibly as a warm, dry wind bothers a line of elms and maples. Eventually, the fire overwhelms. It wins. ”It is so American, fire. So like us./Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.” Observe the lack of comma between brief and triumph: It wins, but so briefly that one might not even really consider it a victory.

Forgive me, “I had/To live my life, even its late, florid style.” Its late, florid style, I had become convinced that I was there too. And so, Larry and all of his other work became, as poetry sometimes is for me, balms, salves, cooling agents. They soothed my ravaged heart. They sat with me in the long darkness. I was thankful for them. But you could probably say that my relationship to them was a little sentimental, a little self-centered. These poems seemed to join me where I was, in my very personalized, hyper-targeted environment. They molded themselves to me. It was fundamentally more about me than it was about Larry.

Earlier this month, Graywolf Press released an entire collection of Larry’s poems. Larry died young, at 49, of cardiac arrest triggered by a drug overdose, and left behind several uncompleted works, which comprise the sixth and final book in this collection. The book is currently only in hardcover, with a beautiful jacket that I immediately took off and kept aside.

I had seen images and videos of Larry before, of this lanky man with the dark eyebrows and sensitive velvet eyes, the mustache like a catfish’s. But the photo on the jacket is the sort of photo that one can only achieve when they are gone and therefore permanent. It’s only after seeing the cover that I’ve thought that he looks like the narrator in his poem, “Fish,” and that maybe he is referencing himself in this poem.

In “Fish,” a narrator is being held up by a cop; there are “huge bones surrounding [his] eyes,” the police officer “run[s] a thumb under them,” and afterwards he lifts his eyelids “as if they were envelopes filled with the night.” And on this cover, his eye bones are stark, his face is wide like a fish, there is a stream of cigarette smoke around him.

To hold the entire weighty collection of Larry’s poems in my hands, a thick cover keeping the poems safe, has felt like a very different experience from reading each poem online on singular webpages. I like how Elisa Gabbert puts it: “…there’s something novelistic in the experience…, reading from youth to death. It gives you a sense of the scale and pace of the writer’s life, an alternate form of biography.” It’s made the experience less about what Larry can do for me, and more about what I am learning about him.

For example, “Fish” comes early in Larry’s first book. I have always liked it less than his other poems. There is an event that seems to take place over a single minute. A man is being held up by a cop and then let down. Certain things work well about the poem, like how the narrator’s physical body morphs to this experience and becomes “tame and still.” And how the cop holding him up has made the narrator so object-like that he doesn’t really feel anything, except for a single line when he is finally let down by the cop: “I feel numb.” And I love how the poem describes that moment of exhaustion at the tail-end of a long-endured, silent humiliation. “Once, I thought even through this/I could go quietly as a star/turning over and over/in the deep truce of its light.” No more, and never again.

But the poem’s sentences do not spool into the sort of narrative I tend to turn to Larry for. They do not resolve problems, raise questions, or show a consciousness at work on the page. During that brief, desolate period of my life, Larry’s sentences were my companions. Thinking, doubling back, making mistakes, correcting themselves, in-process, in-progress. Fish did not do that for me, but then—in the book—rifling over to “A Late Style,” published a decade later in 1985, about halfway through Larry’s short career, I found myself caring less about a singular poem and what it did for me, caring more about Larry’s life. Every poem contained an open door, and it leads to the next poem, the previous poem, to a poem written decades before or after.

“A Late Style”’s ending now felt a little weak, a little abrupt and clumsy. Larry knows how good he is at creating beautiful images, and sometimes uses the device without thinking.

“It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.”

As the book continues, his sentences get lengthier or shorter, and sometimes move into dialogue. He relies less heavily on the image. More and more, it seems as if Larry is trying to find the secret essence of prose within his poetry. An entire set of elegies read like short stories, even though they seem so unlike Larry, with their sentences cut short and large spaces between lines.

He has a tendency to list, as he does in “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill” (“misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief), or in one of his elegies: “idiot, clubfoot, doorstep, opt on the stove boiling over, your dead mother you survive and bury.” He uses the same workhorse words over and over, somehow to varying effects; ice, trout, fire, star—a beak, a wound, a little frozen thing of ice. With each poem, he pushes a small question ahead across a very thin tightrope. He is concerned always with the problems of normal people, their bodies and minds, how they worked, loved, and lived, what war and poverty and drugs stole from them, what love and friendship and nature gave back. How they managed to find hope, lose it again, and to live anyway.

The poems seem to never end. Even by the last page, it is possible to imagine that Larry is still writing somewhere, still asking questions, still moving endlessly from poetry to prose. I feel lucky to get the chance to understand Larry on his own terms.