Denise Levertov wrote "Olga Poems" between May and August 1964. The series of vignettes memorialized her sister, Olga Levertoff, who had died that year, at the age of fifty. I do not know how Olga died, but clearly she was desperately unhappy, and she made those around her desperately unhappy as well. She was nine years older than Denise, a powerful and demanding presence, yet also a partner, a fellow traveler.

I finished copying out "Olga Poems" yesterday morning. It had taken me weeks to finish this project, though the series is only eight pages long. Partly I was distracted by work and travel, but partly I needed to advance incrementally through these pieces. The elegy weighed heavily on my thoughts: the sadness, the loss, the details of childhood. But the stylistic shifts also drew me into slowness . . . short lines shifting to long lines; wild indentations shifting to formal stanzas. Something about the structure required my patience. I could not simply rush into these poems and absorb them.

And also, I have been aware of a synchronicity. Olga died in 1964 at the age of fifty. I was born in 1964. One week from today I will turn fifty. It is hard for me to avoid suspecting that a ghost has pressed me to read these poems, and to take them seriously as a message.

I don't know what the message is. I don't know who the ghost is. I don't think this matters.

In the past, early autumn has been my writing time--boys back to school; garden and yard retreating into quietude. That has not been this case this year, however. Among the demands of travel, teaching, and editing, I've had almost no unstructured time to think about my own work. So this morning, after I ship the files I'm editing to the author (and pitchfork the associated detritus off my desk and solidify a few details concerning my next editing job), I'm going to return to poetry: which is to say, I'm going to resume my study of Levertov's work, tinker with some revisions, think about manuscript organization, possibly even submit a few poems to journals. I've also started rereading, for the third or fourth time, David Reynold's wonderful cultural biography, Walt Whitman's America, which is a dense, beautifully plotted clutter of details (in the best possible way) about the way in which Walt's relationship to the everyday stuff of nineteenth-century America was also his apprenticeship in poetry.

And when I look up from my desk, I will see the golden light of the maples, the overgrown grass, the new woodpiles, late lettuce billowing in the garden, Ruckus the White stalking among the lavender asters.

I received the following lovely note from my friend Carlene, who knew how much this would matter to me:

I was reading an excerpt from Virginia Woolf, "Shakespeare's Sister," and I was struck by the comparisons I was making between her discussion about the role of women writers in the sense of being marginalized and the lovely essay you posted on Sept. 15 re: the "Response to Trolls." I felt like I was hearing your voice when I was reading Woolf:

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead"— that is the burden of their song. if anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived. 

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, "Write? What’s the good of your writing?"

My body is still on New York City time, but my life is back on Harmony time, and the upshot is: I am bleary. Today--bright, warm, color-laden--would be a lovely day to climb a mountain or go canoeing. But unless this coffee works better than it's worked so far, I will be blinking like a lizard on a warm rock.

At least I am thinking about poems. Since my reading this week, I have been pondering Jeffrey Harrison's "Encounter with John Malkovich," which he read that evening. I was already familiar with the poem, but hearing it in the air changed it for me. That so often happens, for better or worse, with poems. Some curl up and die in the air. Some unfold like lilies, which was the case with "Encounter with John Malkovich."

Jeff tells me that he originally wrote the poem in past tense but during revision changed it into present tense. That certainly must have contributed to the way in which this piece began to gather itself tonally and dramatically. It may seem like a minor switch, this tense thing, but the same thing has happened to me during revision: a poem will become new with a new verbal structure. Not only does the sense of time change; the sound of the poem changes because the alternate verb form requires different numbers of words and syllables, which in turn shifts the stresses of the lines and requires adjustments in word choice elsewhere.

Bur for me, the listener, all that verb information was an after-the-fact curiosity. The poem itself, which is long and meandering, held me--and continues to hold me, days later, like the tag-end of a song in my head.

When I visited the Frick Collection earlier this week, I think I was the only art gawker who did not have the audio-tour guide pressed to the side of my head. I kind of hate listening into teeny-tiny electronic devices and I kind of hate tours, so at art museums I tend to wander around among the pictures and sculptures and gilt couches while learning no facts about anything. At the Frick, however, my free ears and random progression through the galleries seemed to attract the attention of the guards, who kept talking to me. One even brought me over to look at his favorite paintings: "Look! These Veronese! This man that the artist paints, you see? He is Strength! And the lady, she is Beauty! Ah! Look! You see?" His delight was delightful.

I spent a long time standing in front of Rembrandt's The Polish Rider, writing down the idle thoughts that came into my head: what thoughts the colors and shapes were triggering, why the emaciation of the horse disturbed me, what was going on in the paintings in other parts of the enormous room. And at the same time I could not stop thinking, "All of this was purchased by a boy from Scottdale, Pennsylvania."

H. C. Frick Coke Company mines, c. 1936

I first read this poem when I was 15, and I had no idea what Donne was trying to tell me. I think I have a better idea now.


A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne

As virtuous men passe mildly away,

            And whisper to their soules, to goe,

Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,

            The breath goes now, and some say, no:

,

So let us melt, and make no noise,

            No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

T’were prophanation of our joyes

            To tell the layetie our love.

Moving of th’earth brings harmes and feares,

            Men reckon what it did and meant,

But trepidation of the spheares,

            Though greater farre, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers love

            (Whose soule is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

            Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love, so much refin’d,

            That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

            Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse.

Our two soules therefore, which are one,

            Though I must goe, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

            Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.

If they be two, they are two so

            As stiffe twin compasses are two,

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

            To move, but doth, if th’other doe.

And though it in the center sit,

            Yet when the other far doth rome,

It leanes, and hearkens after it,

            And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must

            Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;

Thy firmnes drawes my circle just,

           And makes me end, where I begunne.

Yesterday's reading went well. The bank was packed: there were no chairs left to sit on, and that never happens at poetry readings. People were kind listeners, and responsive. But reading poems about central Maine while standing in bank on the Upper West Side just made me feel so bizarre, like I was performing in a freak show or something. The world of "Ugly Town" was so far away from these listeners. I felt, as I read, that rural poverty was weirdly one-dimensional to them . . . a vision of Tea Party Republicans and fundamentalist preachers and deer rifles and four-wheelers and smelt fishing and clear-cutting: a world of redneck paper dolls. But I live in that place. And they live in a place where Yoko Ono has an apartment around the corner.

Update: I just got an email from one of the other poets at last night's reading, who told me he was worried that his poems weren't dark enough and that people could tell his mouth was dry . . . at which point I started laughing and decided not to delete this silly post. It seems that poets come out of their holes just long enough to feel like idiots, and then dive in again. It's good for you to see us in all our glory.