The Caretaker of Absence
†An architectural reading of Larry Levis’ poetry
Master’s Thesis by Divya Nadkarni
University of Amsterdam – MA English Literature Supervisor: Dr. Jane Lewty
Student number: 10848827 email: nadkarni.divya@gmail.com Word count: 22,114
Date: 23rd June, 2015
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
A brief outline
14
Chapter 1|The Levisian Architectural
15
The ekphrastic and the architectural
26
Levisian Poetic Architecture
32
Sensationalism
35
Conclusion
40
Chapter 2|The Architecture of Elegy
42
An elegy to elegy
55
Conclusion
57
Postlude
59
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Introduction
Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.
- W B Yeats
It is an artificial simplification, and to be taken only with caution when I say that the problem appearing in these essays, which gives them what coherence they have, is the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing.
- Eliot, The Sacred Wood, Preface to the 1928 edition
Before approaching the main subject of my thesis, Larry Levis’ poetry, it is perhaps more relevant to engage first with the process of appreciating reading poetry, and to glimpse briefly at what contours the studying of poetry has taken within contemporary academics. My interest in this subject is partly the result of a concern for the dwindling interest in poetry in academic scholarship and general readership. As far as the general reader is concerned, it is hard to deny that though the production and publication of poetry is on the rise in the United States, the reading of poetry by an unspecialised audience has not seen a proportionate increase. Dana Gioia in his 1991 study, “Can Poetry Matter”, tracks poetry’s diminishing status: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group” (Gioia, 1991, 1). How often do daily newspapers carry reviews of poetry books? Even criticisms of poetry and essays on it are largely written by other poets, and hardly by leading journalists or critics.
The issue tightens further when one looks at the state of contemporary poetry in the academia. While on the one hand, more people are studying the craft of writing poetry in graduate and post-graduate
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BFA and MFA1 programs (The number of MFA Writing programs today exceeds 250 in the United States, with over 2000 students graduating every year2), on the other, poetry as a field of study appears to be slipping out of focus in the more traditional Literature and Literary Studies programs3. Charles Bernstein, one of USA’s most prolific poets and critics, notes with a degree of well-founded scepticism that “the university environment is not just non-poetic, which would be unexceptional, but antipoetic. And this situation has remained constant as we have moved from literary studies to the more sociologically and psychoanalytically deterministic approaches to cultural studies” (Bernstein 1999, 42). The problem with this shift he identifies lies in an “institutionalised multiculturalism” that enforces, on literature and more specifically on poetry, a compulsory condition of representation “where works are chosen because they represent “ennobling” voices of their subculture” (39). Bernstein’s argument problematises the deterministic, obsessively multicultural, theoretical academic environment that has inflected the writing of poetry by determining what is read. Although this problem touches all of literature, poetry has taken the blow hardest for several rather obvious reasons. The first being the long-held misconception that poetry is too personal, that a poet’s isolated private experience is the sole reason for his/her poems. It is this very dogma that has in many ways driven poetry to “represent” a culture or a set of values in order to defend itself against the baseness of this criticism and to find its place in the realm of ‘cultural studies’. The second reason is that despite this push, the circumstances of which Bernstein so effectively lays out in his essay, a bulk of poetry is not representative and cannot be read easily within the sociological demarcations of contemporary theory. The result is a widening gap between the academia and poetry, between theory that makes “poetry the subject of its frame rather than presenting poetry itself as a contest – a conflict – of frames” and the practice of poetry; a gap that is slowly but surely draining poetic practice of its diversity (ibid).
1 Bachelors in Fine Arts; Masters in Fine Arts. 2
Study published in The Atlantic, “Where Great Writers are made”, 2007.(Delaney)
3 To state one example, at the University of Amsterdam, where I’m currently pursuing my Masters Degree in
Literary Studies, there is only one post-graduate course dealing with the reading and studying of poetry. All the other courses on contemporary literature focus on fiction and digital media texts.
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However justified Bernstein’s claims are, I differ from him on one crucial account: what he so dismissively defines as “official verse culture”
What, then, accounts for the complacently narrow range of styles and tone in the official verse culture of the postwar period? Perhaps this too can be understood as a manifestation of intellectual self-hatred. Professional anti-intellectualism plays itself out in a particularly uninhibited form in the promoting of works of poetry that espouse a distaste for the intellectual and rhetorical nature of writing-poems that insist on affiliation with innocuous abstractions like the "universal human spirit" while denying their implication in the material forms in which particular human spirits actually might appear. Ironically it is such nostalgic values, fundamentally aversive to a contemporary engagement with the poetic, that those who profess both literary and cultural studies too often ascribe to. (1999, 42)
Bernstein’s thesis, I argue, given his own poetic ideology and the undeniably discursive postmodernism of his “Language School4” poetics makes its case for a kind of poetics that is a “form of cultural studies” in its own right, a formal poetics that treats language as a science, a post-structuralism that extends consciously into the act of writing poetry, into its soundscapes, formal values and “poetic logistics”. This I believe is not so much a solution to the problem he identifies above, as much as it is only another limb of the same problem. It follows the same theoretically exclusory road by accommodating certain kinds of poetry and excluding others. However, when Bernstein condemns in the academia what he sees as a “fear of the inchoate processes of turbulent thought” (1999, 43), is he not echoing the same fear by positing so firm a definition of what constitutes “turbulent thought” and entrenching an already problematic dichotomy? Instead of reading poetry – and by that I mean any kind of poetry, be it formally rigid or disruptive or even formless, be it the kind that shatters language from within or the kind that kneads language to reveal only experiences or the sense of an experience – in its own right, he only locks it into another theoretical stockade of poetry as a ‘signifying practice’ (ibid). The opposition of ‘tradition’ to ‘experimentation’
4 The Language School as a distinct school of postmodern/ avant-garde poetic thought emerged in the late 60s.
In its assertion that poetry is primarily a work of language, that language is its fundamental medium – “matter to be arranged, disassembled, and reconfigured”, and not a mere means to a deeper aesthetic expression of theself, it called for a radical questioning of the self in poetry; the authorial self that claims access to a special experience. (Izenberg, 784)
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and ‘conventional’ to ‘avant-garde’ as adopted by the Language School is another false binary that diminishes the diversity of poetic practice and further ossifies the original problem: that the contemporary academia is antagonistic to poetry and resistant to the manifold concerns it contains. Gerald L. Bruns notes the implications of insisting on such a distinction: “Poetry as a work of lyric expression that gives intentional form to experience now gives way to a conception of poetry as a work of language, where the words of language are no longer construed as signs but have become, mysteriously, agents of their own activity” (Bruns, 354). To critique not the state of contemporary cultural theory, but to blame poetry, and a certain kind of poetry at that, for its own exclusion from fields of study, is a problem that demands to be addressed5.
The issue though, is not nearly as singular. That poetry is being studied in today’s literature and/or cultural studies departments at all, is owed in part to the Language School’s insistent theoretical and technical interventions in keeping the writing of poetry up to date with the processes of reading. Yet, “official verse culture” cannot be seen or judged as one homogeneous category of bad, innocuous or ‘anti-intellectual’ poetry. To undermine the value of all poetry that falls outside the bounds of the theoretical, that doesn’t directly represent a culture or a political scheme, and finally, one that doesn’t even easily lend itself to formalist analyses or doesn’t join the avant-garde bandwagon of poststructuralist discursive demolitions, can only be a reductive position. How, then, is a poetics like this to be comprehended? What place does poetry of this nature hold? What does it mean then to read poetry “primarily as poetry and not another thing” (Eliot)? What kind of processual and theoretical refurbishment is needed to accommodate this ‘conventional’ perhaps too-personal poem without
5 This argument however is not a means to dismiss Bernstein’s importance to American poetry and criticism.
Bernstein, perhaps more scrupulously than many other contemporary critics, understands and acknowledges the diversity of American poetry. To quote from his essay, “What’s art got to do with it”, “There is no poetry, only poetries.” His criticism of “official verse culture”, and I’m afraid to say this so plainly, is far more pertinent and takes on an altogether new dimension when directed at the proliferation of creative writing programs that have turned poetry into a form of mass entertainment and affectation; just another business of the culture industry. When, in his Attack of the Difficult Poems, he makes a special case in favour of difficult poems that challenge the reader’s intellect to a point of self-flagellation, he is indirectly criticising the diminishing of the intellect in poetry that’s written without a comprehensive understanding of the history and formal mechanics of poetic thought.
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relegating it to the realm of the confessional6 (and leaving it there to fester in its degenerate isolation)? I quote from Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric” to elaborate exactly what I mean by this kind of poetry:
Whatever the poet’s ostensible subject…the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of propositional or parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one. (2012)7
What Perloff and Bernstein criticise, then, is a poetics that bases its expression on the lyric “I”, that employs language as a means to express personal experience or insight, and one that, in using language as a mere vehicle for communication, ‘ignores’ the fundamentals, the mechanics, the forms and structures of words; a poetics that is incapable of recognising the bind of language and thereby incapable of radicalising or questioning its formative strictures. A kind of poetry that anyone, with ‘a story to tell’, could effectively write.
On this note I turn to the subject of my study: Larry Levis, whose work, though critically acclaimed, would doubtless be seen as exemplary of “official verse culture”, a poetics rooted in personal experience and the lyric “I”. Moreover, the whole body of Levis’ verse falls between 1972 marking
6 The confessional is another problematic categorization, often adopted to easily by those who seek to criticise
poetry of a personal nature.
7 Note also, Ron Silliman et al. in their manifesto for Language Poetry, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of
Poetry: A Manifesto” :
On analogy to the visual arts, where the avant-garde is felt to be a virtual commonplace, the situation of poetry is as if the entire history of radical modernism – Joyce, Pound, and Williams notwithstanding – had been replaced by a league of suburban landscape painters. The elevation of the lyric of fetishized personal “experience” into a canon of taste has been ubiquitous and unquestioned. (262)
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the publication of his first collection, Wrecking Crew, and 1996, the year of his untimely death8 – a period that encompasses the heat of the Language School’s radicalism and the nexus of several paradoxical trends in poetry that emerged around it9. My own project of reading Levis is not to posit another one-against-the-other argument. Neither is it to defend Levis’ work against the criticism levelled by poets like Bernstein and Perloff10. Furthermore, it is not an attempt to posit an alternative theoretical framework within which official verse culture can be read. Bernstein’s life-long project has been to bring the practice of poetry and academic criticism into a productive union. However, on considering the dichotomies endorsed by the Language School, I am inclined to adopt a sceptical stance on the level that Language Poetics doesn’t so much question existing theory or attempt to push its limits, as much as it endorses a poetics that abides by the laws of poststructuralism and does so by criticizing disparate poetries. Such a step can only cripple poetic practice in the long run. What I really intend to do then is read Levis’ poetry in its own right; not simply read it within available frameworks, but to look at what conceptual structures emerge in his writing and how they develop through to his final collection, Elegy.
Two fundamental elements/ qualities guide my reading of Levis: the architectural and the elegiac. Both elements emerge from his work and from his own explication of his poetic process. I quote the following passages from his interview “After the obsession with some beloved figure” with Leslie Kelen.
8 His final collection, Elegy, was published posthumously a year later in 1997.
9 Up until the early 70s the New Criticism model of Eliot and the others was the most widely used theory of
reading and interpreting poetry. At about the time with poststructuralism and Barthes’ Death of the Author (1967) began to create waves and disturb the obsoleting model of New Criticism, a more personal, confessional trend was beginning to emerge within American poetry, a trend that gained the favour of many and became the pivot-point for creative writing programs that emphasised finding your own unique voice in your experience.
10 In fact, one of my strongest grievances against poetic scholarship is that it is often compelled to speak in
terms of defending poetry, defending the lyric, defending the confessional. It’s as if, having internalized academic hostility, it now has to take a defensive stance and guard the poem.
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Whereas traditionally, in poetry, one might think of rhythm being linear, one could begin to think of it more architecturally11, as not only a linear but a vertical figure, establishing itself in rhythms or variations, both across the line and then vertically down through the poem, picking up repetitions and motifs. And, usually, more or less, the way they’re used in music. (CS, 40)12
My father, at that time, was dying of Parkinson’s disease, and the title poem had something to do with what he was like in the years he was deteriorating. His death…had not occurred but was inevitable in many ways. And it caused me to think elegiacally13 long before he had died. (44)14
To read poetry -- no matter from which style, movement or period -- is to read a self, a voice responding to its time. I do not seek to use Levis’ work as a means to defend the self in poetry, but to look at what shape subjecthood takes on the body of the poem and how that shape is sculpted. The architectural, as Levis puts it, refers to the form of his poems, the way each line in rhythm allows the next one to stand and so on, almost like a building constructed in reverse, top-down. The elegiac has more to do with Levis’ content, his gaze, his manner of looking at his own experiences as they slip into the past. It’s not so much about a final physical death, as much as it is about the tone and mood of retrospection. I make this distinction at the risk of a terrible oversimplification, but I don’t intend it as a dichotomy between form and content. In Levis’ work, they’re often one and the same thing, and often interchangeable. The architectural is as much about the content, in the way he builds memory into memory, or the way one memory leads to another like the streets of a city; and the elegiac is as much about the form, a way of understanding rhythm, as if every line were an elegiac looking-back on the last one. What drives the two along in an elemental dance is memory, the central artery in the mutable anatomy of his poetry. In Levis’ work, memory doesn’t stop at being an event or a
11 Emphasis mine
12CS is short for A Condition of the Spirit. Edited by Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long, it brings
together the available criticism on Larry Levis, his interviews, and some of his own non-fictional writings. For the convenience of referencing, individual writers from the book whom I quote will be referred back to the book with the appropriate page numbers.
13 Emphasis mine 14
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commodity; it flows, it twists and curves around the organs of the poetic body. Marking its end, the self stands, with little sense of a final shape; as if it were there only for this instant before it became a part of memory. Of the little available criticism on Levis’ work, a majority focuses on feeling and emotional intensity, autobiography and how Levis universalizes/generalizes the autobiographical. Very little has been said about how these elements are conceptually developed throughout his work, and lesser still about its place within American poetic criticism. Though the architectural and the elegiac may well be commonplace terms to describe literature, I argue that they take on a conceptual character in Levis’ work. They become, on their own account, theoretical focal points with which his poetry can be read, and points that facilitate a necessary critical intervention into the reading of a poetics that is at once inescapably personal and universal.
Let me begin by detailing Levis’ relationship to memory – personal, national, and fictional or constructed – by looking at some critical responses to his poetry. In her essay “What’s Wrong with this Picture”, Marcia Southwick talks about how for Levis, memory is a way to preserve things, to “reconnect to the places and people we’ve lost” (CS, 25). It is also a way to preserve loss. She further notes that Levis’ poetic genius lay in sewing a thread and binding events and images of memory “that didn’t seem to belong together” (ibid) – almost like the way memory itself functions in its unwarranted triggerings. In “Larry Levis’s ‘Spots of Time’” Gary Short notes: “Levis juxtaposes personal history and memory with considerations of notions of art and reality. The poems go beyond recollection and the past, taking on a present tense enacted on the page” (CS, 66). Tony Whedon writes of Levis’ style as being essentially narrative; a narrative poetics whose “main emphasis is on the solutions its [speaker] devises for dealing with his past. Not only does its speaker attempt to retrieve his past, but a species of analysis is employed to interpret images and to deal with them contextually” (CS, 360). J. Randy Marshall writes that “Larry was wont to observe that poetry is a technology of memory. Memory is personal. But the word technology implies instrumentality and manipulation in some direction. Do we manipulate memory or does it manipulate us? As the poet quite literally handles the material that becomes a poem, various levels of representation are rendered inherent to the language that results” (CS, 460).
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Throughout his writing career Levis reveals a self that comes into being only in past memory. When that past is returned to the poem’s narrative present, the reader is confronted not with an authorial voice claiming identity, but a voice that unable to reconcile or even compose itself, turns back into the poem and into the act of writing itself, or else it reaches for some ground that is present despite the self and despite language. Often that ground is landscape, though even that is eventually a thing materialised in memory. It is ultimately only the poem (the words, language) that stands as a memory of the self. In that sense, extending Southwick’s observation, the poem preserves lost things and loss itself. With Short’s comment, I agree only partially: about the past becoming present as it’s enacted on the page. Levis does have a manner of preserving loss by making it present. Yet he also has a way of preserving temporal complexity by bringing in a spatial dimension. How he does it constitutes the unique architecture of his poetics: Although an act of recall is essentially temporal, in Levis’ writing it is also spatial, in that the focus of the poem is not the sequence of memory, not what happened first or what came later. The arrangement of memory is spatial. It is materialised in space and embedded through an orderless repetition of words and motifs. The facticity of temporality, though present in stark detail – Levis often specifies the exact dates of observations and events – becomes secondary. The playing field of memory is not arboreal with a fixed order or a fixed theme but rhizomatic15, marked by repetition, by a “circulation of states” (Deleuze Thousand, 33), where each point connects to every other. As a consequence, the speaker’s memory never acquires a final, contained and consumable form, but remains dynamic and restless. This spatial arrangement engenders more fascinating mutations within the field of memory that would not have been possible were the focus laid wholly on temporality. Each memory brings with it its own memories that extend far beyond the limits of Levis’ experience. Moreover, if these memories are grounded in landscape, often that landscape brings with it its own memory (of changing seasons, farming cultures, etc.)
To sketch an example, consider the following concluding lines from the poem “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969”
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And his wish to be no one made his body tremble, Like the touch
Of a woman he could not see,
Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence Until his loneliness was perfect,
And she let him go –
Her laughter turning into these sheets of black And glassy ice that dislodge themselves, And ride slowly out,
Onto the thawing river.
(The Selected Levis, 5316)
Note, first of all, the specificity place and date in the title: both the spatial and the temporal axes have already been established. Though these are only the last few lines of a 57 line poem, there is a discernible drift of memory outside immediate experience and finally, still uncontained, into the landscape.
The poem begins with an image of his father “driving through this place once, / in 1957”, and drifts out easily into his own journey through his life until it arrives at a memory his father may or may not have had: of a woman who let him go. Along the intangibility and unfixedness of this drift, the poem is returned to the embrace of landscape, the only physical presence that can contain and articulate these otherwise disparate memories. I use the word disparate somewhat warily given the wheeling nature of memories. However, a brief glimpse at the few facts the poem offers might drive home my basic idea. First, the dates. The ‘1969’ in the title says little in itself. It might be the date when the poem was begun, or when Levis saw the furnace, the “wall of flame” at the Steel Mill where he worked. But note, the collection in its entirety was published in 1981 (Afterlife, the collection preceding it, in 1977). The second date we’re given is 1957, the time his father drove through this place. The third isn’t a date per say, but Levis’ recollection of his father in 1957:
16 Henceforth abbreviated to SL. Since all the poems quoted in this dissertation are from The Selected Levis, all
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I still think of him staring into this road Twenty years ago,
While his hands gripped the wheel harder…
This is presumably – if one follows the syntax – the poem’s present, twenty years after 1957. Despite all these tangible temporal markers, a reader is left with little or no sense of linearity. The point I’m driving at is that Levis refuses to allow these fixed points to sculpt the final circumstance of the poem. This poem, like many others in Levis’ oeuvre, tacitly acknowledges the impossibility of giving memory a fixed contour (just as the self at the end of the long string of its memories has little sense of its shape), and line by line it drifts through densely connected networks of association in time and space.
Levis’ skill as a poet lies in the way he delves into memory without reducing it to a final consumable form, in the way he materialises not reality, but a pattern that recalls a process of making reality. Levis’ poems are not a representation of any one reality, but an answer to multiple experiences of it. They don’t plead special treatment of his life/autobiography and its afflictions, but pass unflinchingly over them, turning them into metaphors, fleeting reference points that leave you not with the facts of Levis’ life, but a sense of having felt that way. For instance, the lines quoted at the beginning leave the reader not with the facts of one man’s memory; not even with the fact of lost touch or with the geographical fact of a wintery place. One is left, instead, with an embodied current of the senses – passing time, touch, loneliness, estrangement, the way what one sees bears on what one remembers – flowing into one another. There is an assiduous build-up; one by one the lines evolve without disclosing where they might end or end up. The result – to risk this maudlin metaphorical comparison – is much like a weighty, slow-flowing river where the water is never the same. I say slow-flowing and weighty because the movement of memories, the words conveying them, is never frisky, and often indiscernible. No sudden jolts or surprises. A reader, like one floating on her back in the water feels only the gentlest movement. Only when she opens her eyes does she realize the force that has borne her so far from the shore.
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“To a Wall of Flame…” is part of Levis’ 1981 collection The Dollmaker’s Ghost. Like the title suggests, and like the woman who the speaker’s father could not see, many of the people and images that appear in his poems are ghosts, already lost. As Eric Gudas observes in his essay “Three Silent Diamonds”, “this narrative strategy…ushers in the relentlessly elegiac stance and tone of his mature work”.
Asked by Wojahn whether he “consider[s] himself to be primarily an elegiac poet,” Levis replies, “I often feel that’s what I am as a human,” and WinterStars and
TheWideningSpelloftheLeaves, the books in which Levis comes into his own, bear out this
contention. The former volume’s strongest poems are a sequence in memory of the speaker’s father, but all of Levis’s poems from this point on are infused by a sense of loss and mourning – for the speaker’s childhood, marriage, and past love affairs – which widens the individual speaker’s singularity to a confrontation with what one poem calls “the swirl and vortex of history.” (CS, 474)
I quote this passage at length to briefly illuminate two main ideas. One, as I mentioned earlier, is the movement of memory from the personal, to the ghosts of the personal, to a larger history (a point I will explore in detail in a later section). The second is the tone that articulates memory: the elegiac; that deep and persistent shade of loss that characterises Levis’ poetry. Unlike Gudas, however, I don’t believe this narrative stance was “subsequently abandoned”. A sense of loss remains a characteristic of his work through to the final collection which is propitiously titled Elegy. It is only the mourning that disappears, giving way to an almost eerie strength; a resolute yet detached grip over a memory until it disappears altogether.
"Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?"—each generation having to Listen more closely than the one before it to hear
The faintest whispered rasp from the small bitter seed Of her tongue as she answered them with the same
Remark passing through time, "I want to die!" As time passed & she Gradually grew invisible, the boys had to press
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Their ears against the cage to hear her,
And then one day the voice became too faint, no one could hear it, And after that they stopped telling
The story. And then it wasn't a story, it was only an empty cage That hung outside a shop among the increasing
Noise of traffic, &, from the Square itself, blaring from loudspeakers, The shattered glass & bread of political speeches…
…
You could see there was nothing inside it, he said, unless you noticed How one of the little perches swung back & forth, almost
Imperceptibly there, though the street was hot, windless; or unless You thought you saw a trace of something flicker across
The small mirror above the thimbleful of water, which of course Shouldn't have been there, which should have evaporated Like the voice that went on whispering ceaselessly its dry rage Without listeners. He said that even if anyone heard it, They could not have recognized the dialect
As anything human.
(“Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in a Cage”, SL197) Loss without the mourning. Elegiac without death. Disappearance without death. Memory without autobiography. These form the stanchions of Levis’ poetic oeuvre. In the following chapters of my thesis, I will take a closer look at the architectural and the elegiac as they develop in his work and how these elements become conceptual and theoretical frameworks to comprehend much of his poetry. Comparisons, dichotomies, defences and cookie-cutter theoretical applications invariably spawn binary oppositions and hierarchies where one side is privileged or its precedence presupposed. Rather than deploying Levis’ poetics as exemplary of a particular argument, my project aims to allow the “inchoate processes” (Bernstein 1999, 43) of his thought to speak for themselves and let the framework for a more thorough reading emerge from within.
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A brief outline
In connection to all that I’ve said above, Chapter 1 explores the nature of Levis’ ‘architectural’ as it manifests in the construction of the poem. In an attempt to understand the full implications of the architectural, I delve into certain aspects of architectural theory that speak about the relations of space and time within architecture. I then attempt to draw this outline into a deeper understanding of what the architectural might mean in Levis’ poetry, in a textual construction based in memory. Chapter 2 then zooms in on those elements that are central to Levis construction of memory, his mnemotechnics, as it were, to understand how they constitute a certain tone, a mood, a way of looking at whole the scape of life, and how this mode becomes central to the effects/affects of Levis’ particular architecture.
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1. The Levisian ‘Architectural’
For Descartes, the point is a ‘simple’, just simple… And between this [point] and another simple [point] I draw a line, and hence Cartesian geometry…hence the grid. Hence we have the idea that everything is given, autonomous, drawn by a series of lines which have single means and single unique means because a line is a relationship between two points. Counterpoised to this is the extraordinary definition that Leibniz gives to the line in his correspondence with the French philosopher Arnauld. He says…the point is the moment in which there is a concurrence of an infinite number of lines. In other words, every point is an aftereffect of a potential infinity.
- Andrew Benjamin
This quote, transcribed from Andrew Benjamin’s 2005 lecture series at the Architectural Association School titled, From Splines to Lines, becomes, for Benjamin, a focal point to think about the importance of both space and time in architecture. Descartes, as he notes, further on in his series, conceptualises space in terms of a temporal simultaneity, a single temporal point or instant. Complexity, in opposition to the simple in this case, entails an addition of more things to an original unity. However, complexity or a complex notion of space has to have a temporal dimension, as Benjamin asserts: “A thinking of space has to bring with it a thinking of time. In other words, a complex notion of space is not simple things added on; it equally involves temporal complexity” (From Splines to Lines 2/8). For Leibniz, any single point is the concurrence of an infinite number of lines, an infinity of spatial and temporal possibility. Benjamin uses this as a starting point to think about the very nature of representation and the nature of an image. To pin down any specific point is to take “the infinite as a precondition for the finite, [and] original complexity as one possibility of something simple” (ibid). This becomes fundamental to thinking about architecture because an architect drawing a line for a model sketch must acknowledge, first, the possibility of an infinite number of lines. The simple is not a beginning; it is the “after effect of a process” of negotiating infinite possibilities.
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While a complex understanding of space is relatively elementary to architecture, it is the question of time that’s more exacting. For Benjamin, architecture is fundamentally a site of repetition17.
[It] is possible to approach architecture in terms of built time. What this means it that not only is the object – the built domain – already temporalized by its being located in the complex movement of historical time… the possibility of there being that critical engagement with repetition which allows for an interruption occasioning the possibility of alterity in architecture has to be thought in terms involving the centrality of time. An interruption within repetition…in terms of architecture’s positioning of the productive interplay of discontinuity and continuity, is a staging of time. It’s not just that time figures within repetition. Rather the complex temporality of objects and their history comprise the different possibilities for repetition. (Benjamin, 2000, 6-7)
I delve into this philosophical outlining of the complexity of time and the line here in order to effect that necessary deviation into poetry. It also allows me to ground Levis’ view of the ‘architectural’ into a materiality of architectural philosophy, and allows for an overall clearer understanding of constructed time and space. While for architecture, space is a given, and complexity involves figuring temporal concerns in space, for poetry, the formulation works conversely. In a poetics like Larry Levis’, based in memory, time is a given, and it is that spatial dimension that is a prerequisite for complexity. Possibilities of repetition are effected when a complex spatiality of memory is articulated. Is it possible, then, to approach memory in terms of built space, and to see in form a precondition of formlessness? Recalling Levis’ quote from the first chapter:
Whereas traditionally, in poetry, one might think of rhythm being linear, one could begin to think of it more architecturally18, as not only a linear but a vertical figure, establishing itself in rhythms or variations, both across the line and then vertically down through the poem, picking up repetitions and motifs. (CS, 40)
17I italicise this to emphasise its importance later on to my understanding of Levis’ poetics. 18
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What relationship does an architecturally construed poetics share with space? How does it transform space from a given into a process, and more so into a process of temporal enactment? What is space when construed as a site of verbal/linguistic repetition? What is the exact nature or effect of Levis’ repetitiousness?
Let me first begin my detailing clearly what I mean by space or spatiality in Levis’ poetic construction. Since space here cannot merely be seen as physical space which is quite literally the space of a page19, it must be imagined as a linguistic construction; but then again, not be reduced to it. What we’re looking at is not only a ‘hypothetical’ space in constant creation on account of how meanings of words are deferred, but also virtual space: space that cannot be framed or contained within demarcated boundaries; space that never simply ‘is’ but is ‘becoming’, charged by flux, enacting ‘form’ as a spatial process while resisting ‘formation’. In Levis’ poetics, this enactment is integrally tied to the way he adopts the processes and technologies of remembering, of memory, into spatiality. Landscape forms an essential part of Levis’ poetry, and it’s the link between memory and landscape20 that allows the poem to expand in space (space here in a definitively geographical sense): the memory of a landscape leading on to a meditation of the landscape’s own memory and so on, or a spatial instance as a touch point for temporal complexity. The temporal is immanent to the spatial field; every moment in space is a point of concurrence of an infinite number of temporal lines, just as a single temporal instant precludes the possibility of an infinite number of spatial articulations. If Levis’ poems unfold in memory, they unfold equally in space.
Take for instance, the poem “Adolescence” from Winter Stars. Though it begins with the distinct memory of a girl who loved the speaker, it expands in a widening drift across space, and in doing so envelopes, in its sweep, a multiplicity of disparate temporal instances. The poem, too, is a site of
19 The matter of space acquires an altogether different dimension in the case of visual poetics, like say that of ee
cummings, where meaning is conveyed through a visual arrangement of words. Levis’ poetics isn’t ‘concrete’ or concretely visual. It is an imagined space, a linguistic space.
20 A very important work on the spatiality of memory is Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory. It is a study of
classical memory systems in the pre-printing age where memory was ordered through a linkage with space, and that facilitated memorization and recall. I explore this in more detail in Chapter 2.
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repetition, and a single repeated motif/ image makes possible a complex spatio-temporal weave. It begins with a simple observation that passes quickly into its surrounding landscape and is never picked up again
Our babysitter lives across from the Dodge Street cemetery, And behind her broad, untroubled face.
Her sons play touch football all afternoon
Among the graves of clerks and Norwegian settlers. At night, these huge trees, rooted in such quiet, Arch over the tombstones as if in exultation, As if they inhaled starlight.
Their limbs reach
Toward each other & their roots must touch the dead. (SL, 83)
Note how imperceptibly the trees appear casting a pall over the story that’s just begun and overwhelming it completely, until only the trees remain in the readers’ mind, their calm strength. Then a story, altogether different, begins anew, picking up where the trees left off.
When I was fifteen,
There was a girl who loved me; whom I did not love, & she Died, that year, of spinal meningitis…
The memory drifts to the girl’s father, a horse dealer, weeping openly at her funeral, and then onto Levis’ own affected sense of loss, the sincerity of which is questionable, until you realise the moment has long drifted away and it was never about his grief anyway:
If I had loved her, or even slept with her once, She might still be alive.
And if, instead, we had gone away together
On two bay horses that farted when they began to gallop, And if, later, we had let them
Graze at their leisure on the small tufts of spring grass In those woods, & if the disintegrating print of the ferns Had been a lullaby there against the dry stones & and the trunks
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Of fallen trees, then maybe nothing would have happened….
The event is circumvented again and returned to the trees that carry imagination and memory in waves from a single temporal instant across an expanse of space. This spatial expansion, generated by a repeated motif, makes possible further temporal interconnections as the narrative emerges at an altogether different moment in time. There is a sense of travelling in a time-machine and emerging at the same place at different moments in time. Yet even to say ‘same’ place is a veritable reduction. It is the same only as far as the trees are recognizably trees.
There are times, hiking with my wife past
Abandoned orchards of freckled apples & patches of sunlight In New Hampshire, or holding her closely against me at night Until she sleeps, when nothing else matters, when
The trees shine without meaning more than they are, in moonlight And when it seems possible to disappear wholly into someone...
And like that noted axiom of curved-space geometry that straight lines form closed curves that eventually return to their source21, the lines return to the trees, from which a new image emerges: of the girl’s father who died a year later (we’re returned most suddenly to the sense of time we’d willingly let go of). I quote the final lines in their entirety not only because the poem is hard to excerpt, but also because of their simple, wrenching beauty that cannot be paraphrased:
He had been drinking steadily all week, And was dealing cards
When the muscle of his own heart
Kicked him back into his chair so hard its wood snapped. He must have thought there was something
Suddenly very young inside his body, If he had time to think….
And if death is an adolescent, closing his eyes to the music On the radio of that passing car,
I think he does not know his own strength.
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If I stand here long enough in the stillness I can feel His silence involve, somehow, the silence of these trees, The sky, the little squawking toy my son lost
When it slipped into the river today…. Today, I am thirty-four years old. I know
That horse dealer with a limp loved his plain & crazy daughter. I know, also, that it did no good.
Soon, the snows will come again & cover that place Where he sat at a wobbling card table underneath A Ponderosa pine, & cover
Even the three cards he dropped there, three silent diamonds, And cover everything in the Sierras, & make my meaning plain.
How consistently, almost reverently, the narrative touches the trees again before taking flight, once, for a single brief moment, into the poem’s present (the boy losing his toy) and then back to the place under the tree where the girl’s father sat. The tree in being named here seems to bring the memory to a close, but it is named only now that the snows threaten to cover it and everything else. As the poem nears its end, as the memory is almost ‘complete’, that spatial touch-point of the tree is alluded to once again, this time in a move into the future: “The snows will come”. There is to the singular encounter with the trees a certain generality, a looseness that augurs multiple connections to other possible registers of thought and sensation by which, as Simone Brott articulates in her book
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity, “every encounter belongs to everyone and to no-one. This
movement of the encounter comes before the formation of static (nominal) things” (Brott, 3). The spatio-temporal connections finally bring the poem into the speaker’s physical and emotional present: his son losing his toy, here, today. But pillared already by the impersonal-ness of the trees, the moment doesn’t stay or even proceed to end the poem in the speaker’s emotionally closed space. It bursts into flight almost immediately, and this time, simultaneously into the past and the future, when the snows will come, and cover the place where the girl’s father sat.
In her book, Simone Brott argues that architecture operates at the level of “impersonal effects” (2) that belong to everyone and to on-one. The effects of say, a street, a market place, a cathedral etc, are
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subjectively anonymous in that they affect the body distantly, outside of the subjective processes of their creation22. They can of course be subject to a personalization and thereby objectified or “repersonalised” derivatively. Yet, architecture, in its built existence, engenders the conditions of multiple subjective encounters and processes of “subjectivization”. Everyone who encounters an architectural monument will temporalize it within her own subjective frame, will actualise it differently. The monument, possessing its own independent effects and the creative force to generate effects will make possible subjective actualizations, but will always remain independent of them. Brott quotes Deleuze to emphasise the impersonality of this effective encounter:
[T]he battle hovers over its own field, being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, … impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and the brave…Never present but always yet to come and already passed, [it is] graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires. (Deleuze Logic, 116-18; qtd in Brott, 2)
What Deleuze and Guattari refer to here, in The Logic of Sense is that an aesthetic object is independent of its representations; it is also a concurrence of all its past actualizations and an anticipation of all the future ones, a “de facto deindividualization of the self23” (Brott, 3) as each moment echoes its history and its becoming. The object (in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, a battle as presented by writers like Tolstoy, Hugo and Stendhal) doesn’t merely attest to or take part in the production of a subject or subjecthood, but constitutes its own subjectivities that are prior to and exceed its “temporal actualizations”. Levis’ trees similarly supersede their actualizations, thereby not representing a subject or being reducible to a subjective interpretation (which even the poem’s speaker in returning to the trees over and over again is unable to do: reduce them to the self. Their subjectivity
22 They are independent of the artist who created them and of the moment of their creation.
23Brott uses the phrase “deindividualization of the self” to discuss how a work of art, specifically architecture,
transcends and even effaces the self, the intent of the creator. Its effects operate independently of the singular circumstance of its creation. Yet, its reception, its meaning for a viewer/ observer/ reader coexists with everything s/he knows. All the past actualizations, representations, contexts, knowledges and interpretations become part of the object’s effects. So in this sense, a war represented in a painting or a novel operates independently of the creator, and relies instead on an ongoing process of meanings and affects.
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remains independent, material yet transcendental), instead exerting its independent effects. “Adolescence” here works like an architectural construction on two philosophical levels I’ve outlaid above: in becoming anonymous in terms of its generative process, and in its complex space-time where an expansion in space makes possible multiple temporal actualizations that are never static, or held in the present. They have either “already passed” or are “yet to come”.
A second link to spatiality and the architectural goes back to a sub-point in Benjamin’s quote: the poem as “temporalized by its being located in the complex movement of historical time” and spatial complexity, fomented by repetitions and interruptions within repetition, as staging the interplay of temporal “discontinuity and continuity”. What I mean is that, Levis’ writing, in acknowledging a subjective force that exists beyond the self’s interpretive or derivative impulses, allows the poem’s space-time to extend out into the historical. So while in “Adolescence” the articulations of memory remain within the ambit of the personal, time that can be directly touched, in a poem like “My Story in the Late Style of Fire”, the memory takes a step beyond the threshold of the personal. Whereas the former uses the impersonal effect of the trees, in the latter the effect is a fire. On first glimpse it appears to be grounded completely in the personal, but in an analogy to Billie Holiday and the crumbling state of art (and artists) in America, it becomes once again that veritable impersonal object with its own potentialities and subjectivities. The analogy formulates an effect in between the personal (Levis’ own life) and cultural (Billie Holiday’s life) that imbricates Levis’ life and more importantly his poetry, into the cultural landscape of the United States.
Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded
That I, too, was once banished from New York City. (SL, 101)
“My Story…” is perhaps the most candidly autobiographical poem in Levis’ oeuvre, and even as it moves into a personal account of love and loss, even as it situates itself explicitly in an act of recall, there is the image of the fire that is located in an “if” that transcends the personal in its syntactic
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uncertainty and becomes metaphor24. The moment its factuality becomes doubtable, the fire transcends its ‘actualization’ and the personal too hinges on a loss, a sense that could be everybody’s.
If my house burned down tomorrow morning, & if I & my wife And son stood looking on at the flames, & if, then
Someone stepped out of the crowd of bystanders And said to me: “Didn’t you once know. . . ?” No. But if One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak, And if 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.
Joseph Fasano, in his analysis of the poem, makes a very pertinent comment about Levis’ use of a repeated motif:
What has always attracted me to Levis’s work is his ability to develop a motif and then allow it to slip for long intervals under the surface of the poem, out of view but never quite out of mind. A motif—an idea, an image—might appear and disappear like some cryptic, aquatic creature, troubling the waters of the poem just enough to let us know it’s there. When it rolls up again in another line or section, we see perhaps a stretch of its dark body, though Levis never gives us the whole. (Fasano)
The fire here, appears exactly in this manner. It flashes in a personal reference and disappears under the surface of the poem. When it emerges again a few lines later, it has already changed into something else:
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The sharpest criticisms of Levis’ work have been directed at his insistent return to the personal, for his “masturbatory relationship” with himself (Jeff Schiff, qtd in CS, 460). In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Steven M Wilson argues that Levis “came to symbolize the self-referential writer, pampered by the academic ivory tower and spending his writing career in endless exploration of himself.” (CS, 460). To counter this would be to counter not only Wilson’s statement but also the very academic ivory tower it’s accused of locking itself into; that landscape of academic theory that has only succeeded in antagonising poetry – a point I have elaborated in the introductory chapter. To label his work confessional or to say it is inseparable from autobiography is to undermine that essential ‘otherness’ in his poems that make them not only accessible to readers, but meaningful without ever giving off a sense of being gossip or inconsequential grumbling.
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But I never felt alone all that year, & if I had sorrows, I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
From this juncture the narrative meanders through a personal crisis: a love affair outside of his already failing marriage, a fire that might have been real or is a metaphor for the failing marriage (which is only mentioned directly once in the word “divorce”) or both and more. It has the sense of an intimate memoir being spoken to an interlocutor. At every turn in the poem, it is the repeated motif that occasions an interruption in the narrative and engenders explorations of other spatial and temporal possibilities. One sees the loneliness of the memoir, the speaking voice moving through the narrative without imposing anything on its listener, from one kind of loneliness to another. It is neither about a single event or experience, nor a bridge to another unstated experience. Rather, it is a road into a slowly forming pattern of experiences and affections. The speaker’s autobiography is erased as the pattern emerges. Not erased, entirely, simply by the fact of the poem existing as it does on a page and authored a name, but pushed beneath the surface, out of sight and held there. The parallel narrative reference to Billie Holiday at this point in the poem further interrupts the personal to comment on the act of writing the personal. It comments on the agency one has to assume to bring the personal into narration and the final inconsolable loneliness of the act itself.
Billie Holiday, whose life was shorter & more humiliating Than my own, would have understood all this, if only Because even in her late addiction & her bloodstream’s Hallelujahs, she, too, sang often of some affair, or someone Gone, & therefore permanent. And sometimes she sang for Nothing, even then, & it isn’t anyone’s business, if she did.
Moreover, the parallel to Billie Holiday serves to comment on American culture, and the way its icons are perceived. Without explicit criticism the lines turn a sharp eye to the veiled prejudices of the media, and from Levis’ own standpoint within American poetry, the prejudices levelled against the
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confessional by contemporary criticism. As he notes towards the end of the poem, without assuming this agency the “only other choice was fire, ashes, abandonment, solitude”.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire, Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass, The flames reaching through the second story of a house Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.
Although the poem actualises the effects of the fire through the particulars of a personal loss, when the narrative returns to it again here, it is separated for a final time from personal memory and the reader is urged to see its effects independent of the poem or its speaker.
Levis’ poetic architecture then departs from pure physical architecture through a narrative and language which lays out the mental circumstance of the poet-architect before acknowledging that which exceeds it. By turning to the act and agency of writing, “My Story in the Late Style of Fire” admits to the necessity of any artistic creation being grounded in personal impulse. But the final work when encountered by the reader necessarily exceeds that impulse and its effects become graspable “only by the will of anonymity” it inspires. As D.W. Fenza points out, the poem: “is about our desire to surpass ourselves; it dramatizes the beauty and destructiveness of that desire. [It] has personal and national ramifications, but that desire creates quandaries in art, too; and Levis was, in part, a cartographer of desire as it shapes psychological, political, and artistic spheres” (CS, 546).
This peculiar weave of the personal and the impersonal effected through mnemonic expansions across time and space constitutes what I call the Levisian architectural. It is a narrative architecture of memory. A city may commemorate a historic memory of a war that razed it to the ground or of an unjustly traumatic event, by constructing a memorial in a public square (a memorial that becomes
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independent of its immediate actualization, breaks free even of the one who created it, as it stands through the years and is encountered by millions25).Levis’ poetic monument doesn’t merely commemorate an event or memory but uses it as raw material. Not the memory itself but the technologies of remembering – rife with repetitions and involuntary triggers – become central to the poem’s effects.
The ekphrastic and the architectural
This argument is perplexed further when one looks at Levis’ ekphrastic poems. As James Heffernan writes, an ekphrastic poem “stages a contest between rival modes of representation: between the driving force of the narrative word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image” (Heffernan, 6). In these poems, Levis’ constructions really begin with specific temporal actualizations of “impersonal effects”; personal memory here is a by-product of these actualizations as much as it is their source on other occasions. The mnemonic time-space is accessed by means of an image (a painting or a photograph), another aesthetic object with its independent subjective forces, which develops in these poems, a quality of the virtual, a quality of framelessness and infinitude. A brief digression would be helpful here in order to elucidate the theoretical context within which I use the term ‘virtual’. The context is Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the virtual as not opposed to the real (perhaps the most common understanding of the term), it is real and it is present, but it is outside the category of being real. The key word here is ‘being’ vs. what Deleuze calls ‘becoming’. To quote:
25The Holocaust memorial in Berlin, for instance, though grounded in the particulars of Nazi atrocities, has
become symbolic of a larger repeated narrative of death, the violence of ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
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We have...confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not; but it acts. Its proper element is not being but the active or useful. (Bergsonism, 55)
In terms of ‘becoming’ as opposed to ‘being’, the virtual is opposed to the actual. This returns, in a way, to the ‘actualization’ we referred to in the beginning of this chapter. In the genesis of anything, any object or construction, the virtual is actualised. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy in its entry on Deleuze, states a simple example of a hurricane to explain this virtual-actual opposition. All hurricanes share the same virtual structure in terms of their wind direction, ocean currents, and each individual hurricane is an actualization of that structure (Smith). Yet each actualization will differ from the others. No two hurricanes will be exactly identical. Though this aspect of difference takes on immense complexity in Deleuze’s work, I only mention it here briefly. The idea is that this process of actualization could be seen as working a context as radically different from a hurricane as a private, internal, human thought. We already spoke about Deleuze’s note on a battle as ‘virtual’ and separate from its individual actualizations. In the same way, a painting (an actualization in itself) is independent of its actualizations by each individual viewer.
I hit a theoretical roadblock here when I try to transition back into Levis. In Deleuze’s terms, the virtual isn’t created or made or initiated. It is simply there. Yet I speak of the image in Levis’ ekphrastic as developing a quality of the virtual. This may appear to be a faux pas or a misinterpretation, and it most probably is for a Deleuzian scholar. However, without complicating the argument any further or entering a syntactical/propositional labyrinth, I’d like to say that the question returns to narration, narrativity. If narration of any kind is an actualization (both thematically and in its physical presence), how are the qualities of the virtual to be discerned in this actualization? How are the structures of the “endless becoming” and the “pure multiplicity” to be rendered transparent enough so as to make possible other actualizations, how is the image in question to be its own virtual? Is that even possible within narration, or specifically in the poetics of the ekphrastic, where the narrative actualization of image allows the image itself to become virtual, to become formless and
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frameless? Can the ekphrastic narrative de-actualize the image, as it were? Can virtuality not become the ineluctable condition of the image in question as far as one knows what’s being narratively actualised in the poem is not the image or even an explanation/ representation of it?
Ron Burnett in his book How Images Think, makes a crucial distinction between representation and what he designates as visualization, a term that could well be used to understand Levis’ ways of seeing. He writes:
Visualization is about the relationship between images and human creativity. Conscious and unconscious relations play a significant role here. Creativity in this instance refers to the role of viewers in generating what they see in images. I am not talking about vision in general but the relationships that make it possible to engage with images. Visualization as a concept is also an entry point into the depth of the viewer’s experience—a way of moving beyond the notion that there is depth “in” the image. (Burnett, 14)
Levis’ particular manner of visualization in his ekphrastic poems transforms images into complex and dynamic metaphors; in a sense, de-actualizing them. Their meaning here depends on Levis’ “discursive efforts” which inhabit the generative, impersonal space between his actualizations and the actualizations by other viewers26.The ekphrastic, which literally means a verbal description of an image, already parallels the architectural in Benjamin’s formulation in being a temporal proliferation of a spatial instance. What I mean here is that the ekphrastic makes visible once again the temporal depth of a moment that has been captured, made static in time and space. It does so narratively. An image of a hunter caught in the act of throwing his spear will now be imagined before he raised his arm and perhaps even after the spear leaves his hand. This is only an example, and not a meant as a truncated explanation of an image as static. The focus remains on the notion that a narrative like this one is really only one actualization (or one could call it an interpretation). The example is more a means of returning momentarily to Benjamin’s detailing of a point as a concurrence of an infinite
26Remember here an earlier reference to Simone Brott who talks about a work of art as being a concurrence of
all its past actualizations and an anticipation of all the future ones, a “de facto deindividualization of the self” (Brott, 3) as each moment echoes its history and its becoming.
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number of lines. The image is one such a point of concurrence: its single moment already contains the hunter’s past movements and anticipates those in the future. The ekphrastic then, as a narrative with a tangible “driving force” frees the image from its static frame, renders it virtual, de-compresses time and space (hitherto concentrated in a single frame), renders it as on-going movement, as flux. And in the process, the ekphrastic narrative itself becomes one actualization.
In Levis’ ekphrastic, those very mnemonic processes that were previously seen to unfold in space, now unfold in the space of a photograph or image that is impersonal to begin with. If earlier, the complexity of his poems was seen as hinging on the “impersonal effects” of an object that had a very personal connection, it now hinges on a dual impersonality. The spatio-temporal proliferation that was seen as effecting a move outside personal memory and into history (in “My Story…), now moves further into the space of the image, into an imagined space of those depicted in it. I’d like to recall again, a point from the first chapter, about Levis’ focus being not on the facticity of this depiction but on its affective quality. Fact is only one compelling actualization, and poetry’s power often lies in revealing the singularity of fact by taking flight from it. There is in Levis a privileging of affection and sense over fact, therefore making a remote historical moment present as well as drawing the reader into its affective space. A detailed analysis of two poems here will serve to portray the complexity of Levis’ ekphrastic: “Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923” (from The Dollmaker’s
Ghost) and “Sensationalism” (from Winter Stars). I use the first poem to explain the notion of the
space of the image becoming virtual, and the second poem to elaborate this point further while bringing in a discussion of historicity and historical fact. Between the two, one can also see how Levis constructs and designs his narrative architecture, and how it develops from one collection to the next. I will also look into the materiality of Levis’ architecture. So far the discussion having issued from the philosophies and effects of architecture and how Levis’ poetics modulates and intonates these effects, will now look at how the specific constructed shape of his poems executes them.
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In Fresno it is 1923, and your shy father Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor. On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge Over gradually whitening water.
If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended To be trout.
You can see the whole scene Is centuries older
Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning. And the girl
Who used this fan to cover her mouth Or breasts under the cool brilliance Of chandeliers
Is gone on a train sliding along tracks that are Pitted with rust.
All this is taking her south…
In only the first seventeen lines the reader has been thrown into three different locations through the touch-point of a single motif – the Chinese fan: when the speaker’s father picks up a fan in the hotel, the poem enters the realm of the ekphrastic with a description of the painting on the fan. Yet the image does not remain within its frame as mere description. It is a ‘visualization’ rather than representation in the sense of its spilling over into the process and the circumstance of the one visualizing: “You can see the whole scene / Is centuries older…”It becomes part of a process that Burnett calls the creation of “vantage points” by means of which “something distant—events, memories, and histories—comes into ‘view’” (13).
In connecting so many points inside and outside the frame of the image, Levis’ creates multiple vantage points which nevertheless dissolve or fluctuate as the layers of ‘visualizing’ become apparent. There is the father who sees the fan. There is the speaker who watches the father holding the fan, and from this vantage point he can hypothesize, move across space to visualize an abstraction: the girl who lost the fan, now travelling in a train far from the hotel. He also dives into the frame, into the
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distant time and space of the painting to bring into view a different experience of an altogether different time:
And as your father opens the fan now you can see The rope bridge tremble and the lines of concentration Come over the face of this thin scholar27
Who makes the same journey alone each year Into the high passes,
Who sleeps on the frozen ground, hearing the snow Melt around him as he tries hard
Not to be involved with it, not to be Awakened by a spring that was never meant To include him ---
There is finally the reader, who at one level shares the position of the speaker; is drawn into the speaking by an intimate second person address28: “your father”. At another level, the reader creates her own vantage point, her own visualizing, and is thereby always aware of her distance from the speaker. Burnett locates such a compellingly creative visualising in "the tension and contradiction between what is said and what is experienced with images… between the virtual status of the image and knowledge of events, history and language" (38). Several interesting points of discussion emerge from this in the context of “The Lost Fan…”. There is first, a sense of the image (the painting on the Chinese fan) as virtual. It is freed from the security of its frame, thrown into flux. It is entered, inflected, its temporality is subjected to the viewer’s participation, the viewer’s actualization. Upon reading the poem, we read/ encounter/ create an image ‘without gravity’, without a frame or a predetermined, fixed perspective. It is virtual in the sense that it never is; it is mutable, in force, always unfolding/ expanding tangentially. Tangential here replaces simple association of thought, which implies one thinker or one thinking agent, and expresses a chaos of interacting/ colliding subjectivities.
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Note how the image is imbued with a temporality that shakes it out of its frame.
28 In the classical verse tradition, this is a typical strategy of lyric expression where the impersonality of the epic
is temporarily held away as the rhapsode’s personal voice improvises, and pulls the reader into the story. This is how the ‘absolute past’ of the epic is brought into the reader/listener’s affective space.
