Odd footnote on Larry Levis

 This shows up on p. 70 of Elegy:

Lovely convulsion of thighs lathered as a horse's back,

Because, as Marx said,
Sex should be no more important than a glass of water.

When I read this, I recalled the same idea had shown up in The Darkening Trapeze, p. 67, when Levis is explaining that "the only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx":

One thing he said I still remember, a thing that's never there 

When I try to look it up, was "Sex should be no more important...

Than a glass of water." It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing

Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.

Levis's difficulty in looking up the quotation likely results from the quotation usually being attributed not to Marx, but to Alexandra Kollontai, a key figure in the Bolshevik intelligentsia. 

Larry Levis, _Elegy_

THIS IS THE FIRST of the two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, edited by his teacher and friend, the late Philip Levine. It's very strong--the strongest of the three books by Levis I have read, I would say.

The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in  the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.

The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering. 

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.

Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one

He won't give back.

The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up. 

Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.

Ruben Bolling, _Tom the Dancing Bug Awakens_

 THIS COLLECTION (VOLUME 6) gathers Tom the Dancing Bug comics from 2012-15. Ruben Bolling made his big pivot to political topics in the Trump years, but there was already a lot of politics in these strips--wealth inequality in the "Lucky Ducky" installments, middle class precarity in the "Chagrin Falls" installments, various hypocritical compromises of the second Obama administration, like the drone program, in several comics. Odd to be reminded how disappointing that second Obama administration often was, given what we have to deal with since.

Bolling knows his comics history and, as always, astonishes with his ability to conjure up the look of several distinct styles: Hanna-Barbera, Carl Barks, EC comics, Sunday School pamphlets, the ads that blossomed in the back pages of comic books back in the pre-Maus days before started taking themselves seriously. He's a master.

I wonder--will we ever see Louis Maltby navigating the perils of middle school again, or Billy Dare again take crafty advantage of the conventions of narration? Bolling has bigger fish to fry these days, true, but I look forward to seeing Louis and Billy again when things calm down...if they ever do.

Larry Levis, _The Darkening Trapeze_, with a long digression on two camps in American poetry

THIS IS THE second of two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, both edited by friends and fellow poets. The first, Elegy, was put together by Philip Levine and appeared in 1997, the year after Levis died; this one was edited by David St. John and appeared in 2016. 

Readerly gratitude is in order. Going through the work Levis left behind and deciding which poems were finished, which version was the definitive one, and how he intended to organize the poems would all be difficult enough, but to do that while also remembering a dead friend would be heartbreaking.

The poems are excellent. Darker and sadder than those in the only other book by Levis I have read, The Afterlife, but with the same originality of vision and figuration: "The village slept in the gunmetal of its evening." One notices an interest in self-destruction in "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire." In "Threshold of the Oblivious Blossoming" Levis describes himself "Sitting inside & waiting for my dealer to show up so I could buy / Two grams of crystal methedrine from her," which seems like a risky thing to mention in a poem, but I suppose the police rarely read poetry.

I don't know David St. John's own work, but seeing his name reminded me of American Hybrid, an anthology he edited with Cole Swensen and published in 2009. The anthology took as its working hypothesis that (a) there are two broad camps in contemporary American poetry and (b) there is a lot of interesting work going on in the in-between, when poets associated with one camp try on the moves of the other camp.

The two broad camps--as I would describe them, not necessarily as St. John or Swensen would--look like this:

Camp A is representational or mimetic; it aims for a kind of fidelity to phenomena, to a "getting right" of what is sensed, experienced, remembered. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being honest, or moving, or vivid, or "so true." Mary Oliver, for instance.

Camp B is non-representational; it tends to see the relationship between language and reality as unstable or unknowable, so "getting it right" is out of the question. Writing a poem is more about form, procedure, method, working with language itself. Work in this camp would likely be praised for being innovative, ground-breaking, experimental, radical. Lyn Hejinian, for instance. 

It's not exactly a Crips and Bloods situation. Poets in one camp, a few drinks in, may say snarky things about poets in the other camp, but there is a lot of interaction between the camps--hence American Hybrid.

This made me wonder: would St. John have put Levis in the anthology had Levis still been alive in 2009? Levis is certainly Camp A--the poems routinely focus on his memories and experiences and the places and people he has known--but at the same time, the reader gets the uncoupling-from-reference effect that one gets in Stéphane Mallarmé (the great-grandaddy of Camp B) or Wallace Stevens (whom Levis obviously admired). This mainly happens when Levis's genius for figuration seems about to leap off into wild blue synaesthesia: "a flash of green silence almost alive / In the palm of your hand," for instance. There is a simple signified behind this dazzling signifier--water--but the signifier trembles on  the brink of autonomy. 

The more of Levis I read, the more interesting he gets.

Nathalie Léger, _The White Dress_, translated by Natasha Lehrer

 THE WHITE DRESS is the third in a trilogy of prose portraits of women artists. The first two--Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden (LLL 12/24/2021 and 4/14/2022)--bear witness to delayed but fulfilled justice or vindication, since the Countess of Castiglione's photography project and Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda, disregarded and undervalued at the time of their making, did eventually find audiences and recognition. The White Dress tells a more sobering story.

Pippa Bacca was an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, was video-recording herself hitch-hiking around Europe and the Mediterranean in a wedding dress, with the goal of promoting world peace. The project was brutally ended when she was raped and murdered by a man who picked her up in Turkey (who was eventually caught because he kept and used the camera, with Bacca's footage still on it). 

Braided with this story is that of Léger's parents' marriage--a story not as terrible as Bacca's, but grim enough, with Léger's father seemingly set on humiliating and wounding his wife and daughter with his flagrant infidelities. This story has previously appeared in the trilogy, in Exposition, but here Léger pays particular attention to how marriage (the white dress) damaged her mother's life. 

Decidedly downbeat, then, and for that reason an unexpected way to end a trilogy about women artists whose work is brought back to life thanks to archival research. Or is the book suggesting something like that will happen in Bacca's case? A painful but worthwhile read.

Anne Dufourmantelle, _Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living_, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Salle

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH version of this book, Puissance de la douceur, was published in 2013; when this translation appeared in 2018, Dufourmantelle, only 54, had already died. Cancer or car accident, I guessed, but it turns out she died while trying to save two children from drowning in the Mediterranean. How many philosophers, or intellectuals in general, have died trying to save another's life? It's a short list, I expect.

Power of Gentleness reminded me of Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories. The history of aesthetics largely involves philosophers wrestling with what "beauty" is, or "the sublime," but Ngai upended things and started new conversations by trying to understand the "cute," the "interesting," the "zany." Similarly, while many philosophers have thought about power and duty and necessity, Dufourmantelle started a new conversation by taking up "gentleness." Or douceur--her translators point out in a prefatory note that the French word covers a different semantic landscape than the English word does, as douceur can refer to sweetness and softness as well as mildness or tenderness.

The book is in thirty-six chapters, short essays of two or three pages--the whole book is scarcely over a hundred pages in the Fordham University press edition--all working through the apparent paradox of the title. We tend to associate power with force, but refraining from force also makes things happen. Dufourmantelle makes some unsurprising points along these lines--for instance, about Tolstoy and Gandhi--but also some very surprising ones--for instance, about animals: "So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own." A strange idea--nature, red in  tooth and claw, has a gentleness instinct? But we do see animals being gentle with each other, and where does that come from? Not from having taken an ethics course.

Dufourmantelle offers some important caveats. Gentleness ought not to be confused with "mawkishness," and we should keep in mind that it can be "bastardized into silliness." She notes that "gentleness does not belong only to the good." But we need what it makes possible, as she particularly emphasizes in the section "Justice and Forgiveness" and the final section, "A Gentle Revolution."

I was especially struck by this, in the section titled "Childhood":

We would not survive childhood without gentleness because everything about childhood is so exposed, hyperacute, in a way violent and raw, that gentleness is its absolute prerequisite.