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.