Larry Levis, _The Gazer Within_

 MY INTEREST IN Larry Levis led me to this volume of his occasional prose, assembled a few years after his death by James Marshall, Andrew Miller, and John Venable, “with the assistance of Mary Flinn.” I’m not sure what the editors’ tie to Levis was…friends, former students, I imagine. The foreword is by David St. John.

I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan. Thank you, South Dakota State University!

Levis’s prose is intelligent, light on its feet, vivid, witty, and passionate about poetry…no surprises there. Of particular interest:

—An autobiographical essay written in the last year of his life. Levis devotes most of his space to his childhood and youth on his parents’ farm in the San Joaquin Valley, a recurring landscape in his poetry.

—An essay on his most crucial mentor, Philip Levine. 

—An essay on elegy (Levis’ s late work includes about a dozen poems he identified as elegies), with particular attention to Heaney’s “Station Island.”

—a lengthy and candid interview with the poet David Wojahn.

—“Some Notes on the Gazer Within,” an essay of twenty pages that looks to be Levis’s most developed statement of his poetics. Judging from this essay, and drawing on the typology I sketched in the Sept. 11, 2024 post, I feel safe calling Levis a “Camp A” poet, interested in paying attention to and faithfully representing actual phenomenon (e.g., in this essay, landscapes and animals).

—“Eden and My Generation” interested me because it hinted at the existence of what in that same post I called “Camp B” poets, whose work is based less on actual phenomena than on the processes of language. As Levis sees it, “In a way my generation has had to invent a way of thinking and a language which could not only record its losses, but could also question the motive behind every use of that language—especially its own.” Case in point, Levis’s discussion of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which both evokes a place in Hass’s memory and “all the new thinking” about language.

Coincidentally, I had just been thinking about that Hass poem since Hass published what looked to me like a re-boot of it in the September 9 New Yorker. But that’s another post for another day.