What Comes After Elegy?

The appearance of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, by Larry Levis, Graywolf Press, 2016, surprised those who expected that Elegy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997, also published posthumously, was probably the last collection of Larry Levis’ work. Since its publication in January this year, however, The Darkening Trapeze was has been received to high acclaim, and has been widely reviewed and contemplated in print.

Full disclosure: I studied with Levis at the Warren Wilson College MFA for Writers Program in the early ’90’s, so I am absolutely biased. I agree with most of what I see in the press about Levis in general and The Darkening Trapeze in particular.  Rather than re-state what has otherwise been very well said, I will list below various links, grouped into the three categories of reviews, remembrances, and other. Of course this cannot be completely comprehensive. Please feel free to leave any adds or misses in the comments.

Reviews of Levis’ The Darkening Trapeze:

Ploughshares Review of The Darkening Trapeze from February, 2016. A particularly perceptive comment is “If humor offers a way of coping with the self-consciousness of sentiment, one of the great tropes of Levis’ work is that jokes often spiral out of control into tragedy”.

In Tess Taylor’s NPR review of The Darkening Trapeze,. I especially like the description she gives of Larry’s poems as “mournful, quicksilver inhabitations.”

Publisher’s Weekly posted Ada Limon’s review in which she calls The Darkening Trapeze “a book in which hope is only delivered in increments, slowly and under the door”.

In David Biespiel’s review of The Darkening Trapeze for the NY Times, Biespiel says of Larry’s work: “Rarely have life’s joys and bitterness been embraced with such decency.”

Kathleen Graber reviewed The Darkening Trapeze  –and referred back to earlier collections, in her post for the LA Review of Books. She covers a lot of ground in this in-depth consideration, but I like that she’s pointed out “how hypnotic the unfurling of Levis’s sentences can be” — a characteristic which I think intensified over the span of his work.

In a review for Graywolf Press’ blog, Mark Doty describes Levis’ work as confessional and post-confessional, “bound in time” and yet leaking into timelessness. I agree with his assertion that “people will be reading Larry Levis a hundred years from now, should there be readers of poetry, or readers at all.”

Remembrances of Levis:

David St. John–first student, then long-time close friend and colleague of Larry’s–who edited Levis’ Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, also compiled and edited The Darkening Trapeze. As part of Graywolf Press’ blog series, David St. John muses on an iconic Larry Levis moment.

An impressive Levis moment at a reading, is told by a then-PhD student, Pam Houston, from Graywolf Press’ series of remembrances of Larry.

Charles Baxter’s lithub post — in which he recalls Larry Levis, and calls him a “lizard poet”.

Erika L. Sanchez’ describes what Levis’ work means to her, in particular the feeling his work creates of “a sharp ache for something I can’t quite identify”, in another post for Graywolf Press.

Also available to purchase, in The American Poetry Review’s March/April 2016 issue, is the long piece The Darkening Trapeze: A Conversation which is a conversation between the poets Gregory Donovan, Linda Gergerson, Terrance Hayes, and Tony Hoagland in which they span the range of Levis’ poetry and its development over time.  Also in this issue are three poems from The Darkening Trapeze.

Other Levis Links:

Not a review about the newest book, but a good bio and bibliography of Larry Levis’ work: Poets.org Bio and Bibliography

Want to hear Larry Levis discuss poetry, and, in particular, the elegy?  On the Warren Wilson College MFA site, you can buy a digital copy of Levis’ lecture from January, 1994:  On Elegy: Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island”

Joseph Fasano’s 2015 examination of the theme of banishment running through Levis’ poetics was also published at poets.org.

Also not a review– a documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet will be released this fall.  I’m looking forward to seeing the film, though of course revisiting the past always brings up so much that is bittersweet–like much of Levis’ work.

My Own Opinion

As I said at the beginning, you have to remember that I am biased.  Hayes talks in the APR article about Larry trying to “expand the edges” of the poem.  Others have written about the long, sometimes recursive, lines that mark his later work. a sort of circling about the subject as a means of eventually containing what cannot be contained. Donovan says they “swirl” and Hoagland and Graber describe the poems as having “unfurled.”

When I think of Larry writing in his later style, all the above seem apt descriptions.  But I am left with an image of the poet as fly fisherman, casting a line out into life’s stream, tugging and reeling it back through the moving water, patiently casting again, tempting and entrancing, until the mesmerized fish strikes and is able to be brought into the light.