by Larry Levis
I started on the stack of drafts of the poem that would eventually become “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate.” I laid the drafts out on the table like cards or puzzle pieces and read, and read, and read. I looked for dates first, then for significant additions (“longer equals later” seemed a good rule of thumb, at least to start), then any word changes. If there was a line that matched a previous draft but which Larry had done freehand work on (crossing things out, rewriting), you could safely assume (if any of the assuming is safe) that the handwritten changes were likely a later draft. It was part logic, part instinct, part familiarity with Larry’s voice in his notes to himself. Sometimes he would have random comments in the margins or on slips of paper. Some were incredibly funny. It was strangely like spending time with him while simultaneously making me miss him more.
I did the best I could on the poem. I did the best I could on all of it. Then I read a poem he wrote about Nick—I think it was called “God Is Always Seventeen”—sitting by itself in a single draft. It was clearly recent because it had in it the darkness I’d seen in him all winter, something that was sort of graycoated and not at all like the vaguely amused and wry face he presented most of the time. He wrote heavy poems, but he did not despair. This poem had an edge of that to it, and it was lonely and full of grief, and honestly, it made me too sad to go on with the work for that day. I ended up sitting and talking to Mary on the couch for a while instead and then going home.
I immediately wrote to Mary Flinn, but she had no memory of seeing the poem. At last, Tudor found a copy of it on files from an old computer, where she’d happened to save a copy for herself. Out of the blue, we had the concluding poem for The Darkening Trapeze. In my view, it is without question the final piece Levis finished, the poem he’d clearly intended to use as the last poem of his next collection.
A few years after Elegy was published, Sheila Brady asked Levine if he would also edit Levis’s Selected Poems. But the editing of Elegy had come at a profound emotional expense for Phil, and he suggested to Shelia that she ask me to edit the Selected Poems, which I did. In the fall of 2010, a conference, Larry Levis: A Celebration, was held at VCU to celebrate the acquisition of a superb and varied collection of Levis’s papers by the Special Collections and Archives division of James Branch Cabell Library. It was at this conference that Sheila asked if I would consider editing a collection of Levis’s uncollected poems, as she knew I felt strongly that there was an enormous body of astonishing work still left to be published—work that only a few people had ever seen. At first, however, I said no, admitting that I felt it would be too wrenching a project. I suggested several poets who might take on the editing of the uncollected poems, but Sheila said that she would simply prefer to wait until I was ready, as she knew that, at some point, I would be. Of course, she was right. I’ve titled this collection The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, and it pleases me that these last poems of Levis’s are no longer lost.
I continue to believe that poetry remains one of our most vital reservoirs of reflection, solace, and outrage within a world replete with horrors. Levis’s poems help to remind us of our daily and necessary struggle. I see in the poetry of the poets of my own generation—as well as in the poems of the poets of the next—the lasting influence of Levis’s extraordinary work. I feel the remarkable poems in this collection will now add to the conviction of many of us that Larry Levis was one of the truly major American poets of his time.
—DAVID ST. JOHN
LARRY PATRICK LEVIS was born in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1946, and grew up on his parents’ ranch in Selma, California. He attended Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), earning a BA degree in English in 1968. It was there he met Philip Levine, who was to become his mentor and lifelong friend. After receiving an MA degree from Syracuse University in 1970, where he first worked with Donald Justice, his mentor also at Iowa, Levis taught for two years at California State University, Los Angeles. He then moved to Iowa City, where he took his PhD in Modern Letters. Levis’s first volume of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1971 and was published in 1972. His second collection, The Afterlife, was the 1976 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and published in 1977. In 1981, The Dollmaker’s Ghost was selected by Stanley Kunitz as a winner in the National Poetry Series. Levis’s fourth collection, Winter Stars, appeared in 1985, and his fifth book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, in 1991. A collection of his fiction, Black Freckles, was published in 1992, and a posthumous volume of his prose on poetry, The Gazer Within, appeared in 2000. Over the course of his career, Levis was awarded the YM-YWHA Discovery Award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He first taught at the University of Missouri (1974–1980), then at the University of Utah (1980–1994), where he served as Director of Creative Writing. He began teaching as professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992 and was living in Richmond, Virginia, at the time of his death from a heart attack on May 8, 1996, at the age of forty-nine. Elegy, a posthumous collection of poetry edited by Philip Levine, was published in 1997. The Selected Levis, edited by David St. John, appeared in 2000.
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