Denise Levertov’s son went to my high school–he was a year younger than I, and I remember Denise Levertov coming to speak at some event–a graduation? a festival? and being impressed by her air of brooding inaccessibility. This seems to me how she looked then. That’s when I first read O Taste and See, still one of my favorites of her books. It was a revelation to me. I had been reading Hart Crane, Wordsworth, Yeats–poems with a strong sense of rhyme and meter. Levertov’s spare, intense poems were something completely new.
She has said of the line break that it should read as “half a comma.” I love how this poem opens, seems to detour, and resolves. And this may be the only poem I know that includes vomiting and diarrhea and still remains a poem:
The Prayer
At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain me
in the flame of the poem Continue reading “Levertov on Monday”