The Poetry of Larry Levis

Here is an article I wrote on Elegy, a book of poetry by Larry Levis.

The Brow of the Horse and the Tract House

jonathan phillips

Elegy, a posthumously published book of poetry by Larry Levis, uses animal imagery to write about the ineffable beauty and indifference of the world – and the people within it. Horses in particular appear throughout Elegy, and these horses bring an incomparable psychic weight into the poems in which they appear. A nameless and clandestine import belies the simplicity of their roles and the humor of their names. Theirs is an import that begs to be deciphered. Still and indifferent, incapable of treachery or reason, the animal imagery becomes emblematic of the inexpressible beauty of the natural world and the inexpressible beauty of the human world. The animal image is also a vehicle through which Levis can communicate the things that make the poet feel compelled to remain mute, those slow developments or millions of movements – or the instant when a man is taken by a singularity of vision so complete that he becomes like the horse as it drinks deeply from the trough. The poet occupies and represents the animal in order to achieve the muteness of the animal, the contemplative remove that seems to grace the horse’s brow.

In Levis’ essay, “Some Notes On The Gazer Within,” there is a section entitled “Poetry and Animal Indifference” in which he constructs an explanation of the impetus to include animals in poetry, and the roles animals can play in poetry. He suggests here that the animal is representative of the muteness of the poet, “for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature” (76). Antisocial is an interesting way to think about the animals represented in Elegy, they are the often represented as a force that is contrary to human emotions or behavior, and exist in another world. Horses are “incapable of treachery” in one sense and “worthless” in another. Levis uses animals as distinct from what would largely seem to be the poet’s preoccupations, emotions, actions, words; those things that separate man from the animals. However, humanity largely remains the subject of the poems. The poems are modified by the presence of animals that are separate and representative of the position of the author. For the kulak factory worker in “Anastasia and Sandman,” the horse is real, in fact it is, “More real than any angel,” this claim being made with the presence of an angel in the poem adds to the tension of the claim. Animals are the all-encompassing signifier of time immemorial, and the indifference and unwavering forward march of time, but they also represent some permanence. The opossum in “The Oldest Living Thing in LA,” had “Teeth that went all the way back beyond / The flames of Troy and Carthage.” The animals are the things that defy language, “the slow uninterrupted evolution of the horse” is a subject for pure contemplation and is not something Levis wants to subject to poetics or, God help us, a metaphor – they transcend language. Animals also, as in the example with the kulak, have a concrete presence in the world. They are the potential fodder for the ossuary and the potential meat for a starving man – something no angel and no poem can offer.

The tension is that the poet wants to express this muteness through words, words which are by nature quite noisy. Levis writes, “The Poet wants to speak of, or to, or through, what is essentially so other that it cannot speak” (76). This tension allows for the weight of the mere placement of the animal in the poem, which is consistently done in a detached and observational way. These animals carry with them an inherent calm that the reader must know, before embarking on the poem, is beautiful. This is not problematic, and it does not subtract from the impact of the poem because, as Levis would probably argue, this is a constitutional sensibility. At the beginning of “Anastasia and Sandman” Levis writes,

The brow of a horse in that moment when

The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough

It seems to inhale the water, is holy.

I refuse to explain.

And indeed he doesn’t need to explain, this an intuitive knowledge of the human psyche, the unconditional and almost religious admiration for the indifference of the animal. I suppose if this is not a condition that can be considered universal among men, then those for whom this does not apply are not the type to find Elegy a gratifying read. Because, for the most part, a reverence for the animal’s stillness and its indifference, is a necessary pre-condition to absorb the full weight of the majority of the poems.

The deep image poets often used animal imagery to communicate ideas that words were insufficient to communicate. James Wright, one the seminal poets of the deep image movement, wrote in his poem “A Blessing” after having encountered two ponies in a field at night that, “They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.” This is a beautiful summation of the paradox of the horse’s beauty, the incomprehensibility of their simultaneous capacity for love, and the indescribable condition of loneliness that they experience. Theirs is a loneliness that can only be described by Wright as the ultimate loneliness, the loneliness of the mute. Levis uses the mystery of the animal and its emotional capacity and seeming lack of emotion to speak of the nature of people. The young Marxist stable boy in “Elegy With an Angel at Its Gate” is paralleled with the horse in their common indifference. Johnny Dominguez in “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967” possesses this animal indifference and the grace and contradiction that accompanies it, as he reminds us that he is not “to be used as an example of anything… not even… Johnny Dominguez.” Levis writes of, “The hard, pure, furiously indifferent faces of Thieves” in “The Thief in the Painting.” These instances operate to relieve some of the tension between the muteness of animals and the volume of the poet, and they also ground the poems in a reality that is more observable, more effable. The Marxist boy, Johnny Dominguez and the thieves all have a singularity of purpose or a vision, unwavering, of the things that need to be done. As Levis quotes Keats in his essay, “the Creature hath a purpose and his eyes are bright with it” (76). This is the same directness of the horse found this time in the actions and stillness of men.

Another part of the tension and the impetus for the inclusion of this imagery is that this is not part of Levis’ own life – he is the academic among the watered lawns of tract houses, the comfort of which he can neither feel comfortable in nor can he honestly lament without seeming ungrateful or like that uninteresting grouch, the Luddite. Traces of a pastoralist idealism surface in his essays, but it is problematic as subject matter for poetry, yet it is included in a somewhat more oblique fashion: the holiness of the horse, the holiness of the man with a purpose of complete determination.

The most fascinating part of the book, in terms of the issues surrounding horses, comes in the poem “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand.” Here Levis treats some of the aforementioned issues directly. One of the horses, after the eloquent and surreal images of both, is said to have to liked to watch the traffic pass, “as if it were a thing / Of great interest to him.” Here he introduces the possibility of thought in the horse, as is often evident on an animal’s face, but considers it a foolish notion. Man yearns to understand the horse, and can do so only by thought, which is a trait that immediately excludes the horse, thus the horse remains a mystery because the act of thinking itself enters into a psychic space of which the horse is fundamentally not a participant. He goes on in that same poem to see the horses nudging a sheet of ice on their trough and looking at it, “as if [the horses] were capable of wonder or bewilderment. / They were worthless.” This view, coming late in the book and embodying a character who winds up alone in an empty race-track, is a type of summation of the tension or paradox of animal indifference. This indifference is beautiful, but what is it other than pure ignorance? It is not answerable, they are completely apart from the world of thought; “in the moonlight they were other worlds.”

So what, in the end, can be made of these recurring and indifferent animals throughout this imaginative, beautiful book? The animals operate as that which they signify for Levis, they take the poems and imbue them, by the mere force of their presence, with the inherent mystery and the disappearing landscape. He writes in “Poetry and Animal Indifference” that when the animal is in the poem, the poem benefits from, “the recovery of the landscape. It is no longer a world without imagination, or a world of tract housing beyond time” (76). In Elegy he refers to tract homes as “speechless,” and though horses are speechless too, the muteness they exist within has been distilled throughout the “uninterrupted evolution of the horse.” The horse has grown a muteness so complete that it is, for Levis, a signifier of the indifference that is not ignorance, but is a part of the timeless and ineffable beauty of the natural world. Because the animal is incompatible with an America of tract houses and speechless vinyl siding, the indifference of the animal is the only escape from the unholy life of the suburbs, where nothing is truly revered, where our words linger and pool in perfect irreverence, where we reason and lie and scream and weep. In the poem “Outside Fargo, North Dakota,” James Wright wrote, “Beyond town, three heavy white horses / Wade all the way to their shoulders / In a silo shadow.” It is this animal stillness, this animal indifference that preoccupies both of these poets. To communicate that muteness is to subvert, for an instant, the deception of words when they can suffocate thought or parade falsehoods as truth. The poems in Elegy manage to capture the muteness and composed stillness of horses even in a flurry of words.