Our event this evening is part celebration and part memorial, and it’s my privilege each year to speak a little about the poetry and the life of Larry Levis, who was not only my colleague, but also my friend. 

Most of the time Levis lived in Richmond, he lived in Church Hill in an historic home on North 27th Street. He seldom had a functioning car, so he often walked or sometimes rode the bus home, enjoying encounters with all manner of people along the way—some homeowners, some without a home, some recently out of jail, some drug dealers, some artists and musicians, some wandering alcoholics—many of whom he befriended or gave some money, some of whom he offered temporary work. His path took him past the historical marker for Bell Tavern in Shockoe Bottom (Levis called it Bell’s Tavern) mounted on a stone wall beneath the overpass close to the ornate train station building that has largely been converted into an exhibition space, though now it also once again functions as a train station. Levis created a beautifully written and imagined essay about that area published in Fall, 2002, in the journal Blackbird. In the essay, Levis speculates about all that happened in Bell’s Tavern, especially as it relates to John Wilkes Booth and the murky planning that led to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It’s a great essay I recommend to you, and it provides some of the background imagery and concepts that went into this poem from The Darkening Trapeze collection, which will be the focus of my remarks tonight. 

The poem by Larry Levis titled “The Space” is a meditation on the space we humans occupy in our lives, as well as the emptied space we leave behind when we die, and all that comes along within and outside of that space. For example, the space may belong to a man Levis observes walking along under an underpass, “a drunk guy lurching to a stop / As if to confer / With a god who swirls around him in a windblown / Gust of trash,” or another guy who had “been out / Of work too long” and couldn’t find a job other than being a gravedigger—and when he’s asked by a woman what is inside the space of the coffin when it’s dug up to be moved, rather than recite the ugly truth (that “The body could be poured?”) the weary man tells her that it’s “Just hair… Just miles & miles of hair.” The poem also focuses on the Bell’s Tavern plaque commemorating “the wrong thing,” as it records only its role as a recruitment center for the War of 1812, but skips the slave trade, or recruiting for the Confederacy, or recruitments later for even more of America’s bloody wars. Meanwhile, the poem commemorates those who fought those wars, namely “Shiftless drunks, debtors,” and more “Guys out of work.” The poet reveals his anger at the bloodshed and the endless wars that ultimately became, simply and horribly, “genocide.”

The poem includes quasi-religious allusions to the “resurrection” of the body and the ceremony of the “communion host”—drawing on images originating in Larry’s Catholic upbringing—which are mixed with quasi-philosophical concepts such as the distinction between the “Self” and the “soul,” reminiscent of the Yeats poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” though Levis defines them differently from Yeats. The poem’s final section focuses on the distinction between the two, with the Self being portrayed as a sound, the scraping sound of “a guy raking leaves / Off his walk,” which is what “The Self sounds like,” emphasizing action that produces a limited kind of order, while “The soul is just a story the scraping tells,” a story that manages to hold off disaster and desperation, perhaps even holding off the fated finality of death itself, since “the raked walk keeps the stars / From blowing out in the night sky / Above his house.” The sound is also “The sore screech of the wheel in the addict’s voice,” a screech that “never rests,” and it’s also the sound that comes from the “Thin girl at her loom. Thin girl at her loom.” That thumping rhythm in the poem’s final line is one that repeats always, a sound of making and unmaking—the wheel of time that never rests, the sound of the space given for the self and the scraping out of the soul’s story.