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download audioback GREGORY DONOVAN | 20th Annual Levis Prize
Larry Levis “In 1967,” or, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy-o?
[eds. note: The audio version may contain extemporized material that is not reproduced in the text provided to us for publication.]
Recently I had the chance to attend a reading by my friend Kathleen Winter, whose book titles are a delight. Her most recent poetry collection is I will not kick my friends, which sounds sardonically reminiscent of something your kindergarten teacher might have said to you on a really bad awful terrible day, while Kathleen’s first book was titled Nostalgia for the Criminal Past—and either of those might have done well as the title for my talk this evening, but instead of stealing a title, I’m calling this essay “Larry Levis ‘In 1967,’ or, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy-o?” In this case, I’m referring to the Vietnam War, and alluding to the fact that Larry Levis, like me, was born into what became known as the baby boom generation, nicknamed “boomers” for short—that wave of children who sprang up as a result of the postwar exuberance of the men and women who had just survived the psychological onslaughts and physical endangerments of the Great Depression followed by World War II. Our parents were dramatically spurred by those experiences into becoming highly patriotic penny-pinchers, while their children were also dramatically shaped by another war and other cultural eruptions, so that many of us boomers ended up rebelling against almost everything that parental generation believed in so fervently. And all of us now find ourselves mired in several seemingly unending and morally dubious wars in a dangerously expanded version of ongoing American foreign policy disasters whose roots may be traced back to Vietnam and farther back as well, and tonight we will hear from a brilliant and fully energized poet, Solmaz Sharif, whose work, like that of Larry Levis, seeks to penetrate the darkness with dismay and humor, and with heart and soul.
Back in 1967, we boomers had already witnessed the assassinations of President Kennedy and of Malcolm X, and soon after there would be the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr. The nation was, in the familiar phrase, deeply mired in the Vietnam War, and many of us in our teenage and college years lived under the constant threat of being drafted into that war, which many of us considered an immoral, foolish, and insupportable waste of human lives. In 1967 there were more than 485,000 US troops deployed in Vietnam, while protests against the war were escalating as it became increasingly obvious that false statistics were being issued to support the notion that we were winning the war when the opposite was true. The boxer Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing world championship for refusing to be inducted into the US Army. Inner cities across the country were on fire as race riots broke out from Tampa to Detroit, Milwaukee to Washington, D.C.—while at the same time be-ins and love-ins in New York and California ushered in what was declared to be the Summer of Love in San Francisco, where Timothy Leary actually did say, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” which became a mantra for the growing cultural rebellion. Self-titled albums by the Doors and the Grateful Dead came out along with the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were on debut albums released that year, and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” was everywhere on the airwaves, and all of that music became a vital part of the soundtrack for the counterculture and its sexual revolution, as well as for the war and the protests against it. In 1967 I started my last year of high school and Larry Levis was completing his undergraduate degree at Fresno State College. Like everyone else in the country, we were reacting strongly to all of those powerful cultural and psychological shocks, including the concurrent social revolutions and rebellions related to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Everything back then seemed to be in a constant state of turmoil and unrest, with all major institutions in the nation—religious, political, military, and economic—being thrown into doubt and called into question, something like the state of unease we are living through right now in a renewed moment of upheaval which clearly has its roots in the closely related forms of corruption, lies, sexism, racism, and violence rampant in America in 1967.
Witnessing all of what happened in the sixties forms a rather strong bond between people of that boomer generation, no matter what their political and cultural affiliations and beliefs, but it is particularly strong among those who were involved in protesting the war, resisting the draft, and participating in the alternative culture that sprang into being at that time. That bond was a dimension of the friendship I had with Larry Levis. Nearly thirty years after the Summer of Love, in what neither of us had any inkling would be the last year of his life, Larry and I were having dinner one evening and taking a look back at those sixties experiences in a not very sentimental “nostalgia for the criminal past” that we shared. We often hung out together over a meal or a drink, and sometimes Larry would bring up a topic that was on his mind because it was working its way into becoming a poem—although he never announced that process, most likely because it wasn’t yet clear whether the subject actually would make it all the way into a poem.
Our conversation that evening focused on several aspects of that past. One was that we strongly felt it was both laughable and pathetic when someone from the boomer generation tried to discount or completely deny their early experiments with hallucinogens or even with marijuana, making fun of hippies or even lying about everything and claiming they’d never touched the stuff. On the other hand, while we both agreed that it was highly unlikely we would ever need or want to fool around with LSD or other hallucinogens ever again—too risky for people who are “brain workers” and need to keep from scrambling the most important tool necessary to their professional lives—at the same time, we didn’t see any reason to completely reject the value of the experiences we’d had while tripping. Even if the striking insights we’d gained were dubious or evanescent, they also may have pushed us along toward more genuine and reliable sorts of visionary realizations, ones which came not from using drugs but from using imagination, which can be more powerful than any drug. Besides, everything experienced, whether confusing and painful, or stunning and marvelous, can be useful to one’s art.
In college Larry and I had both done the boomer required reading list that included The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, a philosophical work detailing Huxley’s experiments with mescaline, a book whose title comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the visionary poet William Blake. Still, it remains pretty rare to encounter any artwork influenced by drugs or celebrating drug-induced experiences that is actually worth a damn, especially anything written while drunk or high on anything at all, and it’s a testament to Larry’s profound skill and artful brilliance that he could make something not only aesthetically worthy, but also funny, out of such an intractable subject. That same evening Larry and I had also talked about how our time in college had been truly exciting as well as truly frightening, and about how, back then, with the draft breathing down our necks or cops knocking at the door, there really wasn’t room for us to be complacent, or uninvolved, or simply full of ennui. Too much was shakin’ and bakin’. You didn’t have the luxury of making no choices, or just slip-sliding along—choices were forced upon you. My own choices, and Larry’s, had included being involved with anti-war demonstrations and with civil rights activities. As a result, we risked getting arrested, or getting our heads bashed in. We talked about how, as intense and terrifying as those times had been, in a sense we were fortunate to have been getting a college education during such times, when your character was going to be tested, when you were going to have to decide who you were and how to back up your decisions with exactly what kind of action.
You may be interested to know that Larry completed that poem, and he read it for the first time as part of an art exhibition at the 1708 Gallery here in Richmond. Larry and I, and other artists around town, had been asked to come and be part of a kind of “living exhibition” for an opening held one night in the gallery. The idea was that there would be people offering various sorts of “art performances,” including making art objects on the spot, as well as moments throughout the evening when the organizers would drag out a small “stage” and we poets were supposed to get up and read a poem (we had earlier explained to them that we weren’t about to try to write a poem on the spot). Larry got up on that box and read “In 1967,” and it was a very droll reading he gave, although some people who came in late during his reading may have wondered why this fellow standing there was going on about taking mescaline and turning himself into a bird. I had a rather more intensely odd experience reading there that night, since I mistakenly thought it would be a good idea to read my poem about the Viennese Secessionist painter Egon Schiele—after all, we were going to be surrounded by paintings. However, it is a persona poem, and so it’s not me but Egon Schiele who speaks in the poem of his incestuous relationship with his sister Gerti, as well as the accusations of child pornography leveled against him for his portraits of children in distinctly sexual poses. Right after I stood up in the middle of the crowd and had finished giving my introduction to the poem, a large group of people came in late and walked up close to hear my words. At that moment, I realized too late what was going to happen. Nearly the entire crowd began scowling at me and whispering angrily, as they assumed I was talking about my own life in first person, and they were quite obviously astounded and disturbed that I was standing up there speaking openly about how I’d had sex with my sister and had painted children in pornographic poses, and that I didn’t seem to be sorry or at all embarrassed about any of it. It’s pretty hard to shock a gallery crowd, but I managed to do it rather magnificently that evening.
Larry and I laughed pretty hard about that disastrous evening later on, and I was glad to have had that laughter with him on that occasion and on many others. But Larry wasn’t simply my colleague, or my friend—he was also a poet whose work I had greatly admired long before I ever met him, and my admiration for his writing has only continued to grow even now, and that’s been the case for pretty much everyone else in his ever-increasing audience among poets and readers of every generation. And so now my friendship with him and with his work has taken on this other dimension of my remembering both each year, and if you’re new to his writing, I’m happy to be your guide into it. And perhaps you’ll conclude that both Larry Levis, and me along him, are not only former good little Catholic altar boys but that we also are, at the same time, actual reincarnations of really morally corrupted cedar waxwings. Larry would have liked that, I think. Here is the Larry Levis poem that may clarify what I’ve just said:
In 1967Some called it the Summer of Love; & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same
As ever, the same as they did every summer, in 1967,
Anybody with three dollars could have a vision.
And who wouldn’t want to know what it felt like to be
A cedar waxwing landing with a flutter of gray wings
In a spruce tree, & then disappearing into it,
For only three dollars? And now I know; its flight is ecstasy.
No matter how I look at it, I also now know that
The short life of a cedar waxwing is more pure pleasure
Than anyone alive can still be sane, & bear.
And remember, a cedar waxwing doesn’t mean a thing,
Qua cedar or qua waxwing, nor could it have earned
That kind of pleasure by working to become a better
Cedar waxwing. They’re all the same.
Show me a bad cedar waxwing, for example, & I mean
A really morally corrupted cedar waxwing, & you’ll commend
The cage they have reserved for you, resembling heaven.Some people spent their lives then, having visions.
But in my case, the morning after I dropped mescaline
I had to spray Johnson grass in a vineyard of Thompson Seedless
My father owned—& so, still feeling the holiness of all things
Living, holding the spray gun in one hand & driving with the other,
The tractor pulling the spray rig & its sputtering motor—
Row after row, I sprayed each weed I found
That looked enough like Johnson grass, a thing alive that’s good
For nothing at all, with a mixture of malathion & diesel fuel,
And said to each tall weed, as I coated it with a lethal mist,
Dominus vobiscum, &, sometimes, mea culpa, until
It seemed boring to apologize to weeds, & insincere as well.
For in a day or so, no more than that, the weeds would turn
Disgusting hues of yellowish orange & wither away. I still felt
The bird’s flight in my body when I thought about it, the wing ache,
Lifting heaven, locating itself somewhere just above my slumped
Shoulders, & part of me taking wing. I’d feel it at odd moments
After that on those long days I spent shoveling vines, driving trucks
And tractors, helping swamp fruit out of one orchard
Or another, but as the summer went on, I felt it less and less.As the summer went on, some were drafted, some enlisted
From Elegy © 1997 Larry Levis.
In a generation that would not stop falling, a generation
Of leaves sticking to body bags, & when they turned them
Over, they floated back to us on television, even then,
In the Summer of Love, in 1967,
When riot police waited beyond the doors of perception,
And the best thing one could do was get arrested.
Used with the permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Gregory Donovan, a senior editor of Blackbird, is the author of the poetry collection Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press, 1993), a collection that won the Devins Award for Poetry. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire, a feature-length documentary on the life and work of Larry Levis. Donovan is a faculty member in Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate creative writing program. His commentary on the work of Larry Levis is an annual feature at the Levis Prize event.