Frances Richey

Making the Invisible Visible

 

 

A Conversation with Phillis Levin
by Frances Richey

 

 

Phillis Levin’s new collection, An Anthology of Rain, begins with an invitation and ends with a reckoning. In between are metaphysical, lyrical, mesmerizing poems. Last December we had a far-ranging conversation about her new book, about her influences and the rich experiences that feed her desire to make the invisible visible. Though she told me she has always felt like an outsider, she added, “I’ve never gotten over appreciating enjoying being with people, talking to people.”

Here is our interview. Enjoy!

 

 

FR: Phillis! Congratulations on your new collection, An Anthology of Rain!

 

PL: Thank you.

 

FR: I can’t think of anyone else whom I would ask questions about flight in their work.

 

PL: You mean the subject of flight as a motif in my work, or the experience? There is one poem that specifically concerns flight, flight as freedom. It’s called “Lyre”: the speaker recalls playing among the stars that form the constellation Lyra, named for the lyre of Orpheus. It was first published in Plume (June 2014) and is in Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016).

 

FR: Is that your fifth book?

 

PL: Yes. I was interested in planes from an early age and watched my father build model planes in his workshop, but this poem does not refer to flying in an airplane. “Lyre” arose from a desire to fly on my own wings and a fascination with outer space. As a child I wrote a letter to NASA and soon after began receiving their newsletter, NASA Facts. Maybe they thought I was older.

 

FR: What were you writing to them about?

 

PL: I wanted to learn about the space program. Space travel was on my radar: Project Mercury was in the news and my father spoke with me about it in a way I could understand. The work he did as an engineer must have influenced me: I would observe him drafting designs on graph paper, refining an invention. Phrases such as “traveling wave tube” and “electron ray gun” and talk of satellites and rocket launches intrigued me. I had dreams about orbiting the earth and the moon—and of being separated from the mothership, not being able to return to my planet. I’m sure it’s a common dream, maybe not, of being caught in an orbit and not being able to get back to earth… The moon walk…

 

FR: The moon walk. That’s 1969.

 

PL: But earlier than that I knew about space travel. I had those dreams of circling the earth and the moon when I was still a child. I was six years old when Alan Shepherd became the first American to travel into space; John Glenn orbited the earth a year later, in 1962. I wrote to NASA long before the moonwalk. I received numerous bulletins, they seemed to arrive every month. It was an educational newsletter for the public, an easy-to-understand science series.

 

FR:  They kept you posted. You were probably 14 or 15?

 

PL: I was much younger, probably eight, in the third grade, when NASA Facts began to arrive; that’s also the age at which I started writing poetry. John F. Kennedy was the president; NASA had been established several years earlier. The space race began in the mid-1950s, during the Cold War. Space flights with successful orbits took place before missions with a human crew. In January 1959 the Soviet Union spacecraft named Luna became the first human-made object to leave earth’s orbit, but it failed to land on the lunar surface. That was years before Apollo XI sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon. Those of us old enough (or young enough) to remember cannot forget when the lunar excursion module named Eagle landed and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. It was probably 1962 when NASA Facts started arriving at our house. My parents were like, “Why are we getting this mail from NASA?” The bulletins were addressed to me. Maybe my father or mother put the letter I wrote into an envelope and mailed it; but they were definitely surprised when those newsletters arrived.

 

FR: Would you read “Lyre.”

 

PL:

Lyre
 
Because it hangs from the center of the sky,
I play there sometimes, too, far away
From you, forgetting to return
Until my own fluttering breath unsettles me
 
More than the spaces pulsing between stars.
For years I rose in dreams beyond
Earth’s atmosphere: each night,
As I left the mother ship to bob along
 
The surface of the moon, the cord
Snapped and I drifted away, pulled into
An orbit from which I couldn’t break free.    
 
My hands reach up to grab the yoke:
It stretches down, arms glittering,
A few crumbs of creation following.

 

FR: Thank you, Phillis! That was beautiful.

 

PL: My mother-in-law felt a strong connection with this poem; she requested that I read it at her memorial service. She was an instrument-rated pilot. She was brilliant, but in the generation that she grew up she was expected to be a stay-at-home parent; perhaps this expectation was greater because she was married to a physician. She studied chemistry in college, where she met the man she married a few years later, while he was a naval officer in training; during the Second World War, she worked in a lab and loved the work she did. Throughout her life she was active in many causes; at one point she managed the campaign of Jim West, when he ran for reelection as state senator in Washington State. After her three children were grown, she returned to school to earn a degree in nursing. She loved flying; she must have felt free up there in a way she didn’t in her life as a wife and a mother. In control, and free.

 

“Lyre” is also a poem concerning the desire to be separate, and to leave the earth—and the terror of alienation, the fear of not being able to get back to my planet.

 

FR: What was your first introduction to the idea of flight?

 

PL:  That probably was hearing my father talk about aeronautics when I was a small child. I knew he had wanted to design planes. I remember him telling me about a plane he made of wood when he was a boy, and how it ended up crashing: it took flight, and then….  It was probably not well-engineered aerodynamically… it was too large; and he was a kid. I remember him telling me about that plane, how wonderful it was—but it didn’t keep flying. It reminds me of Icarus. Flight is a central motif in one of my longer poems, “The Stairwell,” in my first collection, Temples and Fields (University of Georgia Press, 1988). As a toddler, I had recurrent dreams of soaring and flying. Euphoric dreams. I don’t think it’s unusual to dream of flying.

 

FR: It’s a common dream, but as a very small child, I don’t know how common it is. We’d have to check with a child psychologist. I think you were a prodigy

 

PL:  I was precocious intellectually and had a lot of empathy for other children and adults but was very shy, was not adapted socially. But the flying is, I don’t want to psychologize, but I think I told you that I had recurrent dreams of jumping from the top of a flight of stairs and how after hitting the landing I would glide and float through the house and out through a window.

 

FR: Clouds and floating appear often in your work…I think you said you didn’t take psychedelic drugs because you were afraid you might think you really could fly and jump off a roof…

 

PL: Never, never… (refers to taking drugs)

For a long time, I hid that I thought I could fly; when my father found me asleep downstairs at night and carried me back upstairs, I remember thinking that I shouldn’t tell him how I got downstairs, that my ability to fly was a talent I needed to hide. I was never crazy. I was very rational and was totally into the sciences. Mr. Wizard was my favorite program. I loved anything scientific. I read books on electricity, magnetism, wind, precipitation. By the time I was fourteen, I became interested in biology, especially genetics. But flying continued in my dreams.

 

What I experienced in those dreams was so vivid that it felt real; and probably because I wasn’t very socialized, I could maintain the illusion that I could fly. It was a secret. Eventually I realized maybe I can’t fly. But I hadn’t told anyone I could because I knew, somehow, that they might not believe me. Only once did I tell a friend that I felt as if I could fly: she said, just don’t get too close to the edge of a cliff. To this day I still experience the temptation to jump when I look down from a height; it’s a strong urge.  I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die; it’s just an urge.

 

FR: Oddly enough, these days, people actually can fly. I have a friend who jumps off cliffs. She hang-glides. Her photographs look a lot like photos taken by cameras somehow attached to birds in flight. And there are also special suits called wingsuits that are used for Base-jumping. They jump from cliffs and buildings. A good flight lasts two to three minutes.

 

Let’s move to your choice of title: An Anthology of Rain. 

 

PL:  I’m good with titles of poems. Titles for books are harder. My first collection had many possible titles because the manuscript went through many versions: by the time the book was accepted, only a few poems from the earlier versions remained. The title, Temples and Fields, is a phrase from “The Lost Bee,” one of the poems in that book. The Afterimage, the title of my second book, is the title of a long meditative poem within the collection. If a book’s title is the title of a poem, I believe its title must be the key to something or function like a magnetic field. I like a title to be suggestive, evoke something specific yet indefinite, ambiguous, making an impression on the reader without indicating one particular context. In my third collection, Mercury (Penguin Books, 2001), the title poem is also a key poem: that book is divided into three sections; but it’s not the length of a collection that determines whether to divide it into sections. In general, I don’t like dividing my books into sections; but sometimes it’s necessary, or the poems cluster into subdivisions. Mercury is an element and also a god (Hermes) of many guises; that title poem begins with mercury as the element, whose properties I examined when I found a vial of it in the basement of our house. The title poem suggests the multifaceted nature of things, how the experience of reality can be mercurial and how mercurial human identity can be.

 

The title of my fourth book, May Day, (Penguin Books, 2008), is also the title of a poem. May Day is the first collection I put together that opens with the title poem—at the time, that felt daring. I put my cards on the table right away, so to speak.

 

FR:  When I first saw the title, May Day, I thought of it as a signal of distress. It also calls to a holiday in some countries on the first day in May, and the beginning of spring. Did you mean for the title to call to all those things?

 

PL:  Absolutely. Most of the poems in that book were composed after September 11, 2001. The word Mayday is the international call of distress, which pilots and mariners use in an emergency. It is the phonetic equivalent of the French phrase M’aidez, which means Help me. I was aware of those three meanings, and I chose the poem’s title and the book’s title for that reason. The poem “May Day” occurred to me all at once, though I did revise it. Many of my poems arise from out-of-the-blue: with a first or last line, or an image or a rhythm without words. “May Day” uttered itself. It has a collage-like quality because so many disparate things co-exist in that poem: it does not concern September 11, but maybe lives in its shadow. The book was published in 2008.

 

“That Morning” is the only poem in May Day that addresses September 11, 2001. In part, it’s a meditation on a concatenation of experiences that morning. I had a direct line of sight to the World Trade Center: a moment after the first plane hit the North Tower, I was outside walking to a 9:00 AM dental appointment. I lived on West 13^th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues: at Sixth Avenue I looked up to where the Twin Towers stood and saw what looked like a giant candle burning in the distance, looking closer than usual because the sky was so clear. The poem’s fragmentary quality, in couplets jumping from one image to another, reflects the series of shocks unfolding. Within the poem, I didn’t want to identify the date; the context is obvious. And the poem alludes to the night before: people who lived in New York back then forget that one of the most violent thunder and lightning storms in the city’s history occurred that evening.

 

FR: I don’t remember that.

 

PL:  People have amnesia about it. That’s why the sky was pellucid the next morning. The night before, I had attended a party at George Plimpton’s house to celebrate Billy Collins’s new book of poems; then I went home, went to bed, and woke early from a marvelous dream with the words “Aurora, Aurora” echoing in my mind. Aurora means dawn. It was an ecstatic dream. I was looking forward to this day: in the afternoon I would teach a graduate poetry workshop at NYU, and this was the beginning of the semester. But first, I had to get to the dentist; I stopped walking and called his office from my mobile phone when I saw the flames and a woman near me began to scream “The people, the people”; he advised me to go back home so I did, thinking a tragic control tower error had occurred. After turning on the radio, I plugged in my black and white TV and saw on its screen a second plane heading toward the Trade Center; when I walked outside, the South Tower was ablaze. “That Morning” reverberates with the extreme beauty of that autumn day, which had brought such joy before the first plane hit.

 

FR: Mr. Memory and Other Poems, the fifth book…I like that title.

 

PL:  It’s a good title, but that poem, “Mr. Memory,” is the least characteristic of any poem I’ve written. I don’t feel it expresses my soul; but somehow something about that title felt right—as long as “& Other Poems” was part of the title. Do you know Hitchcock’s film, The 39 Steps?

 

FR: I haven’t seen that one.

 

PL: It’s a great film. Made in 1935; black and white. Primitive technically, compared to his later films. It’s based on a novel John Buchan published in 1915, whose narrative Hitchcock radically altered in places. A concern in some of my work is the nature of memory: historical memory, ecological memory, personal memory. The 39 Steps is a spy thriller, an examination of goodness and evil; there are scenes in that film that represent for me the purist cinematic depiction of innocence. Mr. Memory was an actual person Hitchcock may have seen performing under the stage name Datas, the Memory Man.

 

FR: Was he a magician or an illusionist?

 

PL:  No. He was someone who had an extraordinary memory, and he performed in London theaters and music halls. In the film’s opening scene Mr. Memory displays his skills.

 

Ethics is a major thread that runs through both the novel and the film, but the film is especially concerned with the power of information and the way information can be a latent power that, when activated, can become a benign or destructive force. Here is a person who can recite huge amounts of information, stunning people with what his mind retains. But what will be done with this information, and what is the difference between what is understood and what is memorized?

 

FR: If you had to say in one sentence what your new book is about, what would you say?

 

PL:  My work is lyric and dramatic. There’s a narrative dimension in many of my poems but my poems, like all lyrics, stop time, dramatize time. Narrative things happen in time. I don’t write books, I write poems. And some poems want to be near each other. When I put a book together, I find poems that want to be near each other, then find a group that wants to be close to the other group and the collection keeps building. My approach is akin to composing a symphony.

 

FR: Is it an intuitive process?

 

PL: It’s intuitive, it’s also physical. I put the poems on the floor. I shuffle them. I look at what happens when one poem is next to another, how does that poem inflect differently next to this poem?  It’s like putting colors near each other. If you place blue next to green versus blue next to yellow…it’s an intuitive process that generates its own rationale. One of the things I like about sections, despite trying to avoid them, is that you aren’t limited to one beginning and one end. You have a beginning and end to each section.

 

For instance, “X-Radiograph”: I think that’s one of the most important poems in Mr. Memory & Other Poems, yet someone who reviewed the book favorably thought this poem was humorous, although its subject is the murder of children—as is obvious from the epigraph, Massacre of the Innocents, the title of a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a work of art whose history retains the attempt to conceal the massacre by covering up the images of the infants. Strata of history and memory, what survives and what erodes, what is lost and what can be retrieved, must be one of the things that compel me; and this painting and its layers of history embody the attempt to bear witness to a terrible event and transcend the coverup of that event. I think the poems we write are related to what we’re drawn to, but we aren’t in control of what draws us—and until putting together a manuscript we often aren’t aware that we’re writing poems with a relationship to each other. I don’t like to repeat myself in my work; by this I mean tonally, structurally. I like to deploy different patterns. I don’t like placing poems next to each other that are in the same stanza structure or concern the same things. It’s not only that I like mixing things up; I like things that are different to be near each other, to bring something else to the foreground.

 

FR:  What do you think of Stanley Kunitz’s idea that most poets have four or five key images that they come back to over and over again? Book after book.

 

PL:  That’s possible but it wouldn’t be me who would notice it because it would keep transmogrifying and show up in different ways. It would be like saying to someone, You keep marrying the same kind of person over and over, and the person replies, but each one was so different.

 

FR: You don’t see yourself as having four or five images that follow you through your writing life?

 

PL:  I can’t think of it. I’m very image based, but very sound based equally. And I think from the earliest time my ideal was to make an image have music and music have an image.

 

The only time I ever heard Yehuda Amichai read live, and he’s a poet whose work I find stunning, was at NYU. He stood up and he said something, and I was in the back and missed whether he was quoting someone else. He was joking about how people always ask him what this or that of his poems is about, and this is exactly the kind of thing poets can’t answer, especially lyric poets, because it already alienates us and puts us outside the poem. But he said, “A poem is about a subject the way a cat is about the house.” And to me that is the smartest thing one can say in response to that question.

 

FR: And so, your title for An Anthology of Rain.

 

PL: The title poem, An Anthology of Rain, came to me spontaneously. It just happened. It’s probably one of the truest poems to the way my imagination works. It’s weird, and it seems to make sense.

 

FR: Would you read it to me?

 

PL: Sure I will.

 

An Anthology of Rain
 
For this you may see no need,
You may think my aim
Dead set on something
 
Devoid of conceivable value:
An Anthology of Rain,
A collection of voices
 
Telling someone somewhere
What it means to follow a drop
Traveling to its final place of rest.
 
But do consider this request
If you have pressed your nose
Of any shape against a window,
 
Odor of metal faint, persistent,
While a storm cast its cloak
Over the shoulder of every cloud
 
In sight. You are free to say
Whatever crosses your mind
When you look at the face of time
 
In the passing of one drop
Gathering speed, one drop
Chasing another, racing to
 
A fork in the path, lingering
Before making a detour to join
Another, fattening on the way
 
Until entering a rivulet
Running to the sill.
So please accept this invitation:
 
You are welcome to submit,
There is no limit to its limit,
The instructions are a breeze
 
As long as you include
Nothing about yourself,
Even your name. Your address
 
Remains unnecessary, for the rain
Will find you—if you receive it
It receives you (whether or not
 
You contribute, a volume
is sent). And when you lift
The collection you may hear,
 
By opening anywhere, a drop
And its story reappear
As air turns to water, water to air.

 

 

FR: That was beautiful! Are you making a recording of this book?

 

PL: There are no plans for that right now.

 

FR: Well, I’m putting in my request that at some point you record this book in your voice.

 

PL: When I read this poem aloud, people remember their own experience of studying the behavior of raindrops—and what can floor some people is how such a subjective experience is shared by others. It’s as if childhood is a secret society (and poems are open secrets). Maybe that is a motif: you know William Blake’s stanza in “Auguries of Innocence”:

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

 

A world inside a grain of sand; and a world inside a single atom…

 

But there is a way in which “An Anthology of Rain” originates in multitudinous experiences, including the experience of sending poems out, the experience of being anthologized, the experience of speaking directly to—. I love direct address, and one of the things I enjoy teaching is apostrophe. At the beginning of the poem there’s a tinge not of hostility but aggression or resistance, maybe arising from how poets are often told, at least in the United States, that “there’s no need for you to…” There’s no value. What is this value? A.R. Ammons addresses this beautifully in some of his poems, especially in “Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness.”

 

An early desire I had as a child, a fantasy I suppose many other children entertain, was to bring peace to the world (somehow, I already knew about the Nobel Peace Prize). I used to think about this, I wanted everyone to get along. I was so naive. I wanted there to be peace and the vision I had of peace was spurred by something I saw in a children’s book. It wasn’t a picture book, but it was a book with pictures. And I remember one image in particular: people were sitting around a table and everyone had dramatically different facial features, and each person’s face was a different shade of color. The picture was cartoon-like but struck me as one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was probably a book about everyone from around the world getting along, like a United Nations of Children; but the people in the picture weren’t children, they were adults, a vision of adults created for children. I don’t remember the name of the book. I still see that page in my mind’s eye: the people talking and eating together; some had angular faces, some had softer features. On some subliminal level, that visual memory must inform, “If you have pressed your nose / Of any shape against a window”: I used to press my nose against the window if it rained or snowed. The windowpane always had the smell of metal; I don’t know why, it could have been lead in the white paint of the window frame.

 

I spent time as a child watching raindrops, watching how they behaved. I think that is something people do. They don’t talk about it. Watching the drops racing, wondering which one will be the first to reach the bottom of the sill, observing how a drop slows down when diverted by another or is absorbed and loses its shape….I spent a lot of time looking at that.

 

FR:  I love all of the context around this poem and An Anthology of Rain…I caught the invitation. I didn’t catch everything you’re talking about now, so I’m glad you’ve given that context, but that moment when you leave the aggression behind and you say, “please accept this invitation://You are welcome to submit…” are you talking to the reader?

 

PL:  Yes, I am. But I’m also playing with the restrictions and instructions we encounter when submitting poems to magazines: you know, the limit on how many lines….  For this imaginary Anthology there is no limit. But I think it’s a poem addressing humanity and every individual within the human race, a collection open to anyone, inviting everyone to contribute—anonymously, without a name or address. Everyone is affected by the rain.

 

It’s a human response to rain. Rain can soften someone’s behavior. Connect us.

 

FR: If we were going to talk about key images, I think definitely water would be one of yours. If we were going to go there. I don’t think you think about that at all, from what you said. I saw a lot of water and a lot of light in your work, more so than when I’ve read several books by the same poet in a row. They really are quite prevalent throughout your work. When you said, in the poem, “An Anthology of Rain, a collection of voices…” when I read that I thought, Ah, so in each raindrop there’s some kind of metaphoric presence going on that includes voices and pathways and drops being individual and merging, which in the yoga world is a huge thing, that idea of merging with spirit, voice, path…everything connected.

 

PL: The way the mind is liberated, looking at things, I guess you could say it’s connected. In the early 17th century, a meditative practice based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola influenced many of the poets of that time. Louis Martz wrote a superb book on this subject, The Poetry of Meditation; he explores the effect of a Jesuit practice that entailed focusing on an object or scene (such as the Nativity or the Passion) until something changes in oneself and the person, the person’s soul, is transformed. Martz’s insights and analysis culminate in a discussion of Wallace Stevens’s poems on objects.

 

FR: That’s an open-eye meditation which is very different from closed-eye meditation and, say, focusing on the breath. But certainly, following the path of one rain drop as it flows down the window, and watching its every move until or if it merges with another, that is a form of open-eye meditation which you were practicing as a child.

 

PL: For the Jesuits, it was a spiritual exercise; one might look at an image of Mary and reflect on that image. The belief is that you look and look until something in yourself is transformed. Some great work resulted from this practice, including the poems of John Donne. Many of my own poems are sparked by looking at an object or image the world offers; some are ekphrastic, words responding to images of images. I have never practiced meditation; but when I read about the practice, I realized that this is crucial—when one looks at an object one forgets oneself, and for a poet that liberates language from assumptions and conventions.

 

FR: When you talked about the raindrops, and you think everybody does it, I think you’re right. I do that sometimes as an adult, and it’s mesmerizing. But I don’t do it in a conscious “I’m meditating” way. As a small child, I used to watch night bugs on the living room window. They were as small or smaller than raindrops, like little ghosts on thin black legs…I might have pressed my nose up to the glass…

 

PL:  That’s the early stuff that I believe connects everyone. I think there’s something that compels me to connect to people on the deepest level, beginning with pre-linguistic perceptions. And I believe children have a sense of the soul at such an early age, an inner self, a subjectivity and responsiveness that’s non-judgmental. I am aware that subjectively is tempered and inflected by, perhaps in part created by, one’s specific culture and time. But I am speaking here from my own subjectivity and am fortunate to feel in touch with the memory of discovering my own soul. It’s the discovery of one’s own mind and spirit, one’s own being, that happens, and it happens in relation to an inanimate or animate Other.

 

FR: There’s so much in the world that we can’t see, and I think your poems give a sense of that world, I don’t want to say behind the world, because that’s been said so many times, but I think poems are different from prose in that they are an expression of the soul.

 

PL: Thank you. Well, to make the invisible visible, I mean I didn’t think about it that consciously but in an early poem of mine, in Temples and Fields, my first book, I have a line, “The visible world invisibles win…”  I wouldn’t put it like that now, the word “win” I wouldn’t use, but it is to make the invisible visible. So you could say the soul is not tangible, it’s not visible, but it’s tangible and visible in the way people behave, in the way we act. People look in each other’s eyes and think they’re seeing the soul, but looking into your own eyes, when you feel your own being, it’s that early sense that I think shows us the sanctity of the person. People used to call it the spark of the divine. I think that poetry concerns the sense of the sacred in the individual and in these moments, and poets are trying to keep alive what’s ephemeral, not just what can be lost to time, but these subjective realities, that they are realities and if they are manifested in language and rhythm in a way that’s memorable one transcends one’s time; and if one worries about reaching other people, usually one inhibits one’s self because “oh, that so self-involved, too subjective, it’s too weird to talk about what matters to little me…” From teaching I learned that what people think is the weirdest thing about themselves, is unrelatable, is something others may relate to easily. Relatable: that’s a word I started hearing…what is this word, relatable, I had never heard such a word before but at a certain point in teaching, students started saying, “Oh, that’s relatable” and I realized, oh, now this term has entered the discourse. There’s a fear that other people can’t relate to one’s in-most sense of things. But if you assume that because your experience is yours, thus subjective, and what you create cannot transcend language and culture, you inhibit yourself before pen touches paper or your fingers touch a key. If you worry about that, forget it; better to focus on craft, struggle with formal limits to forget oneself.

 

FR: So you’re talking about your poem, “An Anthology of Rain….”

 

PL: And all poetry in general, the importance of not censoring oneself. It’s an eccentric vision, meaning off-center. All people have eccentric visions, because it’s their own vision, but we relate to each other…childhood is very important to me, meaning I wanted to be a child psychologist when I was young. I studied psychology very seriously. I thought I’d be a clinical psychologist. I worked with children in psychiatric settings when I was in college. At a certain point I realized I didn’t want to do that. I wound up being a college professor. Childhood is not my primary subject, but it’s a source for all poets, I think.

 

FR: It is. Although some poets stay away from that subject.

 

PL: But those early perceptions. If I look at the trajectory of my work, there’s more and more of a tragic sense. I’m naturally an optimistic person; though I’ve had enough experiences to turn me into a pessimist, I’m not a pessimist. I tend to be hopeful by nature, but “X-Radiograph” is a tragic poem. That is why the tone had to be carefully calibrated, the point of view detached.

 

FR: How do you feel when somebody totally doesn’t get one of your poems and puts that misconception in print?

 

PL:  With that poem? That was incomprehensible to me. Did the person really read it? It’s impossible for that person to have read that poem and not realize the horrors it addressed. Well, it looks like ham and cheese, except that the ham and cheese is an image painted over the image of a dead baby, and the portion that’s been painted over is now showing through. Whoever read the poem must have been reading it too quickly and probably had to read a hundred more books. I decided not to take that review seriously; but it was bothersome because the review wasn’t negative and referred to this poem to highlight my humor and wit, which made the misinterpretation more egregious. It was disturbing to read that review, but you can’t help being misunderstood in life.

 

FR: When people are reviewing your books or writing about your work and it’s out in the world in print, there’s not much you can do about it.

 

PL: Well, if the person had heard the poem, they wouldn’t have thought that. Some people don’t realize that they have to hear a poem.

 

FR: I’m going to change the subject now. Who do you consider your influences?

 

PL:  I have many influences, and in many cases the writer’s first language wasn’t English. Because I started reading widely at a young age, I was influenced by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Shelly, Yeats, Auden, and Frost. I memorized some of their poems. Ferlinghetti was important to me starting at the age of twelve: he influenced me because I was writing in blank verse and rhyme and meter, but after reading Ferlinghetti I composed some poems whose lines spread out across the page. I had started experimenting with ways of spacing lines across a page, but when I saw how Ferlinghetti did this I realized, Oh yes, this can be done. Around that time, I began reading Cummings. And then I began reading a lot of poetry in translation. When I was in high school, I was lucky to be sitting on the floor in the library of the all-girls’ preparatory school I attended and took from the bottom shelf a book whose title caught my eye: The TriQuarterly Anthology of Latin American Literature. I didn’t know that TriQuarterly was the name of a magazine; I just liked the word. “What is a TriQuarterly Anthology,” I wondered. So I took it out of the library and read all the poems and short stories in it. This book introduced me to Borges and Cortazar, and other great writers; a few years ago, I was able to buy a used falling-apart copy. Borges’s Labyrinths grew into an obsession. Another major influence beginning in high school was James Baldwin, starting with Giovanni’s Room and then The Fire Next Time.

 

Seeing a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I at Lincoln Center while I was in high school changed my life.

 

Kafka. I read a lot of Kafka. Before I was in high school I read his novel, Amerika. I was reading things I shouldn’t have read yet, I wasn’t ready for them. I read a lot of Freud. I read whatever was in my parents’ library. I don’t think they had read all those books; many had been assigned to them in college or graduate school classes; some had been collected by my grandparents.

 

Amerika is spelled with a K. I took it off the shelf because I thought, Somebody has published a book with my country’s name spelled with a K: he must be really great. He must be fantastic to get away with that. That piqued my interest. And then I read The Metamorphosis. When I was in college, I read a lot more Kafka, I was always drawn back to him.

 

FR: What do you feel that you got from Kafka?

 

PL: Well, that the world as it is, is absurd. What’s important about Kafka is that he’s not being metaphorical. As a reader, you must enter the literal reality he has created. Someone else, I believe Alfred Kazin, said that about how to approach reading Kafka: when I read that statement, I remember thinking Yes! That’s it. Because people say: this stands for this, this is symbolic of that. No, you have to enter the reality he has created. It’s not that this stands for something else; it is. You must accept in this story that the character awakens to discover he is a giant insect. It does help to know that in German there is an expression, or saying, commonly in reference to someone who does drudge work, “He’s just another insect.” – the way people would say somebody is a drone. It’s not as if Kafka came up with this unusual construct; but for Gregor Samsa to become a giant insect pushes things beyond a limit and makes the situation Kafkaesque. Every language has its way of referring to people who are lower on the totem pole, whether in a pejorative way or a neutral way. And Kafka’s work arises from his personal experience. What was his day job? He studied law and specialized in processing insurance claims for workers’ compensation, workers injured on the job. Think about the exasperation of dealing with health insurance and life insurance claims. He was dealing with all that red tape in his daily life, so he was a witness to how bureaucracy could mangle a person. When he creates a narrative in which a human being is caught in a machine that will destroy him, is that metaphorical or literal? Kafka saw people being eaten alive by rules. He’s also very funny. When he read something he’d written to his small circle of friends, they would just break into laughter. And he would crack up, too.

 

FR: So Kafka was a major influence.

 

PL: He was an influence but not in a way I can trace directly. I just know I loved reading him. I also loved reading Wallace Stevens, whose influence is more evident. I connected with Wallace Stevens a lot. I still do. I think he’s one of the strongest influences on my work.

 

FR: What’s your take on “The Snowman?”

 

PL: “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

 

One of my very favorite poems by Stevens is “Of Mere Being,” which is endlessly mysterious. It’s one of the greatest poems ever written in English, I think.

 

FR: Can you say it?

 

PL:  Yes.

 

Of Mere Being
by Wallace Stevens
 
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
 
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
 
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
 
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

 

FR: Ah.  What a gift he had.

 

PL: But notice: just four stanzas, all tercets; each of the last three lines is a full-stop sentence. It took nerve to do that. A poet usually wants to avoid too many end-stopped lines, prefers that the end of a line propels the reader forward, which is the nature of enjambment. Stevens creates stasis here, instead, stopping time not with rhythm but with a series of full stops. The palm at the end of the mind, where are we? Think about that. The palm is real. We’re going from what is slightly exotic (if I’m in the Northeast). There’s a tree inside his head. And what is “it” when Stevens says, “You know then that it is not the reason”?  The bird? The tree? It’s the very last poem that he wrote. This is the prototypical experience I love and like to create in a poem, where there’s a world in a world in a world. It’s cinematic. And I identified with him for a more mundane reason: because he’s from Reading, Pennsylvania, where my father and his parents are from.

 

Czesław Miłosz was very important to me. I started reading him in college. I felt very connected to his sensibility, his images and range of reference, and his profoundly ethical vision. He was tested by traumas of history. I read Bells in Winter, which I think was his first book published in the United States. And I read The Captive Mind, a book everyone should read. It’s a great essay on what happens to the mind when it gives itself over to a totalitarian ideology. It was published in the 1950’s; in publishing this book he made enemies on the left, enemies on the right. Miłosz was a nonconformist by nature. He saw how ideology subsumed the minds, the lives, of certain colleagues and friends. At the time I met him I had already published poems in many journals but could not find a publisher for my first collection, though various versions of the manuscript had been a finalist in competitions. My work didn’t fit in anywhere; it still doesn’t. I think things have opened up a bit, but they need to open up a lot more. I met Miłosz in January 1984 while in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and he was a visiting professor at Sweetbriar College, located close by. A painter from Warsaw in residence at the same time I was befriended me and asked to see my manuscript; unbeknownst to me, he showed my manuscript to Miłosz, who was a fan of my friend’s paintings. As a result, Czesław Miłosz invited me to tea. The words that Milosz offered—including that I be more direct, less convoluted in syntax, in statement—opened another door. Whenever he visited New York, he would let me know; I attended his readings at the Polish consulate, and we stayed in touch. I never asked him for a blurb. It didn’t occur to me. His words are always with me. All you need is one person to believe in you.

 

I had already met Christopher Ricks when I was twenty-five, and Ricks’s receptivity to my poems and his critical response had been crucial (and continues to be). Ricks had asked me why I was resisting my own musicality; he gave me license to do what I’m good at, which is to be playful with sound— in the service of meaning and independent of meaning. Peers in college said I was too old- fashioned because of the rhyming. As a senior in college, I studied with Elfie Raymond, a philosopher fluent in seventeen languages: her mother was French, her father Hungarian; she was raised by her paternal grandfather, one of Europe’s leading Sanskrit scholars. She was a child in Paris when Paris fell to the Nazis. Until a week before her death, every poem I wrote I would show to her: she had x-ray vision; and she was a lifelong friend. Christopher Ricks’s perspective and his response to my work were just as liberating. These pivotal figures in my life were not American, yet each heard what I was doing and sensed what was needed.

 

FR: Do you speak these languages?

 

PL: No. I heard Brodsky read at Sarah Lawrence College. He had come to the U.S. only a year or two before. His reading, entirely in Russian, with his translator (George Klein) standing by, was an incantation. And it was the first time I heard poetry read aloud in cadences that resembled the rhythms I felt in my body, in my breath, in the process of composing a poem. I didn’t know the meaning of the words he was reciting but the rhythm and intonation felt familiar. Even as a child I would feel this rush of rhythms inside of me when I wrote, the sounding of the words occurring before I put anything on paper. It wasn’t a rational process; I would feel structures configuring themselves inside of me. Musical structures, silences. But there was this incantatory quality that I felt and there it was, out there, and it was the first time that the rhythmic structures somehow met what I felt. It was electrical. That was Brodsky. Years later, I took a seminar with him, and then we became friends. He was so tortured, and sometimes difficult; he was also very encouraging. And then, Tomaž Šalamun. In Mr. Memory & Other Poems, the poem “From a Rooftop” is dedicated to him. I met Tomaž at MacDowell in January 1987. Within a day we were friends. He said I didn’t write like an American poet; he couldn’t explain it. He translated some of my poems and sent them to literary journals in Slovenia, which led to my work appearing in Slovenia’s leading newspapers and magazines. In 1993, I was invited to represent the United States at the International PEN Conference in Bled; while attending the conference, which is where I first met Adam Zagajewski, I was encouraged to apply for a Fulbright Scholar Award. My first book, Temples and Fields, accepted for publication in November 1987 by the University of Georgia Press, appeared in November 1988; it won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, judged by John Hollander. Things started going better for my work after that.

 

FR: What about Jean Valentine?

 

PL: Some of my other teachers did get me. Jean was one. I was a student in her poetry workshop at Sarah Lawrence College in the first semester she taught there. I love Jean’s poetry; and she conducted our workshop with a quiet power. “Tender Offer,” a poem in May Day, is dedicated to her. Jean understood what I was doing; I was nineteen when I started studying with her. Years later, when we were fellows at MacDowell at the same time, we would meet in the Library to share drafts of poems with each other. Now I remember the way Jean remarked approvingly on the diction in one of my poems, which began with a description of how “my father made me/a beautiful pair of wings” out of “wire and silicone”: I composed that poem as a college sophomore and was surprised at Jean’s delight in the phrase “wire and silicone”—I hadn’t yet read Hart Crane so I wasn’t yet exposed to how his sense of the sublime incorporated his awe at the wondrous engineering feat of the Brooklyn Bridge. Here is that motif of flight once again. Her reaction was important because she appreciated what would seem unpoetic: the marvel of such mundane materials leading to transcendence… Years before, my father had received a sample of silicone in the mail to consider for future projects (it can survive extremes of temperature and pressure, thus is an exceptionally useful material for aeronautical applications). He had shown that sample to me and it worked its way into one of my poems.

 

FR: Let’s talk about “Wooden Spoon,” the last poem in this new collection. If the first poem, “An Anthology of Rain,” is the welcome into this world, then I think of “Wooden Spoon” as the reckoning.

 

PL: I wouldn’t have thought of it as the reckoning until you used that term, so that’s interesting.

 

FR: Am I off on that?

 

AL: No, no, no. It’s just that I hadn’t thought of it that way. And it’s also one of those poems where who knows where it came from. It just happened. And it’s a strange poem. It opens with a simple statement, and I didn’t know where it was going; and it is probably more self-revelatory than I normally am. In my work I’m un-confessional, and by nature I’m very private; but this poem, in a masked way, concerns a very personal transition.

 

Phillis Reads the poem, “Wooden Spoon”:

 

Wooden Spoon
 
It is good to cook with a wooden spoon.
Heat doesn’t travel from the pot
To the handle and burn one’s hand,
The utensil doesn’t transfer hot or cold
 
To or from what it is stirring.
Oh to be like that—not adding
Or subtracting anything.
 
But once I was: watching, outside
Always, away from others, not mixing
In their business, not involving
My body or self in theirs.
 
Those were the days
I wished to live an ordinary life,
With emotions extreme and mundane.
 
However temperate I appeared,
Inside was a storm and a sea.
However much I wished to be a part of,
To partake in, a wall prevented entry.
 
Oh to be a wooden spoon,
Stirring, stirring.
One day the world broke through
 
And I broke through
To the world. Then the trouble
Started, and something else happened
(Why then, I don’t know, only that it did):
 
My desire matched another’s,
Impossible match
Flaring momentarily, a force
 
That couldn’t be reckoned with,
Ignored or properly fed. Much drama
Ensued, though nothing criminal,
Nothing that would get into the paper.
 
All at once I was the boiling liquid
Lapping at a frozen pond, no longer
A petrified sapling beyond burning.
 
Perhaps this was ordinary, too,
Only seeming extraordinary,
Out of proportion, due to a lack of
Perspective (the previously reported
 
Position of neutrality). It was as if
Instead of growing little by little,
Like any other infant creature,
 
A fully formed being
Tried to hatch from its shell,
Making the birth more violent, more
Difficult than usual. The sound
 
Of that hard shell cracking, sharp
Shards shattering—I hear it still,
Feel the pressure, the push and pull.
 
It is good to be a wooden spoon
And not be broken.
A wooden spoon stirring,
Stirring, changes everything.
 
From An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street Press, 2025)
First published in Raritan  

 

We both are silent for several moments after Phillis reads.

 

FR: I was just thinking, this takes me back to those days when I was meditating a lot, and practicing yoga and meditation, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, and there is something about the silence after the sound. You can pick it up in Cathedrals. When you walk in the choir hasn’t been there since Sunday, but you can still feel the vibration of their singing. I just wanted to have that experience of the silence after hearing you read “Wooden Spoon.” I didn’t know I wanted it until you finished, and to explain it to you would cut the silence short.

 

You can’t have that kind of silence without the sound first. After you read that poem, I thought, okay, I’m just going to listen.

 

PL: That’s beautiful. Even though I am interested in philosophy and landscape and urban reality there is a way that this is a metaphysical poem and also concerns the metamorphosis of a person. I’m sure it’s more revealing than I would have allowed myself to be. Somehow in this poem I gain access again to that memory of being on the outside. I think I’ve never gotten over appreciating enjoying being with people, talking with people, because I was so isolated when I was young.

 

FR:  This moment where you say, “Flaring momentarily, a force // That couldn’t be reckoned with, / Ignored or properly fed….”  Would you say more about that force?

 

PL: That force, an “Impossible match,” does not refer to one person or one experience, it epitomizes or is a simulacrum of something I cannot name. Perhaps the cliché expression would be “an all-consuming passion” or a “total attraction.” There are times when Eros is so powerful that it cannot be integrated into one’s life or renders someone incapable of making sense of it. It’s just there. People talk about a religious experience like that. It’s like being possessed. There are certain experiences so absolute that they can’t be explained or domesticated. They can’t be civilized. They can’t be contained.

 

This book was difficult to organize because there are some elegiac poems, and I don’t write many elegies. I thought “God, do I separate them, do they sort of stick together?” I finally found a segue, but it was not easy. So where do I put “Wooden Spoon?” It kept moving from one place to another in the collection, I didn’t know where it belonged. Then I realized it’s an ending that’s also an opening, so I made it the final poem—because I think a good ending is an opening.

 

 

Photo © Sigrid Estrada
 

 

Phillis Levin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently An Anthology of Rain, forthcoming from Barrow Street Press in April 2025. Her previous collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Levin’s honors include the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Trust of Amy Lowell, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is included in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, edited by Kevin Young (Knopf, 2025).

 

website:  www.phillislevin.com
Instagram:  @phillislevinpoet