Accompanying Dana Levin’s poem in the fall issue of the Kenyon Review, GC Waldrep’s interview with her in KR Online gives generous insight into her ways and means as a poet, addressing satisfyingly specific aspects of craft. Once every few months I encounter the thing I have been waiting for, the words that will shake down all this noise into some sudden, temporary song. This does. Here’s a starter snippet from the interview:
The most recurrent stylistic element in your work is the almost continual posing of questions, almost always addressed to a “you.” What place does the interrogative have in your conception of poetry?
I think, at first, as a poet in her mid-to-late twenties writing towards Surgical, questions became a way of pulling the reins on the insistent rhythm and graphic visions (blood, guts, etc) most of the poems were pressing. I was afraid of these poems. On the surface, I was afraid of their autobiographical content, afraid of what my parents would think, what my writing peers would think, what the LangPo poets would think (laughs). But more deeply, I think I was afraid of the force of these poems.
Levin describes the initial image that drove her first collection, In The Surgical Theater: the image of a chest opening to reveal [X]. She sources this later to her birth–she underwent major surgery as a newborn–and she talks through how it works to share your story, what the telling does and what work the telling could possibly offer a reader. Not that her poetry reads like a story. With both of her first two collections I have raced in–I love her ideas, the frames she sets, am attracted like a moth to her confident line breaks and punctuation, am absolutely sure she is the real deal–and then backed out again, slowly, to try again with more measure. I find it impossible to stay away from Levin’s work because of what happens when I do manage to plant myself at an intersection one of her poems will cross. All this to say the interview cleared a space for this slow reader through which to reenter her poetry.
Her poem “Zozo-ji” in the fall issue of the Kenyon Review pulls at internet skin to look at the real loss of others: “In long rows, stone children in bibs and hats, the smell of pine and cooled earth – // It was a temple / for the babied dead. I found it via the Internet.”
Ah, the internet. Here we are, and here I am, writing my blog while the baby sleeps, tracking my husband’s flight home on the internet, unreadable glow from the street; hers is a poem quite grounded in narrative but most arresting in the questions it doesn’t ask: why the website? who else visits the site? what was Levin looking for when she found it? This poem lets the babies go too easily, and so the reader automatically reaches to catch them, but they’re water–I think here of Levin’s earlier image of the chest opening, and what is that inside? A baby dies, fair enough, but what does it mean to make it water? How let them float away? And then what of this site, tracking visitors as all sites do, and babblefishing metaphors?
The last thing Levin discusses in the interview is prophesy:
“I really like the way Ginsberg talks about it (in a 1965 Paris Review interview): “What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It’s that you know and feel something which somebody knows and feels in a hundred years.” This idea of prophecy being a feeling, perhaps even before it is a knowing, feels accurate to me. If insistent, incantatory rhythm feels prophetic, perhaps this rhythm (and the poem it carries) makes plain what we feel in our bodies: little spurs of anxiety, or numinosity, or the impending, still inchoate and inarticulate, yet significant, in a won’t-leave-you-alone kind of way, in the incantatory systole/diastole song of the heart beating.”
As readers we rarely acknowledge where we are in our own lives when we encounter art that moves us, but I think it matters–I think it’s a significant, if unspoken, part of what it is to be moved, and so I will tell you where I was. Before my son was born, years before, I began writing a novel in verse which, to my surprise, increasingly focused on a woman who was about to give birth, but instead the baby she was carrying died in utero, and it was days before she learned that the baby had died. This was someone else’s loss I’d heard about, someone else’s story which I took up. As I grew increasingly pregnant, I kept working on this manuscript, trying to finish it before my son was born. I stopped meeting with my writing group because I couldn’t understand why I was writing these poems and couldn’t bear to share them. One night my son stopped kicking and the midwife sent us to the hospital, where we learned that his heartbeat was slowing down and that I needed to have an emergency C-section to try to save him. Like Levin, I wonder what relevance my story has for others, and what writing it does. A poet friend of mine says that the poems I was writing saved my son’s life, in that they kept me attuned to wrong stillness. But what if it was the other way? I fear that the poems instead leaked out, that the stillborn baby I was writing about moved towards my son, that I cleared a path.
The role of the question: Levin speaks of questions as harnesses and I marvel at that. There’s only one question in her poem, and its reply shrugs off the borrowed sweater:
When her lord asked her again how it died, she said
As an echo off the cliffs of Kegon.