Denise Levertov Quotes

"Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.

("A Tree Telling of Orpheus")"

Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons
off the tree! I don't want
to forget who I am, what has burned in me,
and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

"The yellow moon dreamily
tipping buttons of light
down among the leaves. Marimba,
marimba - from beyond the
black street.
Somebody dancing,
somebody
getting the hell
outta here. Shadows of cats
weave round the treetrunks,
the exposed knotty roots.

("Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees")"

The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry. To use it is to misuse it.

What I invaded has invaded me.

so many writers and readers, that “deep spiritual longing” Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both writer and reader, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world — a criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to receive.

You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow. You the unchanging presence, in whom all moves and changes. How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain's heart the sapphire I know is there?

He quotes Ezra Pound saying in a 1948 manifesto, “You must understand what is happening”; and makes it clear the significant emphasis is on “what is happening,” the presentness, the process. “Most verse,” Duncan comments, “is something being made up to communicate a thing already present in the mind — or a lot of it is. And don’t pay the attention it shld to what the poet don’t know — and won’t [know] until the process speaks.

Two girls discover the secret of life
in a sudden line of poetry.

I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride' — hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

And not till he saw the angel had left him, alone and free to resume the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of what he had still to do, not till then did he recognize this was no dream.

"A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light — facets
of the forming crystal."

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

There is a fence around the garden but the gate stands open.

I am not joking. I'm speaking of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way.