Denise Levertov Quotes

holiness does not dissolve,

Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust. You are given the questions of others as if they were answers to all you ask. Yes, perhaps this gift is your answer.

As Andersen told it, the tale was not for young children, not even called ‘The Little’-just, ‘The Mermaid.’ It’s about love and grief, a myth of longing and sacrifice, far closer, say, to Goethe’s Parable than to any jovial folktale, much less to today’s manufactured juvenile distractions.

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall — out in the light it
shows clear, whether
shrunken or known as
a giant wrath — discrete
at least, where before

its great shadow joined
the walls and roof and seemed
to uphold the hall like a beam.

Looking, Walking, Being

I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
Sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.
The eyes
Dig and burrow in the world.
They touch
Fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
Not only
Visible present, solid and shadow
That looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
Of echo and interruption?
That’s
A way of breathing,

breathing to sustain
Looking,
Walking and looking,
Through the world,
In it.

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.

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.

What I invaded as invaded me.

"To the Reader"

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

Each minute the last minute.

বিবাহের অবিরাম বেদনা
বিবাহের অবিরাম বেদনা:
উরু আর জিভ, হে প্রিয়,
এর সঙ্গে বেশ ভারি,
তা দাঁতে স্পন্দিত হয়

আমরা আংশিদারীর চেষ্টা করি
কিন্তু ফিরিয়ে দেয়া হয়, হে প্রিয়,
প্রত্যেকে আর প্রত্যেকে

এটা হল প্রকাণ্ড হাঙর আর আমরা
তার পেটের ভেতরে
আনন্দ খুঁজি, কোনও আনন্দ
যা এর বাইরে জানা যাবে না
দুই বনাম দুই এর সিন্দুকের
মধ্যে এর অবিরাম বেদনা ।

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.

When I am a woman — O, when I am
a woman,
my wells of salt brim and brim,
poems force the lock of my throat.

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

..and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.