Heather Derr-Smith's Blog
June 1, 2016
Larry Levis,The Darkening Trapeze, & Le plaisir du texte
The highlight of my AWP 2016 was attending a panel in memory of Larry Levis and in celebration of the posthumous publication of The Darkening Trapeze, a compilation loving assembled by David St. John and Gray Wolf Press. The panel featured marvelously lyric and moving remembrances by David St. John, Linda Gregorson, Carolyn Forche, and Mark Doty, all very close to Larry Levis in his life and in his work. Even ten years after his death, the grief and sense of profound loss these friends held in their bodies was palpable in the room. I felt extremely privileged to be witnessing such an abiding love among the dearest of friends.
During the panel Mark Doty spoke at length about the evolution of the representation of the self in poetry from the Romantics into Contemporary work. When I was a student at the University of Virginia in the 1990’s Deconstructionism and Post-structuralism were all abuzz. Even though I knew I wanted to be a poet, I chose Art History as my major, rather than English, because of the wild foment of possibilities I found in the conversations around the Art History table with regards to these theories. It was a very strange situation, though, because the place where I ended up in my wrestling with Derrida and Barthes and others was very different from that of many of my peers and was heavily influenced by the thinking of my professor and mentor at the time, the extraordinary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman.
Clad in her signature fishnet stockings, cigarette dangling from a finger, and the liberal use of the word “fuck” in her Romanian/Israeli/French inflections, her talks and seminars often drew crowds that packed the largest lecture halls and the tiniest conference rooms, with students pressed against the walls and spilling out the door. She was a remarkable scholar who contributed immeasurable gifts to the understanding of Picasso’s work. And she did it through this intuitive approach, befriending Picasso’s lover Marie Therese and learning about the artist’s loves and obsessions, the life of his mind and heart, and these were the signs and wonders she uncovered in his work.
Lydia often began class with some scripture, maybe from the Book of John, In the beginning was the word and the word was God or a bit of Kabbalah. The message she transmitted to me was one of the holiness and sacredness of art and of poetry and writing, and its ecstatic, mystical possibilities as so much of our time was spent in the surrealist poems that Picasso loved and in the texts of Derrida and Bataille and Barthes.
What I learned through that study and reading was a positioning of myself as an artist/writer/human being who could face the problem of meaning and truth and structure, interrogate the assumptions of conventionality and narrative, and yet, speak and testify anyway as an act of resistance, and perhaps even, in some mystical way as an act of faith. What I carried away from those seminars, I find in Levis’ work. That we can never know. That there may not be any truth. That at the end the self will come to disembodiment.
Mark Doty in his tribute at Gray Wolf Press describes it like this, “What then is an “I” but a swirl of snow and a gust of cold air? In this way the poems are both “confessional” (recalling and recasting the difficult hours of a life) and “post-confessional” in that they never forget their doubts about what a self is. The autobiographical “I” is bound in time, but in a Levis poem, it seems to leak out, again and again, into the timeless, into a distance from which it’s possible to look back into the world of particulars and forward into the realm of emptiness.”
And yet, nevertheless, we speak it anyway. We speak the particular. That we choose to speak, and to tell, and to testify, knowing we fall short every time and will in the end dissolve into emptiness. It’s that rebellion in Larry Levis I love so much and want to live by.
To me, this speaking, or testimony, and this form of rebellion is a profound act of grace and of love and Larry Levis is for me, “a lyric and moral example” (to quote Linda Gregerson on the panel). Levis often wrote about the “swoon” or “swirl” in his poetry–those moments when he lost himself to a sweeping current that to my mind and heart feels so much like what I have known of love and falling in love–that ecstatic unraveling of the self and then the surviving remains of the self in the aftermath.
During the panel Mark Doty spoke at length about the evolution of the representation of the self in poetry from the Romantics into Contemporary work. When I was a student at the University of Virginia in the 1990’s Deconstructionism and Post-structuralism were all abuzz. Even though I knew I wanted to be a poet, I chose Art History as my major, rather than English, because of the wild foment of possibilities I found in the conversations around the Art History table with regards to these theories. It was a very strange situation, though, because the place where I ended up in my wrestling with Derrida and Barthes and others was very different from that of many of my peers and was heavily influenced by the thinking of my professor and mentor at the time, the extraordinary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman.
Clad in her signature fishnet stockings, cigarette dangling from a finger, and the liberal use of the word “fuck” in her Romanian/Israeli/French inflections, her talks and seminars often drew crowds that packed the largest lecture halls and the tiniest conference rooms, with students pressed against the walls and spilling out the door. She was a remarkable scholar who contributed immeasurable gifts to the understanding of Picasso’s work. And she did it through this intuitive approach, befriending Picasso’s lover Marie Therese and learning about the artist’s loves and obsessions, the life of his mind and heart, and these were the signs and wonders she uncovered in his work.
Lydia often began class with some scripture, maybe from the Book of John, In the beginning was the word and the word was God or a bit of Kabbalah. The message she transmitted to me was one of the holiness and sacredness of art and of poetry and writing, and its ecstatic, mystical possibilities as so much of our time was spent in the surrealist poems that Picasso loved and in the texts of Derrida and Bataille and Barthes.
What I learned through that study and reading was a positioning of myself as an artist/writer/human being who could face the problem of meaning and truth and structure, interrogate the assumptions of conventionality and narrative, and yet, speak and testify anyway as an act of resistance, and perhaps even, in some mystical way as an act of faith. What I carried away from those seminars, I find in Levis’ work. That we can never know. That there may not be any truth. That at the end the self will come to disembodiment.
Mark Doty in his tribute at Gray Wolf Press describes it like this, “What then is an “I” but a swirl of snow and a gust of cold air? In this way the poems are both “confessional” (recalling and recasting the difficult hours of a life) and “post-confessional” in that they never forget their doubts about what a self is. The autobiographical “I” is bound in time, but in a Levis poem, it seems to leak out, again and again, into the timeless, into a distance from which it’s possible to look back into the world of particulars and forward into the realm of emptiness.”
And yet, nevertheless, we speak it anyway. We speak the particular. That we choose to speak, and to tell, and to testify, knowing we fall short every time and will in the end dissolve into emptiness. It’s that rebellion in Larry Levis I love so much and want to live by.
To me, this speaking, or testimony, and this form of rebellion is a profound act of grace and of love and Larry Levis is for me, “a lyric and moral example” (to quote Linda Gregerson on the panel). Levis often wrote about the “swoon” or “swirl” in his poetry–those moments when he lost himself to a sweeping current that to my mind and heart feels so much like what I have known of love and falling in love–that ecstatic unraveling of the self and then the surviving remains of the self in the aftermath.
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, & David Bowie
After a night of physical and emotional excess, I spent the whole rainy afternoon in my bed reading Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, a book I found in the NYRB (New York Review Books) Classics section of Book Court, a lovely little bookstore in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I had never spent a lot of time with Genet, and was surprised to learn that he had committed so much of his energy to the Palestinian cause in the 1970’s.
It’s a beautiful book and it brought me back to my own time spent with Palestinians in Syria, remembering my very first night in Damascus around a table at midnight with Palestinian poets in exile from Iraq, feasting on Maklubah, the upside down chicken, an Arabic tradition at every celebration. This was in the midst of the 2007 Iraqi troop surge, and fierce fighting in Fallujah that brought young activists and volunteers crossing back and forth over the Iraq-Syrian border to report on the war with Alive in Baghdad and to run ambulances and humanitarian aid convoys into the besieged city. At the table that night with the poets were some of these volunteers, as well as activists from Jafra Center in Yarmouk Camp, home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Damascus, now overrun by ISIL, but at the time, a thriving city within the city with its own distinct culture and civil organizations. At the table was also a man who was on his way to crossing back into Iraq to ransom a relative being held hostage by the Mahdi Army.
Jean Genet begins Prisoner of Love with this note, written at the top of the final proofs of his book, which was published after his death:
“Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.”
Is that why I went to Syria? Was I looking in the desert for all the images in language? I think it is why I went then and why I still go into places that feel like desert, or to use the Biblical word, wilderness. The places of extreme human experience, whether it is a conflict zone or that brutal geography of the human body and its desires. I think of Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness, the place of temptations of the flesh.
Jean Genet, is most known for the latter sorts of landscapes, the topography of the erotic and his unyielding insistence on crossing boundaries, transgressing deeper into forbidden territory. In this place, too, he was mining the image. I knew about his criminal youth and his prostitution and pornography. I didn’t know about his alignment with revolutionary political movements and with people wandering in exile. All of these parallel and sometimes intersecting streams of passion make sense to me, all terrain that will yield the image, if someone is willing to go and get it.
After reading and reminiscing, I stumbled across Tin Machine’s video for Prisoner of Love. David Bowie, sitting on the edge of the stage in perfect repose,bathed in blue light while all those boys leap off the edge into the crowd below. Those were the shows of my youth, the mosh pit and stage dive. Those clubs were where my heart was learning how to take risks, where its muscle and sinew was being strengthened so that I could pilgrimage into places where the image can be found.
I also found David Bowie’s video for the song, Jean Genie, and was surprised and happy to learn its connections to Jean Genet, subconscious or not. The song imagined an Iggy Pop style wanderer, and that seems perfect, too. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jean Genet, all traversing the same barriers, breaking down binaries, going in to love’s rebellion full thrust and unrepentant. They took great personal risks and what they brought us all was a larger country of love to make our home in. It’s a revolutionary work, art pushing out the boundaries, making more space for more of us in all of our human desire. Because of Genet and Bowie and Iggy Pop and countless others, my trans son now has a place at the table.
It’s a beautiful book and it brought me back to my own time spent with Palestinians in Syria, remembering my very first night in Damascus around a table at midnight with Palestinian poets in exile from Iraq, feasting on Maklubah, the upside down chicken, an Arabic tradition at every celebration. This was in the midst of the 2007 Iraqi troop surge, and fierce fighting in Fallujah that brought young activists and volunteers crossing back and forth over the Iraq-Syrian border to report on the war with Alive in Baghdad and to run ambulances and humanitarian aid convoys into the besieged city. At the table that night with the poets were some of these volunteers, as well as activists from Jafra Center in Yarmouk Camp, home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Damascus, now overrun by ISIL, but at the time, a thriving city within the city with its own distinct culture and civil organizations. At the table was also a man who was on his way to crossing back into Iraq to ransom a relative being held hostage by the Mahdi Army.
Jean Genet begins Prisoner of Love with this note, written at the top of the final proofs of his book, which was published after his death:
“Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.”
Is that why I went to Syria? Was I looking in the desert for all the images in language? I think it is why I went then and why I still go into places that feel like desert, or to use the Biblical word, wilderness. The places of extreme human experience, whether it is a conflict zone or that brutal geography of the human body and its desires. I think of Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness, the place of temptations of the flesh.
Jean Genet, is most known for the latter sorts of landscapes, the topography of the erotic and his unyielding insistence on crossing boundaries, transgressing deeper into forbidden territory. In this place, too, he was mining the image. I knew about his criminal youth and his prostitution and pornography. I didn’t know about his alignment with revolutionary political movements and with people wandering in exile. All of these parallel and sometimes intersecting streams of passion make sense to me, all terrain that will yield the image, if someone is willing to go and get it.
After reading and reminiscing, I stumbled across Tin Machine’s video for Prisoner of Love. David Bowie, sitting on the edge of the stage in perfect repose,bathed in blue light while all those boys leap off the edge into the crowd below. Those were the shows of my youth, the mosh pit and stage dive. Those clubs were where my heart was learning how to take risks, where its muscle and sinew was being strengthened so that I could pilgrimage into places where the image can be found.
I also found David Bowie’s video for the song, Jean Genie, and was surprised and happy to learn its connections to Jean Genet, subconscious or not. The song imagined an Iggy Pop style wanderer, and that seems perfect, too. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jean Genet, all traversing the same barriers, breaking down binaries, going in to love’s rebellion full thrust and unrepentant. They took great personal risks and what they brought us all was a larger country of love to make our home in. It’s a revolutionary work, art pushing out the boundaries, making more space for more of us in all of our human desire. Because of Genet and Bowie and Iggy Pop and countless others, my trans son now has a place at the table.
