Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry

by Gregory Donovan (Editor), Michele Poulos (Editor)

Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry is a collection of the full-length transcriptions of the extended interviews Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos conducted with a group of America’s most notable poets—including two U.S. Poet Laureates—in making the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. These discussions cover not only their relationships with Levis and his poetry, but also more wide-ranging commentaries on a broad spectrum of American literary life.

Prismatics reflects the multiple angles of perception provided by its fourteen participating poets, including David St. John (who also contributed the foreword), Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Norman Dubie, Gerald Stern, Carolyn Forché, Stanley Plumly, Colleen McElroy, David Wojahn, Carol Muske-Dukes, Kathleen Graber, Peter Everwine, Charles Hanzlicek, and Gail Wronsky. The book’s title points out that Levis’s personal and professional life as a writer provides a prism which leads these discussions to range broadly into a wider portrait of a highly influential era of poets and poetics, personified not only in Levis, but in each of the poets interviewed. In these lively, spontaneous conversations, Prismatics provides an informed and intimate portrait of the risks and triumphs of a life in poetry, a discussion of distinct intellectual, practical, and historical value that’s also emotionally involving—and quite entertaining.

292 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2020

About the author

Gregory Donovan has authored the poetry collections TORN FROM THE SUN, newly published by Red Hen Press, and CALLING HIS CHILDREN HOME, winner of the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press, as well as poetry, essays, and fiction published in a great variety of print and online journals. Born in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas and raised by adoptive parents in St. Louis, Missouri, he later attended the University of Missouri, Columbia. After college, he lived and worked in North Carolina for some years before going on to earn an M.A. at the University of Utah and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University where his dissertation director was the novelist John Gardner. Donovan now teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, a program which he helped establish, and he is Senior Editor of the well-known online journal BLACKBIRD (http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu). With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he also has produced A LATE STYLE OF FIRE, a documentary about the life and work of the poet Larry Levis featuring music composed by Iron & Wine, due out in 2015.

Reviews

[Kevin Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry and I were separated by too much of a difference in age and then physical location for me to really know him. He was of my parent's generation - my great-aunt's son - he would be 73 if still alive today.
This book of interviews is wonderful - got to more about Larry and just ordered another book of his poems. There are many descriptions in the book about the central valley that I recognize from my youth. Wish I could sit down with him and have ale and talk.
One postscript: It is really nice to know that he is considered one of the best American poets of the last century.