We’re talking today with Mathias Svalina and David St. John about the new collected Larry Levis book Swirl and Vortex, which has just come out from Graywolf Press.
Mathias has been a long-time reader and scholar of Levis’ work, and so I knew I needed him on here today. He’s been on this podcast many times; he is the author of many books of poetry, including most recently Thank You Terror (Big Lucks, 2024), and the prose book Comedy, from Trident Press.
David St. John is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Auroras (2012), The Window (2014), and The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems, 2017. He is the recipient of many honors, including the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Venice Beach, California. And to the point he has edited several posthumous collections of poetry by Larry Levis, including the Selected Levis, The Darkening Trapeze, and the book we are talking about today, Swirl and Vortex.
Levis’ poems hold an enormous sense of loneliness, a fiercest singular speaker beyond the “illusion of community.” I thought this was so true, as I see so many of his poems
I think there’s this continuous movement of being among people, yet they’re so immaterial the moment they’re more solid—every time there’s a woman, if she’s not already disappeared, she’s about to disappear— or a man he’s just met, or his father, or someone he’s working beside—you know the speaker is passing, and about to be alone—
they too are next, always turning away and walking away….the veil is “thin” between living and dead, and one dwells just there—
as this imagery of thinness is so throughout
I wonder what stays? What objects are tangible here…
I am thinking of the nothing and the something of the poems…
The Cry, for example:
Then, everything slept,
The sky & the fields slept all the way to the Pacific.
And the houses slept.
The orchards blackened in their sleep…
One of his earliest poems is “Morning After My Own Death” as someone who DID end up dying young, it has a haunted tone to it. But I’m musing on the fact that poets seem so often(or at least the poems I seem to love) are always speaking posthumously. Always have this unique relationship to what might be what is beyond the pleasure principle.
The Self sounds like a guy raking leaves
Off his walk. It sounds like the scrape of the rake.
The soul is just a story the scraping tells.
The Self has no story. It is a sound. It scrapes
Against all things. He lets the rake do all
The talking now, the raked walk keeps the stars
From blowing out of the night sky
Above his house.
This endless elegy note in all the words, it moves like one voice through a graveyard that is also somehow never gloomy, never gothic, never fixed to the ground but staring at the ground— not in the ground, but considering the roots in the ground— from a vantage point of one who has already moved through the cycle of death—
Like Rilke his poems seem more like the angels, or the torn robe of the angel that’s left clutched in the hand of the man frozen outside a bar….they don’t want the ghoulishness of death, they want the exact moment the soul moves from within the interior to the exterior, and to hold that position.