Happy birthday, Denise Levertov! Here are some quotes from the writer:

“to go / just that much further, beyond the end / beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.”

“There comes a time when only anger / is love.”

“Solitude within multitude seduced me early.”

“returning to the mirror / to see if I’m there.”

“Solemn filaments, our journeyings / wind through the overcast.”

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

“Poetry is and should be part of resistance movements, including the anti-nuclear movement.”

“The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kinetic force, it sets in motion…elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.”

“I believe poets are instruments on which the power of poetry plays. But they are also makers, craftsmen: It is given to the seer to see, but it is then his responsibility to communicate what he sees, that they who cannot see may see, since we are ‘members one of another.'”

“I believe every space and every comma is a living part of the poem and has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem’s life.”

“I believe content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery. The revelation of form itself can be a deep joy; yet I think form as means should never obtrude, whether from intention or carelessness, between the reader and the essential force of the poem, it must be so focused with that force.”

“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’—the 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.”

“Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, ‘God and the imagination are one,’ I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion. and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.”

“Language, coral island
accrued from human comprehensions,
human dreams,
you are eroded as war erodes us.”

“Days, like the emanations of a dream,
gather me up into their secret folds;
centred in sorrow, they fall
to the green pool of the evening, or burn
with solitude or love, a wandering flame of love.”

Art (after Gautier)

The best work is made
from hard, strong materials,
obstinately precise—
the line of the poem, onyx, steel.

It’s not a question of
false constraints—but
to move well and get somewhere
wear shoes that fit.

To hell with easy rhythms—
sloppy mules that anyone can
kick off or
step into.

Sculptor, don’t bother with modeling
pliant clay; don’t let
a touch of your thumb
set your vision while it’s still vague.

Pit yourself against granite,
new basalt, carve hard ebony—
intractable
guardians of contour.

Renew the power men had in Azerbaijan
to cast ethereal intensity in bronze
and give it
force to endure any number of thousand years.

Painter, let be the “nervous scratches” the
trick spontaneity; learn to see again,
construct, break through
to “the thrill of continuance with the appearance of all
its changes,”

towards that point where “art becomes
a realization with which the urge to live
collaborates as a mason.” Use
“the mind’s tongue, that works and tastes into the
very rock heart.”

Our lives flower and pass. Only robust
works of the imagination live in eternity,
Tlaloc, Apollo,
dug out alive from dead cities.

And the austere coin
a tractor turns up in a
building site
reveals an emperor.

The gods die every day
but sovereign poems go on breathing
in a counter-rhythm that mock
the frenzy of weapons, their impudent power.

Incise, invent, file to poignance;
make your elusive dream
seal itself
in the resistant mass of crude substance.

Intrusion

After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

Making Peace

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.”

You must make, said music
in its voices of metal and wood
in its dancing diagrams, moving
apart and together, along
and over and under a line
and speaking in one voice,
make
my image. Let be
what is gone.”

—from “The Charge”

And while we fear
for the end of earth-life, even though we sing
and rejoice in each other’s beauty and comradeship,

over there they mourn
the dead and mutilated each has seen.

They have seen and seen and heard and heard
all that we will ourselves with such effort to imagine,
to summon into the understanding…

And they too sing.
They too rejoice
in each other’s beauty and comradeship:

they sing and fight. I see their spirits
visible, crowns of fire-thorn
flicker over their heads.

Our steps toward struggle
are like the first tottering of infant feet.
Could we,
if life lasts
find in ourselves
that steady courage, win
such flame-crowns?

—From “The Distance”

—what I hold fast to, grip
in my fist for amulet, is my love
of those who dare, who do dare
to struggle, dare to reject
unlived life [….] O holy innocents! I have
no virtue but to praise
you who believe
life is possible…”

—from “Staying Alive”

The new day rises
as heat rises,
knocking in the pipes
with rhythms it seizes for its own
to speak of its invention—
the real, the new-laid
egg whose speckled shell
the poet fondles and must break
if he will be nourished.

—from “Matins”