Laureate |
[Aug. 10th, 2011|04:53 pm]
rejectomorph
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So, Philip Levine. One would expect poetry coming from Fresno to be a bit prosaic, and so it often is. It's frequently delightful prose, divided into lines like poems, but my mind always puts it into regular sentences and paragraphs as I read.
That flat place on the gridded valley floor, with its hazy distances and its monotonous rows of trees, the sky oddly washed out on most of those days when it has any clarity at all— it's an odd place for verse to grow, even irrigated by the largess of the California State University system. Like most of the San Joaquin Valley, Fresno is all vagueness and jumble, its few landmarks the work of mostly prosaic artifice, and unless it is one of those rare days when the bordering mountains are visible, it's very easy to get lost there.
To be perfectly fair, Levine is known to spend little over half the year in Fresno, and spends the remainder in Brooklyn. He spends summers in Brooklyn. I think that says something about Fresno's summer climate. Now and then in reading Levine one finds a line or two about a harbor. I'm sure they do not refer to Stockton or Sacramento. If a poet from Fresno did not occasionally escape to some place outside the valley, his work would probably end up as dessicated as Fresno's raisins. What's left when a grape is dried by the sun is sweet, but I always find myself missing the juice. Philip Levine is fortunate that there are highways leading out of the San Joaquin Valley.
Wednesday Verse
Everything
by Philip Levine
Lately the wind burns the last leaves and evening comes too late to be of use, lately I learned that the year has turned its face to winter and nothing I say or do can change anything. So I sleep late and waken long after the sun has risen in an empty house and walk the dusty halls or sit and listen to the wind creak in the eaves and struts of this old house. I say tomorrow will be different but I know it won't. I know the days are shortening and when the sun pools at my feet I can reach into that magic circle and not be burned. So I take the few things that matter, my book, my glasses, my father's ring, my brush, and put them aside in a brown sack and wait— someone is coming for me. A voice I've never heard will speak my name or a face press to the window as mine once pressed when the world held me out. I had to see what it was it loved so much. Nothing had time to show me how a leaf spun itself from water or water cried itself to sleep for every human thirst. Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.
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