John Levy, 54 Poems: Selected and New (Shearsman Press 2023)
––, To Assemble an Absence (above/ground press 2024)
––, Guest Book for People in My Dreams (Proper Tales Press 2024)
John Levy has commented generously a couple of times on this blog (here’s a link). When he emailed to ask if I’d like a copy of his recent book, with no expectation to blog about it, of course I said yes, provided I could send him one of mine. So we swapped books: I sent him two, he sent me three, an unequal exchange in more ways than the obvious. He has responded to my efforts with what I now know to be his characteristic generosity. And now I am blogging about his, motivated by joy, not obligation.
John’s books arrived when I was sitting down to lunch with the Emerging Artist and our grandchildren. I flipped 54 Poems open to the first page, and read out the prose poem ‘Kyoto’:
Kyoto
I'm at a temple. A young monk in black robes walks by, looks at me,
stops. He points to my long hair. Brown. Then to my goatee. Red. He
touches my armpit and looks puzzled. I point to my hair. He points to
my crotch. I point to my hair. He invites me in for green tea.
The children liked it, probably because of the crotch reference. The Emerging Artist liked it, possibly because of the colour play. I liked it for both those reasons, and also for the comedy about communication and connection that don’t need words.
These three books reminded me that poetry can be a lot of fun. It can deal with death and loss, all manner of elevated cultural matters, or issues encountered when working in a Public Defender’s office, and still be fun. It can talk to goats and spiders and be silly about words, while still being serious. It can be warm without being goopy, and self-referential without being wanky.
Naturally, I went Googling. Among other things, I found John being interviewed on the website of Touch the Donkey, a small quarterly poetry journal published by above/ground press, publishers of one of these chapbooks. In that interview, he describes his approach:
I begin writing a poem (or prose poem) without knowing what I am going to say after the first few words that I thought of to begin with. Sometimes … I begin with a friend in mind and want to write something for the friend although I usually haven’t figured out anything beyond wanting to write something to that friend.
It’s poetry impro.
No doubt these poems have been polished and revised, but they retain the feeling of immediacy, of the poet’s mind chasing associations like a distractable child in a toy shop, and then they resolve themselves as if by magic.
I’ll stick to ‘Levy’sAccordion Straps’ on page 77–78*. I apologise for the quality of these images:
You could call this a rabbit-hole poem. It doesn’t start in exactly the way Levy describes in the interview above, but it’s in the same paddock. It’s a comic version of close reading: he takes a single word from Gregory O’Brien’s poem ‘A Genealogy’ (of which we know nothing else), and sees where it takes him. Maybe it’s the obsessive copy editor in me, but I love it that the poem starts from what turns out to be a misspelling. We tend to think of USA-ers as culturally arrogant, but Levy here has the humility to check the ‘variant’, and then stays open to the possibility that they do things differently in New Zealand. (There’s an Easter egg in line 24: Levy slips in a typo of his own, adding a space in Angelo Dipippo’s surname.)
As the poem progresses in an apparently random manner, it turns out that it features quite a bit of English as spoken/written by people not from the USA. There’s quiet humour, but not, I think, mockery. The last line made me laugh out loud. Instead of seeing the ‘detour’ as taking him away for a moment from O’Brien’s poem, he sees it as having changed the kind of attention he brings to it.
And now, because it’s November, here’s an hommage (with an advance note – Mruphy’s [sic] Law decrees, ‘If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written’):
Verse 10: Dear John
YouTube. Angelo Di Pippo
plays, you said, 'La vie en rose'.
I can’t find him (you’ve got a typo
in his surname, Mruphy knows).
I do find other Piaf splendours –
Galliano working wonders.
Music takes me in its arms,
an infant whose late night alarms
are soothed by father’s tender crooning.
Jean, who says she’s ninety-one,
comments that life then was fun.
I googled “Levy’s straps” this morning,
found them, surfed around some more,
found fancy watch straps made by Shaw.
I finished this blog post on Awabakal country, near what is now one of the biggest coal ports in the world. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.
* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.
Me fail? I fly! 