a reckoning by fire

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:

there was

Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

 - Jacques J. Rancourt, from his essay "Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis" from the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry. You can read the whole thing here.

being vulnerable to being understood

I wasn’t consciously trying to make anything accessible, nor was I trying, on the other hand to be obscure or priestly, as the Modernists tried to be. I have nothing against being accessible. I think there’s certain pleasure in that—the poems being vulnerable to being understood. A lot of young poets don’t want to be understood, because they feel that when they’re understood, they’re dead. But I think that fear only comes from criticism—the vast inhibition they get from reading critics who, because they can understand something, simply decide not to deal with it. I think it’s very difficult to deal with a fantastically complete, utterly accessible lyric by Thomas Hardy, which already says everything it intends to say. It defies criticism. It says Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler, sure, come ahead, say what you have to say: I’ll make you look hopeless.

Donald Justice comes to mind in this way. He wanted to write a poem so completely that the only thing he could say about it that would be accurate would be its recitation.

- Larry Levis, from an interview in Antioch Review, as quoted by Chris Banks on his Table Music blog. You can read a slightly longer version of the quote here. Thanks, Chris!

a long walk in the dark

I think that most poets labor joyously a long time to learn the language, to hear it, to speak it, to write it. It is also important to read poetry for me, to see how other men and women have used language during their time on earth. Beyond that process, which goes on all the time, there is simply a long walk in the dark - and the sweet electrical moment in which a fresh poem occurs. Though this may be the same poem that has occured through the ages. It may even be the same moment, friends.

- Larry Levis' "Coda: A Word to the Wicked", originally published in Rolling Stone in 1973, and republished posthumously in Levis' The Gazer Within.

they make poetry harmless

What interests me here is a deeper poetics, one that tries to grasp what happens at the moment of writing itself—not a discussion that indulges in prolonging what Marvin Bell has called the pointless “dualisms” of form versus content; nor a poetics that praises one kind of poem as organic while denouncing another as artificial. Ultimately, the trouble with such classroom determinations is that they do reduce poetry to technique, to something stripped of vision, something which gives the illusion of being soluble through either/or choices; they make poetry harmless. And in doing so, they lie. We all know that poetry had better come, if not “as naturally as Leaves to the Tree,” then at least with something more alive and luminous than a servile, cynic’s technique. We know that a poem made to order from theory is slave labor, just as we also know that a poem, any poem, is artificial in one huge respect—if only because, as Eliot’s character so famously complained: “I gotta use words when I talk to you.”

- Larry Levis, from his essay "Some Notes on the Gazer Within", originally published in Field in 1986, and republished posthumously in Levis' The Gazer Within.

how my mortality can be insulted

I don't believe I can bear witness to [suburban] landscapes for long without feeling merely exhaused, drained, and spiritually beaten. In these places I must do all the looking, all the gazing. Because no one has ever died into such landscapes, it may be that no one can live in them, either: I don't know. I do know that as I watch my eyes pay enormous tax while the gazer inside me dies for a few moments.

This death has something to do with time. Tract housing, most suburbs, malls, and shopping centers on the perimeter of any city or town seem to wish, in their designs, to be beyond time, outside time. To stare for three hours at a Kmart is to feel myself rapidly aging, not Kmart. And this is not an experience of my own mortality, either. It is only a way of feeling how that mortality can be insulted.

- Larry Levis, from his essay "Some Notes on the Gazer Within", originally published in Field in 1986, and republished posthumously in Levis' The Gazer Within.