your hand on someone else's heartbeat

When my husband was in the late stages of his terminal illness, he asked me to read him poetry. He didn't ask for short stories, or essays, or news articles, or the first crisp pages of a novel, with its unfolding narrative weight. The request was unexpected. Despite his five (almost five and a half) decades on this earth, he'd never been much of a reader, though he was incredibly knowledgeable about the world, often serving as my first editor, catching errors or incongruities in my poetry or prose, the wrong slip of a word. And so, without much thought as to why poetry, most evening I obliged him: ferrying a few collections from my study to the living room where he lay on a rented hospital bed, largely paralyzed from both his brain tumour and the muscle-weakening trudge of a year and a half of medications aimed at keeping him alive. From an old loveseat, under faerie lights, our three dogs sleeping around us, I'd read a poem or two from each book, never welling too long on one poet in case the poems I'd selected didn't speak to him in the way he hoped, in that moment, to be spoken to. I suppose, in a strange way, I was curating an anthology for him. 

What strikes me now, about the poems I chose to read to him in late 2018, is how steeped they were in tenderness and knowing. There was one poet's knowing of his own impending death, there was another poet's Buddhist knowing of love - what it means to try at that beautiful and hopeful thing, whether that light is directed at the self, or another, or the world. I've thought a lot about "why poetry" this past year. Why it is, to my mind, the most powerful and instantaneous of the arts. The feeling I get from encountering a good poem is like turning around on a busy street only to discover I've nearly collided with a stranger: the two of us suddenly very close in an unexpected and vivifying way. I admire the visual arts - galleries are one of my life's great pleasures - but in apprehending an artwork there still seems to be a kind of mediating distance that is greater than the intimacy felt when reading a poem. Poetry's cousin, music, is immediate in its own way, but often the maker of the music seems distant - on the other side of the swelling strings and swirling oboes and the musicians playing the composer's notes. In poetry you  have your hand on someone else's heartbeat.

- Aislinn Hunter, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2025. 

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.