Philip Levine has died. That is the simple—the brutal—truth. I first encountered his work in the pages of a red anthology, which served as our textbook in Roger Gilbert’s modern poetry seminar at Cornell, back in the late ’80s (I still might have that book on my shelf somewhere). I remember taking great joy in the poem, “Animals are Passing From Our Lives,” with it’s bleak, defiant, somewhat mocking, and unexpected ending: “No. Not this pig.” It’s a phrase I still repeat to myself in certain situations. Similarly, “They Feed They Lion” made an impression, with the driving urgency of its language. But though these earlier works were remarkable in their own right, they barely hinted at what he would later achieve in What Work Is. For me, and many other young male poets, that book was a revelation. It deeply influenced everything I wrote thereafter, as it probably did for the likes of B.F. Fairchild, Joseph Millar, and others who would be hypnotized by the force and muscularity of his verse. Thin, taut, the cascade of lines carried the reader down the page, dragged the reader into a world that was far removed from the effete ivory towers of academia. But though they were powerful, I would not call his poems raw, for they were in fact impeccably engineered. Certainly, they taught me the importance of cadence, and the sense that you could not work on a particular line without considering every line that came before it, and the collective rhythm of the poem. I was also struck by what could only be called a dismissive attitude, a tone that said, “this is important, so forget you, if you can’t relate.” Levine also illustrated the difference between the personal and the confessional, as well as the distinction between honesty and truth; history is subjective, and therefore, so is truth—but the honesty with which we embrace that truth must be incontestable. And of course, the characters themselves, straight out of story by Isaac Babel! Nobody else was writing about such people at the time, with the intimacy that comes from first-hand knowledge and the wisdom that comes from detached regard. His politics were also out of the mainstream. As a young man, he had been an ideological communist, espousing the belief that “property is theft,” and displayed an apparent bond with the anti-fascists in Spain. This, too, influenced my work at the time.

Side note: Shortly after the publication of What Work Is, Levine gave a reading at a small bookstore in LA. I don’t remember now whether he was promoting that book, or the next one, The Simple Truth, but is strange to think now that he was still reading to sparse crowds at such a venue. But though I had devoured the book, I had never seen him in person. So, I was expecting this brooding hulk of a man, a steelworker or truck driver, with a stentorian voice like that of James Earl Jones. Instead, here was this wiry little guy with a whiny little voice. The incongruity was unsettling. It also intrigues me to think of him in the cattle burb of Fresno in California’s central valley, ground zero for the migrant farm-labor industry, about as far as you can get from the grimy confines of Detroit and the hearty eastern European stock that took root there. But perhaps it’s the vast open spaces there (ever redolent of dung and fertilizer) that focused his mind and verse.

It’s a shame that I often don’t revisit a poet’s work until I hear that they’ve died. But in this case, I’m looking forward to pulling those books off my shelf and reliving my early joy in discovering them.

Claudia Emerson: Late Wife

Another great loss, which I failed to notice, distracted as I was by the frenzy of the holidays and subsequent slide into the new year. Claudia Emerson died of cancer in December, but I only just found out about it. We went to grad school together, at UNC-G, from ’89 to ’91. Our class was small, so we got to know each other pretty well, though our temperaments and situations were vastly different. In fact, looking back, she probably found me rather annoying, but (mostly) put up with me good-naturedly. She took her work seriously, and (though I didn’t realize it at the time) viewed her presence in the program as a wondrous gift that could not be squandered. I, on the other hand, was much younger, and had only graduated college a year or two before joining the program. I still very much had an undergrad mentality—work hard, yes, but don’t forget to have fun. I was the Jarrell Fellow that first year, and it probably irked a few of my classmates to see that honor given to someone with such a dubious work effort (of course, I was working—diligently—but I never let anyone see that). As for Claudia, she had been waitlisted for the program. How could that be? I don’t know. Perhaps she simply didn’t have any contacts in the poetry world. She was not yet widely published, though that was soon to change. In an effort to enhance her chances of getting in off the waitlist, she started submitting her work everywhere, she told me. And the acceptances started rolling in. We were all a bit stunned and chagrined to see her work appearing in some of the premier journals of the day during our second year in Greensboro. That year, she also began editing The Greensboro Review, along with her close friend Kathleen Driskell. I remember being somewhat disgruntled—I thought the job would be offered to me, as the Jarrell Fellow. I was so clueless, I didn’t realize that: a), they didn’t just offer it—you had to pursue it, and b) the job required a good deal of work, and I suppose my reputation in that regard was already well established. In any case, she and Kathleen did a great job of it. That year, Claudia, Kathleen, and I did an independent study with Prof. Tom Kirby-Smith. He was, strictly speaking, not part of the writing faculty, but did write poetry, and taught classes in poetry and prosody. When I look back at my time in Greensboro, it’s those mornings that I remember most, and most fondly. Kathleen and Claudia would swing by my house in Kathleen’s Volvo, and we’d all sit together in Tom’s genteel sitting room, sometimes treated to tea and cookies by his wife. On warm mornings, we’d sit outside by the flower garden. And we’d read and discuss poetry, not just our own, but anyone we’d discovered, or who Tom thought we should know about.

Claudia’s basic voice and style were already established, and she was developing greater range and complexity. My poetry was awful, but I was excited by it, because I was trying new things, pursuing new experiments, most of which failed admirably. I remember one very long poem I wrote about a river flooding around a farmhouse. I knew nothing about the subject, but it was hard not to be influenced by the perceived trials of the rural south in such an environment. Claudia, who knew a thing or two, had written notes all over her copy. I don’t think she was planning to give me her written comments, but Tom asked us all to share them when we had them. She was so apologetic, but I must say, her critiques were spot on. I’m sure that none of us ever dreamed that one of us would one day be honored with a Pulitzer prize. I don’t think anything I wrote in Greensboro made it into my first book, but I think (though my memory is not always reliable) that I first encountered some of the poems in Pharaoh, Pharaoh in Tom’s sitting room. In fact, I remember when the book was first published. I was living by then in Oakland, CA. We hadn’t been in touch much, but I still had her phone number. I called to congratulate her, and ended up speaking with her first husband, as she was out of the house. I don’t know if she ever got the message.

I’ll finish with a snippet of poetry from her first book. To do justice to her early work, I should present something with cows in it—cows figured prominently in her poems, and became oddly emblematic (there’s a paper topic for you, students!). But instead, I will finish up with the second stanza of “Bait,” which has stuck with me for many years:

Seamus Heaney: Station Island

Heaney today. Hollander two weeks ago. The world of poetry has grown a bit smaller.

I had the good fortune to see Heaney just a few months ago, at the AWP conference in Boston. I missed his reading, regretfully, but I attended a conference session that was essentially a tribute to him. He was in the audience, and said a few words at the podium following the presentations, seemingly bemused by the effusive encomiums. I believe it is a peculiar ability of the Irish to appear grave and dignified and puckish and homespun all at once.

I remember my first encounter with his poetry, years (OK, decades) ago. It was through an anthology—I don’t remember whether it was specifically an anthology of Irish poetry or simply contemporary poetry in English. I must confess my ambivalence after reading the opening of “Digging,” which reads, “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests, snug as a gun.” Squat pen? Snug as a gun? How awful, I thought, how amateurish, how polemical. And what does a gun have to do with the following bucolic scene of digging potatoes and turf? And yet, those words have never left me. And of course, guns were certainly part of the local environment. And I subsequently dug into more of his work, particularly Station Island. Here was a man who loved language, and had the benefit(?) of two rich traditions, the Irish and the English. During the early part of the past century, the Irish language was kept alive as an act of political defiance (it was in fact banned under British rule). And even those who did not speak it could not help but absorb some of its structure and mannerism. Of course, Heaney’s Irish tradition was different than mine. He was there, in the North, whereas my ancestors fled to America. And my ancestors didn’t live in the occupied counties. And of course, Heaney was anything but polemical. Perhaps one virtue of loving two languages is that you can’t hate the people that speak them. And the poems that were infused unavoidably with violence and politics were complicated and conflicted—as befitting the subject matter.

I consider myself, at heart, a Nature poet, so I was of course gripped by poems such as “Death of a Naturalist,” which conveyed the visual scene though its deft imagery and conveyed the sounds and sense through the language itself. Who could not love the guttural consonance of “Bubbles gargled delicately,” or the echoes through “bluebottles,” “spotted,” “slobber,” and “clotted” in the next few lines, or the “strong gauze of sound” with its smashed-together velars? And in describing the frogs with their “blunt heads farting,” he marries the highbrow and the low, the poetic and the vernacular, the serious and the childish. My own poem “Mosquito Spawn” was surely influenced by “Death of a Naturalist,” which probably introduced me to the word “spawn” to describe a clutch of eggs (Heaney’s poem mentions “frogspawn” twice).

Even in “Naturalist,” Heaney’s sense of the Anglo-Saxon tradition is evident, so it’s not surprising that his translation of Beowulf immediately became the definitive version. I’ll never forget opening that book and being stopped by the very first word. As many readers know, the “Hwaet” the starts the story is in fact an aberration from the strict form that follows. And translators have tried various ways to present it. But nobody ever really captured it. Heaney’s solution? “So.” I know that seems simple, even obvious. But no one had done it before. And in that one word, that one syllable, he set the entire scene, evoking an image of an old-timer waiting for the perfect moment to start his story, silencing the rapt kids clustered around the hearthfire.

* * * * *

In other news, the paperwork has been submitted, so I can now say that I’ve been awarded a 2014 COLA fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. It’s kind of like the city’s version of an NEA grant. So I will have to stop saying that this city does not care about poetry. I might even give a reading or two in town.

This morning, Mayor Villaraigosa announced the appointment of the first poet laureate for the city of Los Angeles, Eloise Klein Healy. I’ve never met her, as far as I know. But she did serve on the judging panel that awarded my first book the PEN book award. So, obviously, I’m predisposed to applaud the decision. But even putting that aside, her name has become synonymous with the LA poetry scene, such as it is (her presence on the PEN panel further testifies to that fact). As such, she’s a logical choice. Los Angeles is situated, both physically and mentally, on the margins of inhabitable space, and its poets have largely embraced that marginality. And if there is one attribute that unifies the disparate elements of the LA poetry scene, it surely is the respect for poetry as activism and the understanding that a poet is more than simply a person who writes poetry. And from what I know of Eloise Klein Healy’s work, she seems to embody that position.

When I first heard that LA was looking for a poet laureate, I reflexively put together an expected shortlist in my head. It was, indeed, a very short list, for not many LA poets have much recognition outside the city—or even within the city. There’s Carol Muske Dukes at USC (?), but she recently served as the state laureate, so I would think that would take her out of the running. Timothy Steele lives in LA, as far as I know, but I don’t think his poetry is indelibly associated with the city. Dana Gioia grew up in Hawthorne and recently took a post at USC—but he was head of the search committee. Stephen Yenser at UCLA has published books of poetry and critical analysis, and curates the wonderful Hammer reading series—but he’s probably seen as too much of an academic to represent LA’s counterculture reputation. David St. John comes to mind, Harryette Mullen. Elena Karina Byrne is another of those names like Eloise Klein Healy that seems to pop up whenever LA poetry is discussed. Charles Harper Webb at CSULB is well known for his brand of stand-up poetry. More than that, though, I’m kind of at a loss. The news reports said that the laureate search committee reviewed 40 applications, and that they presented three finalists for the mayor to choose from. I’m real curious to know who they are—and whether our new poet laureate can find some way to channel their collective energy.

Another luminary has faded from the scene: Louis Simpson. Overlooked in his later career—even I haven’t read him in many years—he nonetheless exerted a quiet influence on American poetry. Much the way Philip Levine gave us all permission to write in bare-knuckled fashion about real work and real workers, so did Simpson give us a green light to write about suburbia and its denizens. He showed us that even those lives that seem most unremarkable and pedestrian, most alien to poetry, have indeed their share of drama and humanity. This was of course fertile territory for the fiction writers, but poets were (and for the most part, still are) somewhat silent on the subject.

There was a time when I could rattle off any number of poems from memory; most have long since escaped me. But Simpson’s “American Poetry” remains. Here it is in its entirety:

I love how he encapsulates, in just those three opening lines, the energy, optimism, and industry of postWar America. And that progression from “rubber” to “poems,” stepping through a hierarchy that becomes less palpable as it grows more powerful, is altogether gripping. I love how the shark of the second stanza is somehow presupposed by the first—we seem to expect it even before we encounter it. And then, to turn it all on its head, to leap from the tangible and present to the surreal and Kafkaesque, is a master stroke. Ultimately, Simpson connects the amazing leaps of civilization—the discovery and application of uranium (and thus plutonium) and manned excursions into space—with their unthinkable and inhumane underpinnings and ramifications. And in this bizarre landscape, what is poetry but the cry of a creature far out of its element, heard but never quite understood?

If he had written nothing else, this one poem would be enough to secure his place in the annals of American poetry. But of course, he did write much more—and it’s worth checking out.

Poets are generally consumed by the notion that no one in the world understands how brilliant they are. But this year’s list of MacArthur fellows has not one but two poets, Kay Ryan and A. E. Stallings. Ms. Stallings in particular is a superb poet and a wonderful person, and I’m delighted and gratified that her work somehow came to the attention of the prize committee (and that they recognized its worth). And what is my connection? Several years ago, I traveled to Athens (Greece, not Georgia) and had the temerity to contact her in advance, asking if she’d care to get together for a quick cup of coffee. Of course, we did not know each other–we had appeared in the Best Amer. Poetry together, but that was it. Well, she took it one step further and arranged a dinner party, where I got the chance to meet not just her but many of her friends in the Athens literary world. She was as charming in person as she is in verse. I suppose it’s not surprising that someone so well steeped in the classics should still maintain the ancient offices of hospitality. In fact, a line or two from Roethke seems appropriate:

Congratulations, Ms. Stallings!