Larry Levis
I am attaching a Larry Levis poem that another teacher shared with the students in a workshop at the Governor’s School. It got me thinking about opening lines to poems and about writing what you know. For obvious reasons, you want to have a good opening line in a poem, but I think that oftentimes I will have a poem that really starts about halfway through what I’ve written, and while I may not want to cut the first part off, the poem often becomes so much stronger in doing so. This Larry Levis poem starts in the action, and it brings in this conflict in the father-son relationship.
As far as writing what you know, I think that this poem has a lot to teach us as well. Several of my students wrote about boyfriends and girlfriends breaking up or high schoolers being petty, and while, yes, this is ”writing what you know,” oftentimes they had more unique stories than these, but it was hard sometimes to get them to write about those things. I’ve been realizing more and more just how important it is to expose students to a variety of good poetry and to have them read read read. Because I think that reading good poetry and writing is the way to make our students better writers and critical thinkers. It seems a little too obvious of an answer and too easy of an answer maybe, but I look back on my high school and middle school experience and I wish that I had been required to read more contemporary poetry.
Winter Stars
by Larry Levis
My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.
I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.
Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In
California, that light was closer.
In a
California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him.
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed…
If you can think of the mind as a place continually
Visited, a whole city placed behind
The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—
As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at last
All of the travelers will be asleep, or until
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.
I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.
Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the
Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which my be all that’s left of you & me.
When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.