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Abstract
In what ways might poets or poems of the North encounter the South? Are such encounters necessarily exploitative? These are broad questions, having to do with the nature of poetry’s material, and with modes of its appropriation. In this essay, I tackle them by looking at a two-year period in the life and career of the poet Denise Levertov, who moved from the USA to Mexico in 1956, before returning to New York in the winter of 1958. Whilst in Mexico, Levertov composed a number of poems in which she responded to the places and people she encountered, to the land and landscapes, and to local arts and other cultural artefacts. I look closely at three of these poems – considered in light of Levertov’s correspondence with William Carlos Williams and Robert Duncan, her relations with other of her American peers, including Allen Ginsberg, and her engagement with Spanish-language poets such as Pedro Salinas and Federico García Lorca – and track the ways in which Levertov’s practice was affected by her Mexican sojourn. In so doing, I test certain ideas and presumptions about the nature of literary materials and their portability and acquisition.
Acknowledgments
Much of the work on this essay was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, for which I am exceptionally grateful. I am deeply indebted also to the Denise Levertov Literary Estate, the Stanford Special Collections and the Fales Library, for permission to quote from Levertov’s papers and correspondence; to New Directions, for permission to quote from Levertov’s poems; and to the editors of this special issue, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma and Ryan Topper, as well as to María del Pilar Blanco and Harris Feinsod, and the two anonymous readers, for their patient queries and generous advice. “Biafra”, “Something”, “Tomatlán”, “A Supermarket in Guadalajara, Mexico”, “The Artist” and “Travels” by Denise Levertov, from Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, copyright © 2013 by Denise Levertov and the Estate of Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This is not to suggest that Levertov was previously apolitical. It is simply to remark that, until the mid-1960s, there is little evidence of a special concern with European or US imperialism.
2 Dana Greene (Citation2012) and Donna Hollenberg (Citation2013) give useful accounts of Levertov’s life and career.
3 Throughout the essay, I refer to poems in their original print contexts, as a way of keeping in view the chronology of correspondence, manuscript revision and publication, which is essential to understanding the nature of the changes in Levertov’s practice and orientation during this relatively brief period. In some cases, but not in all, later revisions also shift relevant effects and meanings.
4 One of Feinsod’s aims is to trouble the notion of hemispheric divide, at least where the Americas and their poets are concerned. The strength of his argument makes it necessary to recall that, for the vast majority of writers in both hemispheres, the institutions and readerships to which they had access were circumscribed linguistically and regionally, if not always nationally. It is only against the background of division, in other words, that hemispheric poetry articulated the force of its project. As Nathan Suhr-Sytsma remarks, “The crucial decolonization-era problematic for […] poets from ‘peripheral’ locations is their struggle to convoke transnational publics without expatriating themselves literally or culturally” (Citation2017, 7).
5 Some qualification of the meaning of the “South” is necessary because, as Ben Etherington has remarked, “the idea of the ‘Global South’ articulates differently into different disciplinary contexts” (Citation2019, 38).
6 Neither Greene nor Hollenberg discusses this period in much detail, and though the latter does mention certain of the incidents and texts I explore, her concern, quite understandably, is not with the question of how Mexico shaped Levertov’s poetics and politics. Likewise, the significance of Levertov’s residence is underplayed by Gunn, who groups her amongst poets who “tended toward local color alone” (Citation1974, 253–254). Only Sheldon makes this period a central part of his story, though he reads Levertov’s poems as expressions of an openness to “the new, the different”, which is grounded in her own “hybridized” “sense of location” (Citation2004, 8).
7 I take these notions of “literary field” and “literary material” from Pierre Bourdieu (Citation1996) and Theodor Adorno (Citation2004) respectively. If localizations of field and material in the twentieth century are largely framed by the nation, Alexander Beecroft (Citation2015) reminds us of other forms they have taken over previous millennia.
8 This “Americanness” had to do with the identity of editors, but also with the tendency of these magazines to assemble non-American poets in ways that marked their distinct national or linguistic backgrounds.
9 Writing of the US context, Jahan Ramazani describes a number of recent “disputes […] about poetry, language, race, and power”, noting “the cultural capital of poetry and its strong association with issues of language and identity […] have made it a significant site of ethnolinguistic contention” (Citation2019, ix). Focusing on Afrikaans-language poetry in South Africa, Derek Attridge (Citation2021) has likewise described conflicts over race, language and identity, whilst unpicking certain of their presuppositions regarding language-as-property.
10 This is one point of disagreement with Hollenberg, who remarks that Levertov’s poem is “based on these first impressions” recounted in the letter to Williams (Citation2013, 153).
11 Given that Lawrence had likewise visited Mexico and used it as material for his writing, notably in The Plumed Serpent (1926), his relative prominence here invites speculation about the extent of his importance to Levertov. In fact, though Levertov writes to Williams that Oaxaca was much the same as described in Lawrence’s novel (Citation1998, Letter 39, 70–72), she is referring only to the condition of its energy infrastructure, a concern so prosaic that it seems almost comically at odds with Lawrence’s depiction of a Mexico in which “indigenous proletarians and peasants” are surrounded by “an atmosphere of simmering resentment and perverse attraction” (Etherington Citation2018, 130), and which calls forth “the affects of anxiety, fear and paranoia” while invoking a “phantasmatic, exaggeratedly phallic system” of chthonic beliefs and practices (Baer Citation2019, 213, 208).
12 By the time the list was made, in late December 1955 or early January 1956, Origin was into its sixteenth number, and Black Mountain Review its fifth. The list also identifies authors – Richard Jefferies, Stanislavski and Rilke – without specifying texts.
13 Levertov did, however, keep other notebooks in which she recorded her readings. During her time in Mexico, these included her “green notebook”, in which she wrote out significant passages, chiefly from critical texts concerned with the arts.
14 At much the same time, Levertov sent Machado’s Poesías completas as a birthday gift to William Carlos Williams (Citation1998, Letter 29, 51–53).
15 Blackburn’s translations were the outcome of a broader interest in Spanish and Provençal poetry, consequent on his engagement with Ezra Pound and facilitated by the period he spent living in Spain. Rexroth’s book, which Levertov took with her to Mexico, also included translations of poems by two other Spanish exiles, Raphael Alberti and Arturo Serrano Plaja, as well as poems by Mariano Brull and Nicolás Guillén, both Cuban, and by the Chilean Pablo Neruda.
16 An important encounter, but not an inaugural one. Both Levertov and Paz had appeared in Poetry Quarterly 8 (2), the summer issue of 1946, which included the former’s “Poem” (“Some are too much at home”), as well as translations of poems by Paz, Rafael Solana and Efrain Huerta, selected by Lloyd Mallan. In his essay “The New Mexican Poetry”, Mallan singles out Paz as “one of the first new voices of a truly Mexican culture” (Citation1946, 97), and finds, in the young Mexican poets, “traces, too, of […] Rafael Alberti, Garcia Lorca, the Machados, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas” (Citation1946, 95).
17 The Muse in Mexico was in fact a supplement to The Texas Quarterly, which in the spring issue of 1959 was devoted to articles on Mexico, including an extract from Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1959).
18 Etherington defines philo-primitivism as “a broad interest in or felt affinity for the primitive” (Citation2018, 20), and contrasts this with “emphatic primitivism”, an aesthetic project of becoming primitive “most energetically pursued at the height of European imperialist expansion” and as a “mode of aesthetic negation immanent to the capitalist world system” (2018, 9). Clearly, Levertov’s Mexican poems are not instances of emphatic primitivism.
19 Tracking down this text has proven difficult. I have been unable to find records of the “Toltec Codice de la Real Academia”. However, a blogpost in First American Art Magazine (“Nahua Art Theory” Citation2015) suggests that this is a Nahuatl poem from the Codex Matritensis, otherwise known as the Florentine Codex, and gives its details as fol. 115 v. (208). Describing a different text from the same codex, Garcia notes the difficulty of determining its history of composition and transmission, but, all the same, remarks: “the speech as we have it today is an intersection of voices, memories, imaginations, and entextualizations, whose heterogeneity […] still indicates absorption in speech patterns that distinguish themselves from that [colonial] administration” (Citation2020, 39).
20 Levertov (Citation1967).