Mark Pawlak met Denise Levertov while he was an undergraduate physics major at MIT, and she was writer-in-residence. Admitted to her workshop on the strength of a paper comparing Ginsberg and Whitman – Levertov later comments that his poetry “started almost at zero” – Pawlak begins a friendship that, along with the turmoil of the 1970s, would alter his direction. A longtime co-editor of Hanging Loose and author of nine books of poems, Pawlak narrates the beginning of his life in art as a collaboration among friends, his mentor, and the spirit of the times.
Pawlak’s memoir, My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, is organized chronologically in short chapters that focus sometimes on a single incident, sometimes on broader subjects like Levertov’s teaching style or her relationship to other poets. He also includes excerpts from notebooks he kept during 1975-1976. Pawlak recalls himself as a newcomer to the poetry scene and retains that fresh perspective in his recollections. One of the book’s loveliest anecdotes involves a dialogue between Robert Creeley, invited to MIT by Levertov, and another newcomer – an engineering student who asks, “Why do you read like that?” Creeley brings the student to the podium and has him read the poem as written on the page, “pausing at the line breaks and reproduc[ing] the cadence of Creeley’s own recitation.” Whenever Levertov “had occasion to lament a poet’s lack of attention to craft … she would recount this story,” Pawlak comments on the poet’s elegant demonstration of the function of the line.
Pawlak’s introduction to Levertov overlapped with growing protests against the Vietnam War. Levertov believed that if your life as an artist “was whole and not compartmentalized,” it was imperative to share your convictions “on the page and in public forums” (Levertov’s politics had real consequences – she wasn’t rehired by MIT, and worried about finding work). Pawlak describes a demonstration against G.E. recruiters at Northeastern University – one that Levertov was scheduled to join – as a “pitched battle” with “clouds of tear gas” and police clubbing or shackling “any college-age male they encountered.” The section reminds readers that police riots didn’t end with the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and that fury on the right has a long pedigree. Although Pawlak doesn’t bring it up, his activism makes me wonder if he saw science, in conjunction with MIT’s defense-contracting Lincoln Labs, as generally enabling the war, and whether this helped nudge his career from physics to poetry.
Pawlak likens his experience with Levertov to an apprenticeship, and his memoir includes revealing details of her approach to teaching and writing. She would have the dozen students in her workshop read the same poem aloud, producing “a deep intimacy with the text.” She didn’t believe in laboring over too many drafts; after a certain point, it was better to start something new. Echoing her friend William Carlos Williams, she believed art’s “underlying impulse is to make objects of words … able to stand alone after the maker has moved away and no longer needs these products for the self-expressive purpose that impelled their creation.” But Pawlak’s taut, unadorned prose also examines whether, despite her passionate engagement with living friends, “the realm of literature and dead writers wasn’t in some way more real to Denise than flesh and blood people. She was on ‘intimate’ terms with Keats, Chekhov, and Rilke. She adored these writers more than any others. I can think of no other way to describe her passionate embrace of mind and heart. She spoke of them in my presence as if they were still living friends and colleagues, ones that she conversed with daily.”
With this trio of literary masters, it’s easy to understand how, though associated with the Black Mountain school, Levertov sees herself as a writer whose roots are Continental. “I grew up not in an American, and not in an English, but a European atmosphere,” Pawlak notes she wrote to Williams in 1960, reluctant to champion “the American idiom” that “is an acquired language for me.” A poet’s obligation, she tells him, “is to his own voice – to find it and use it,” devoting “all the resources of one’s life … so long as they are truly one’s own & not faked.” A magnetic, intense presence and passionate talker whose gestures vigorously punctuate her words, Levertov is a model for Pawlak and other young writers who started as students and styled themselves into poets.
My Deniversity concludes with fissures between Levertov and Pawlak. He drifts away from her circle into new literary friendships, while she picks fights with poets she once admired. Unhappy with the magazine’s editorial choices, she removes her name from the masthead of Hanging Loose. Pawlak’s political poems follow the influences of Zbigniew Herbert, Brecht, and “the poetry of witness,” while he finds Levertov’s work “preachy and didactic.” When Levertov dies in 1997, Pawlak parks in front of her old house in Somerville to remember his dream after they first met in her office: Levertov “had appeared as Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction” who was also “considered the kindest and most loving of Hindu goddesses … the Mother of the whole universe.” Those dual aspects, he realizes for the first time, “were Denise.”
“Ezuversity” was the term Ezra Pound used for the private tutoring he gave James Laughlin on the workings of poetry. Mark Pawlak enjoys a similar education at the feet of a poet who leads him from innocence to experience in the art he would master. My Deniversity is an intimate, insightful, and affectionate examination of both the process and the remarkable personality who engendered it.
[Published by MadHat Press on October 24, 2021, 184 pages, $21.95 paperback]