… Philip Levine.

[W]hat scenario could you imagine that would [scandalously] end your … term [as laureate]?

I’m 83 years old. I don’t think there’s any intern with the patience to be seduced by me.

… I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems.

Hell, no. I can’t believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.”

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Levine’s poetry?

UD is not a Philip Levine fan. He is chatty, drifty, message-bearing, without style. But – si t’insiste – here’s a Levine poem.

Gospel

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

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The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed.

We start with some nature imagery. Begins optimistically, especially given the title, “Gospel.” Good news, the world is born again each morning, each day, each season, the new grass not growing but rising. Yet the use of overused, not descriptively acute words like loitering suggests that although the world described might be new, the poem is unlikely to be anything we haven’t sort of seen before. True, we’ve got some nice alliteration going – l sounds in the first two lines, d sounds in the three that follow – but there’s no sensibility here. Plain homespun description.

I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks.

A man walks in the woods, pondering as he goes. The calm, plainspoken feel here is very Robert Frosty. Also the sense of an affinity between the poet and the natural world: the grass rises, the poet goes higher. All this rising, plus the poem’s title, puts us in a spiritual mood.

I guess he wants the u assonance of lupine and strewn, but like loitering, strewn is a sort of obvious choice – we want the poet to go higher stylistically. You can be plainspoken and stylish at the same time (see Whitman).

I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.

The fresh morning ground, still cold, still silent, calls the poet; he wants to pace a pristine earth. To clear his head? He’s not sure, and neither are we.

Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth.

The earth is beautiful and new, but gives no answers; we can pace it season after season and it will remain spiritually unforthcoming. It seems friendly enough though, setting out for us its rich mix of live and dead growth… The phrases here –

dead thistles and this year’s / hard spines, early blooming / wild onions, the curling remains / of spider’s cloth

– are very nice indeed, and begin to give things a little symbolic traction having to do with the ceaseless mysterious round of death and life and death and life. In terms of sound, early and curling work beautifully and subtly together… I mean, the subtlety throughout these lines involves a kind of menacing morbidness (dead, hard spines, remains) alongside a perky evocation of new life. So life and death mixed (the poet is surrounded by the dead remains of the last season and bursting-forth shoots of the new), and maybe there’s a lesson somewhere in here for the poet.

What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about.

Something has very much upset the poet; he has, on reading it, crushed the bad-news-bearing letter and (rather than throwing it away) stuck it in his back pocket. This letter is what he has brought to the nature dancing and dying all around him. He doesn’t tell us what the deal is, but the main thing is that it’s very bad news, and the poet is powerless by way of responding to it.

So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light.

In response to whatever anguish this letter has prompted, the poet walks the mountains – maybe to calm himself, maybe – despite the silence of nature – to find some answers. Don’t forget the poem’s title, obviously at odds with the idea that nature is silent. The gospel proclaims not only the truth but the gospel truth of our redemption, our eventual transcendence of earthly anguish and confusion. Meanwhile, the poet is so upset that he’s not even fully seeing the world – half sightless, he keeps walking; and now the wind comes up, and that sound will carry the meaning of the poem. The calming effect of the wind, we take it, calms the poet’s tormented thoughts, calms his darkness as the day breaks, so that he can return to the world of people able to bear his bad news.

“Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

That’s pronounced sao-ing – a word for the soft sound of the wind the poet’s been hearing. The poet is maybe initially pleased, as a writer would be, to find this elegant word, with its deep (heavy) roots in Old English; yet the poem ends with the sad observation that, far from gospel weight, our words, under the impact of insoluble human burdens, bear nothing at all – they’re merely sounds, as the wind is merely a sound.

In short, the poem records an agonized poet turning to those two hardies – nature and art – for consolation and clarity. To no one’s surprise, both fail, and having read the poem it’s clear the title is ironic. Bitter. Our gospel is writ in water, writ on the wind, on violently crushed letters, etc.

I have the same problem with this working out of a familiar human circumstance and dilemma that I have with much of Robert Frost, who seems to be walking a few paces behind this pacing poet. Or in front of. This poem’s tag line is disappointing, since it’s too easy, as if the poet felt compelled to formalize his experience, round it out, stick on a moral, rather than conclude the poem with the full measure of anger and inconclusiveness the speaker no doubt feels.

Levine calls John Berryman his biggest influence. Berryman would have done something other than end with the limp-wristed How weightless business.