Notes on The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems of Larry Levis

The poems by larry levis included in this issue are drawn from The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems of Larry Levis, a collection I have been editing for the past three and a half years. After Larry Levis’s death in May 1996, his sister, Sheila Brady, asked Larry’s oldest friend, former teacher, and mentor Philip Levine if he would be willing to edit a posthumous collection of Levis’s poems. Levine agreed, and also asked me if I would help him look through what he’d been told was a significant amount of unpublished work. This posthumous collection became, of course, the book published as Elegy.

I had known Larry Levis since I was eighteen years old (when he first introduced me to Philip Levine), and he had become my closest friend in and out of poetry. Except for Levine, who knew Larry’s work more intimately than anyone, I felt that I had an unusual perspective on these unpublished poems, as Larry was in the habit of sending copies of his poems to me for comment, long before they would appear in journals or in books. He would also send Levine and me copies of each typescript manuscript as he finished it. Often, with the individual poems, Larry would have specific questions about the work in general, or about lines. I agreed to help Phil in whatever way he needed and, not long after, we both received identical boxes filled with copies and drafts of Larry’s poems. For the most part, this work had been pulled from Levis’s computers (at home and in his office at Virginia Commonwealth University) or found among his papers in his home office. Mary Flinn and Gregory Donovan, Larry’s close friends and colleagues, as well as his former student and friend Amy Tudor, all worked to find every unpublished poem available. What we found, as Levine mentions in his introduction to Elegy, were multiple drafts of many of the poems, some of which were clearly unfinished; yet others seemed remarkably finished. Larry’s friends at VCU had been, in my view, heroic in assembling the most complete and final versions they were able to find or construct from his many drafts; at times, they had even tried to include the revisions they’d found scrawled on scattered Post-its and other notes left on his desk.

I recognized a few of the poems in the box as having come from the period when Larry lived in Utah, and they’d clearly been pulled off the computer he’d brought with him from Salt Lake City to Richmond. A few other poems were originally part of a manuscript he’d sent me called “Adolescence,” but were later dropped as that manuscript became the book Winter Stars. Yet, to me, the most astonishing thing about looking at these poems gathered in their huge cardboard box was that the great majority—nearly two hundred pages—had been written since The Widening Spell of the Leaves. This was almost entirely new work.

The process of working on Elegy was difficult for Levine and for me; it felt emotionally charged and—to me, at least—psychologically daunting. I believe that Larry was the poet Levine admired most of all other contemporary poets, yet he was also as much a son to Phil as he was a protégé, as much an irreplaceable friend as an admired poet. For the first few months, every time Phil and I tried phoning one another to talk about the poems we’d been reading, well, we simply couldn’t do it; we couldn’t talk about this impossible task. In order to talk about some selection of Larry’s poems, we had first to admit that Larry was dead. It took almost five months before we could actually have our first conversation about the work itself. Finally, over that next nine months, Elegy took shape.

Levine had a clear idea of how he wanted to present Larry’s work, and that was to include a group of the shorter, more lyrical...