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“making peace” 163 9 “Making Peace” 1985-1988     But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid.     “Making Peace”1 Denise Levertov spent decades opposing war. Now in the late 1980s she proposed an alternative—making peace. In the poem by that name, she analogizes peacemaking to poem-making. She calls peace “a presence,” “an energy field” that is more than the absence of war. Peace might be realized if “we restructured . . . our lives,” “questioned our needs, allowed / long pauses.” Peace, like the poem, is possible because of imagination and a willingness to venture into the unknown. It is the poets who “must give us / imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar / imagination of disaster.” The late 1980s were for Levertov a time of making peace and reconciling. Through imagination she restored a relationship with persons in her past and forged a link between her vocation as poet and Christian. The result was greater personal tranquility and a desire to “clear the decks” and risk a new beginning. The circumstances of her life were generally positive. She had loyal friends, those she called her “beneficent spirits,” and no major crises to derail her. As a consequence she could plumb her interior life in ways she had never done before. Although she claimed to have a “constant” and “primary ” preoccupation with religion, this preoccupation did not always nourish her. What did nourish and give satisfaction was poem-making.2 Writing poems helped her heal her relationships with her parents, her sister, and other friends, and to wrestle with questions of faith. The years 1985 through 1988 were rich and productive. She continued to live in Somerville and Palo Alto, teach, attend to friends through letters and 164 chapter 9 visits, give readings, travel, garner awards, and create poems. Although the intensity of her romantic life had ebbed, apparently she was content with this turn of events. She wrote that “[t] he pleasure of a chaste well ordered life seems superior to all the turmoil of my sexually active years, I must say! But I suppose I wouldn’t feel the one if I hadn’t had the other.”3 She reminisced about En Potter, whom she said she loved not more, but more wistfully than any other,4 and she had an occasional tryst with Stephen Peet. Her engagement with social justice issues continued to be expressed in her poetry, especially in concern for Central and South America, the arms race, the environment, and the spread of AIDS. Although she participated less frequently in public demonstrations, her button inscribed with “Picket and Pray” suggested her new orientation, one which would have been unthinkable ten years earlier. Levertov’s life remained fast paced; the year 1985 was a case in point. After finishing the winter term at Stanford, she was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and awarded a Certificate of Recognition by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. During the early part of the year, she worked hard on some new poems but broke off this writing in order to participate in the Peace Pentecost March in May in Washington, D.C. She then traveled to England where she vacationed on the Devon coast and gave a reading in Norwich. In August she was in Japan to read at the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Arriving back in the United States in October, she gave readings in Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. By January she had returned to Stanford ready to teach again. Now in her early sixties, Levertov was preoccupied with a series of deaths among her friends: Myron Bloy, Episcopal priest and founder of Associates for Religion and Intellectual Life; David Posner and Beatrice Hawley , both of whom were poet-friends; Abbey Niebauer, who was murdered; and Robert Laughlin, son of her publisher, who committed suicide.5 Levertov herself felt robust and physically strong and hoped, she said, to live into her nineties. Her minor problems were a recent bout with shingles and a diagnosis of Sjogren’s Syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that destroys the production of tears and saliva. This latter caused her to use eyedrops and keep a bottle of water always at the ready. She claimed to feel serene and suggested that a sign of her well...

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