Thanks to Garrison Keillor's daily Writer's Almanac on NPR, we are able to celebrate Denise Levertov's birthday today — she would have been 90 years old today. (She died on December 20, 1997, at 77,) , one of America's finest poets.
Keillor shared this morning some of her development:
"[She was] born in Ilford, England (1923). She knew from the time she was a kid that she wanted to be a writer. And she said: "When I was 12, I had the temerity to send some poems to T.S. Eliot, even though I had not shown most of them even to my sister, and certainly to no one else. Months later, when I had forgotten all about this impulsive act, a two- or even three-page typewritten letter from him arrived, full of excellent advice. (Alas, the letter, treasured for many years, vanished in some move from one apartment to another in the 1950s; I've never ceased to hope it may one day resurface)."
When she was 17, she had her first poem published in Poetry Quarterly. She worked as a civilian nurse during World War II in London, and in 1946 published her first book, The Double Image.Then she moved to America and became very involved in American political causes as well as American schools of poetry. By the 1960s, she was helping to found the Writers' and Artists' Protest Against the War in Vietnam, and publishing regularly, books like With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967), and she was considered a thoroughly American poet, and an important one at that. She published more than 30 books, mostly poetry, but also essays and translations. And she remained prolific until the end of her life — in 1997, the year she died, she published two books of poetry: The Life Around Us, a collection of nature poems written over the course of her career; and The Stream and The Sapphire, a selection of poems with religious themes.
She wrote: "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."
_______________________________
I've written recently in Reckonings of Levertov's evolving awareness of her Christian faith, and of the way she came, with such wonderful insight, to marry the worlds of prayer and poem, devotion to art and religious life as one integrated whole.
Come into animal presence
Come into animal presence
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track and into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
"Come into animal presence" by Denise Levertov, from Poems: 1960-1967. © New Directions, 1983. Reprinted by permission.