Letter: Blogger to Poet 7/6/2012

Dear Steve,

I have a copy of Philip Levine’s News of the World in my hands. Actually, it’s balancing on my knee as I type this. But it has been in my hands and will be again. Although it was published in 2009, this copy feels as virgin as the copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot Levine tells of reading in the library one day sixty years ago when he was a young man playing hooky from work as a delivery truck driver in a poem called “Library Days” which I just finished reading…in the library. I’m reading a poem called “Library Days” in the library, a cliche, a banality, reading about Levine reading, or actually reading about Levine remembering about reading, forced to contemplate the absurdity of vicariously experiencing someone else vicariously re-experiencing a vicarious experience, a joke Levine couldn’t help playing on his readers.  No doubt he regrets the necessity. What’s a poet to do? The kind of people who read poems are the kind of people who go to libraries.  But, hey, I hear the now very old poet saying, You’re in a library. You’re reading poetry. You’re complaining?

 

Comments

[Stephen Kuusisto]

Dear Lance: Yes, what's a poet to do? Phil Levine is, among other things, a student of Neruda. Neruda who said: "And confused, I couldn't decide/whether to seriously meditate/or feed myself on carnations." In short: we choose books as the third way between meditation and eating flowers. This is the only thing poets know for sure!