On The "Olga Poems" Essay, Research Paper
Denise Levertov
Andre: Prior to the sixties you suppressed the direct autobiographical
allusions. But now you seem to be pulling in more actual facts. Would you say again this
is related to movements in poetry, such as confessional poetry?
Levertov: I’m rather antagonistic on the whole to what is called
confessional poetry which seems to exploit the private life. I’ve even felt that some
young poets, students, feel that they have to make a suicide attempt, that they must spend
some time in a mental hospital in order to be poets at all. I think that’s rather a bad
idea. I feel at this point in my life–I’m forty-seven, and I’ve been writing since I was
five years old, and publishing since I was about 20–that I have maybe earned the right to
write more personal poems if I feel like it. I’m often bored and impatient with poems by
young poets who, before learning how to relate to language, to make a poem that has
structure, has music, has some kind of autonomy, launch out into confessional poems. It
seems to me something that you earn by a long apprenticeship. I think the first poem in
which I was largely autobiographical was in a group called "The Olga Poems"
about my sister and that will be re-printed in my new book. It seems to be a prelude to
some of the later stuff and I want to get it all into one book. I’ve written an
"Introduction" for that book:
The justification then of including in a new volume poems which are available in other
collections is aesthetic. It assimilates separated parts of a whole. And I’m given courage
to do so by the hope that whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional
autobiography but as a document of some historical value, a record of one person’s inner
and outer experience in America during the sixties and the beginnings of the seventies, an
experience which is shared by so many and which transcends the peculiar details of each
life, though it can only be expressed through those details.
From Conversations with Denise Levertov. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi. Copyright ? 1988 by The University Press of Mississippi.
Linda Wagner-Martin
It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism that modern poetic techniques are
inadequate to sustain a long poem. What modem epics exist–Pound’s Cantos,
Williams’ Paterson, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Charles
Olson’s Maximus–have all been censured because of their "formlessness,"
their unevenness, or–at times–their sporadic applications of technique. The question is,
then, can modern poets write long poems? In Levertov’s case, there is no epic as yet to
judge. There is, however, the group of "Olga Poems," some two hundred lines of a
single theme sequence written in memory of her sister, Olga Tatjana Levertoff, who died in
1964, aged forty-nine. It is Levertov’s longest poem–at this time, one of her most
recent–and it is interesting as an illustration of her means of sustaining a single
subject.
Poem I, a succinct introductory song, is comprised of four short-line paragraphs in
which the poet’s older sister Olga lives in the poet’s memory. Details accumulate as the
poem progresses. the fire burns, the girl undresses, her skin is olive. The poet, then a
child, watches from her bed, "My head/a camera." The poem concludes with a vivid
contrast between the completeness of the young girl’s body, and the fragmentation of that
same body in death:
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled–
who now these two months long
is bones and tatters of flesh in earth.
Poem II, more formal in its structure of short tercets, presents Olga’s character more
intensely–and that of the poet as well, in contrast. Although Levertov still uses much
concrete detail ("the skin around the nails/nibbled sore"), it is detail
integral to the type of personality described here–Olga at nine already filled with
"rage/and human shame" at all injustice, herself often dealing unjustly with
others in order to correct the initial wrong. The last stanza of this poem declares the
recurrent theme, while reinforcing the image of the physically dark sister and that of the
light already introduced in the fire passage:
Black one, black one
there was a white
candle in your heart.
These preface poems are short and concise, the first written in paragraph format
relying on visual presentation; the second, arranged in tercets and oriented toward Olga’s
character. Pace changes dramatically in Poem III. Itself a sequence of three longer
segments, Poem III moves rapidly but gently. The long phrases are valid for two reasons:
the poet is here speaking much more freely, with reminiscence woven into her direct
commentary. Also, the interweaving motif of this sequence is "Everything flows,"
a line from the hymn, "Time/like an ever-rolling stream/bears all its sons
away." The motion of this theme, of the actual words in it, demands a longer, more
ostensibly accented line.
Part I of this sequence introduces the hymn concept, as the poet remembers its use in
her earlier life. The second section shows Olga’s dread of this concept of flow, of death.
Some of her terror is reflected in the more restrained line arrangement here; although
still long, lines now fall into tercets:
But dream
was in her, a bloodbeat, it was against the rolling dark
oncoming river she raised bulwarks, setting herself
to sift cinders after daily early Mass all of one winter, . . .
To change,
to change the course of the river! What rage for order
disordered her pilgrimage–so that for years at a time
she would hide among strangers, waiting
to rearrange all mysteries in a new light.
The tercets continue in Part III, but lines are here short, helping to reflect a new
intensity as the poet pictures her sister "riding anguish . . . over the stubble of
bad years," "haggard and rouged," "her black hair/dyed blonde."
The two concluding lines of this segment return somewhat ironically to the longer rhythms
of earlier parts of this poem, and to the "Everything flows" theme. Now,
however, it is said that Olga’s life was "unfolding, not flowing." It appears,
then, that the contrast between the grandeur suggested in the hymn and Olga’s actual
life–and death–is central to the poet’s feeling as expressed through the poem.
Poem IV is another restrained poem before the rising rhythms of the concluding poems, V
and VI, The short-line quatrains describe Olga’s hospital life, hours of love and hate,
pain and drugs quarreling "like sisters in you." In this poem return the images
of the "kind candle" and the purifying flame, "all history/ burned out,
down/to the sick bone, save for/that kind candle."
Poem V, another sequence, moves again more slowly. Part 1, in couplets, is dominated by
images of gliding, winding, flowing–the poem thus is tied thematically and rhythmically
with Poem III. These steady images, however, describe the poet’s life as it was
when both girls were young. There is momentary repose in this segment with its closing
refrain, "In youth/is pleasure"; but the second poem returns to the painful life
of an older Olga, buffeted by coldness "the year you were most alone."
Levertov achieves a vivid picture of Olga’s desolation through images of frost and
cold, loneliness, neglect, but perhaps even more effectively through the rhythms of this
poem. Lines still are long, but they move more slowly because of monosyllabic words and
word combinations difficult to articulate. The alliterative opening sets the pace for the
poem:
Under autumn clouds, under white
wideness of winter skies you went walking
the year you were most alone
Such lines as "frowning as you ground out your thoughts," "the stage
lights had gone out," "How many books you read" lead to the closing tercet,
which again depicts Olga as walking, but more than that: "trudging after your
anguish/over the bare fields, soberly, soberly."
With a reference to "tearless Niobe," Levertov introduces the theme for the
strongest poem in the group, the sixth. Light in various contexts (firelight, the light of
memory, the candle) has been a central image throughout the poem–especially in contrast
with the "black" elements, Olga herself and death. Levertov has used much visual
detail, so that seeing has been important to the reader in the course of the poem, Now the
eye itself is added to the accumulative image–and Olga’s golden, fearful, mystery-filled
eyes dominate Poem VI. Her eyes are the color of pebbles under shallow water, the water
that flows throughout the poem. And in a very real sense her eyes are–for the fear of the
moving water (representative, I assume, of the inherent flow from life to death) has
colored Olga’s life. Perhaps her eyes have always looked through this distorting mist. The
remarkable thing about Olga’s eyes, however, as the image pattern makes clear, is that
they did remain alive, lit by "compassion’s candle," even through their fear.
Levertov turns to the rhythms of blank verse in this most majestic part of the total
poem. Poem VI is a continuation of the tone and movement established in the fifth,
particularly in the second part, but the structure of the sixth poem is marked with an
important difference–it is tightly connected through an interplay of the sounds which
have been used at intervals throughout the poem–l’s, s’s, o’s–sounds
which in themselves create a slow full nostalgia. The final stanza of Poem VI incorporates
these sounds, as well as the images and themes which have pervaded the earlier poems. The
viewpoint reverts to that of the poet, but the tribute to Olga is clear:
I cross
so many brooks in the world, there is so much
light dancing on so many stones, so many questions my eyes
smart to ask of your eyes, gold brown eyes,
the lashes short but the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining,
unknowable gaze . . .
It is interesting that Levertov has included in this poem what recently appears to be
one of her major poetic themes–the acceptance of change (even the last great change) as
necessary to life. Olga’s tragedy was an inability to accept that change. Her "rage
for order" made her inflexible, even though "compassion’s candle" burned
through that inflexibility. This central theme was well expressed affirmatively five years
earlier in "A Ring of Changes," the longest poem Levertov had written at that
time. This poem is interesting technically as well as thematically. She uses a six-part
arrangement, the first four short poems serving as prefaces. All four are in free
paragraph form. The fifth poem is much longer; still in free form, it has longer lines.
This central poem contains many symbols–the treevine of life, Casals’ cello, a writer’s
worktable, light. It is a good poem, despite more didactic statement than in most of
Levertov’s poetry.
Yet "A Ring of Changes" as a whole is comparatively weak, I think, because it
has no technical rationale. All the poems are separate, with few interrelating images
or–perhaps more important to the poet–rhythms. Each poem is written in the same form;
consequently, there seems to be little reason to divide the parts. The technical contrast
between this poem and the Olga sequence is great.
The most critical reader cannot question the unity, the single effect, of the
"Olga Poems"; yet Levertov’s patterns of organization and rhythms differ widely
within the poem. It is from her masterful use of contrast and balance that the harmony of
the sequence comes–Poem IV, for example, slowing the movement, bringing the
"everything flows" theme back to rest before it sets off again with new impetus.
It should be of interest to those critics who question the modern poets’ technical
proficiency that the techniques used throughout this long poem are the same devices
Levertov uses in her short poems–the single-theme lyric, the sequence, the madrigal–each
with its own appropriate line length and stanza arrangement. One fruit of her poetic
experience is surely the unity of the "Olga Poems."
[. . . .]
Worksheets as Illustration of Practices, "Olga
Poems"
Criticism by its very nature tends to establish arbitrary standards for judging poetry.
Sometimes in speaking of organization, of prosody, of theme, the reader forgets that these
segments are not separate from the poem as a whole–except as a convenience in the process
of analysis. The poet does not think first of structure, then of words; he conceives of
the poem as an entity. Perhaps in revision he considers separate elements in that, for
example, he may change a word to strengthen rhythm. But writing poetry is seldom the
orderly application of theories to practice that most critical discussions unfortunately
suggest.
At issue here, I think, is the definition of the poetic process itself, a process which
has been explored and described for centuries. That its mysteries have never been
unraveled is, perhaps, a tribute to the innate power of the human spirit. For it seems to
be agreed by nearly all poets, Levertov among them, that the poem begins somewhere in a
non-intellectual response and is brought to perfection, finally, through a surveillance
which is at least partly intellectual. As Levertov writes of Wallace Stevens’ mot:
"’Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’ Almost."
Lest the poem sound entirely like a gift from a willfully evanescent muse, let
me quote from her description of finding the impetus for poetry:
I have always disliked the idea of any kind of deliberate
stimulation of creativity (from parlor games to drugs)–believing that if you have nothing
you really feel, really must say, then keep your mouth shut; and I still believe that–but
with a difference: Namely, that since I also believe that whatever in our experience we
truly give our attention to will yield something of value, I have come to see that the apparently
arbitrary focussing of that attention may also be a way in to our underground
rivers of feeling and understanding, to revelations of truth.
Supervielle: "How often we think we have nothing to say when a
poem is waiting in us, behind a thin curtain of mist, and it is enough to silence the
noise around us for that poem to be unveiled."
Rilke: "If a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time
regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and
exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something the angels serve that
very day on that matchless spot."
I think what validates a practice or device, which may otherwise only
stimulate worthless, superficial, cynical work, is the writer’s attitude when he uses it.
If he works with "Kavonah" (care, awe, reverence, love–the "diligent
love" Rilke speaks of) he can release the spark hidden in the dust."
Levertov emphasizes that the poet must attend the poem, must "stay with the
prima materia of a poem patiently but with intense alertness. As a result the
language becomes active where in earlier stages it was sluggish. However, let me add that
there are times when it is as important to know enough to keep one’s hands off a poem–off
a first draft that is right just the way it came–as to revise. Some ‘given’ poems arrive
without any previous work (of course, unconscious psychic work has undoubtedly preceded
them )." The writer "has to look at the poem after he’s written the first draft
and consider with his knowledge, with his experience and craftsmanship, what needs doing
to this poem. . . . It’s a matter of a synthesis of instincts and intelligence."
Since one of the paradoxes of art is the fact that some poems are "given"
entire while others require more or less revision, this chapter consists largely of
comparative excerpts from Levertov’s worksheets. Through the example of the poet’s own
practice, I hope to identify her more common patterns in revision and, consequently, to