#denise levertov

[havingapoemwithyou]

For the New Year, 1981 by Denise Levertov

[mournfulroses]

Denise Levertov, from a poem titled "Fair Warning," featured in Sands of the Well: Poems

[derangedrhythms]

My madness is dear to me.

Denise Levertov, Relearning the Alphabet: Wanting the Moon; from 'Mad Song'

[apoemaday]

Talking to Grief

by Denise Levertov

Ah, grief, I should not treat you like a homeless dog who comes to the back door for a crust, for a meatless bone. I should trust you.

I should coax you into the house and give you your own corner, a worn mat to lie on, your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living under my porch. You long for your real place to be readied before winter comes. You need your name, your collar and tag. You need the right to warn off intruders, to consider my house your own and me your person and yourself my own dog.

[miamaimania]

Alma's silhouette ablaze, a fiery dance etched in 1975's vintage Super-8 film.

[roua-poemului]

“With all my passionate intensity,”

— Denise Levertov, from The Complete Poems of Denise Levertov: “Ways of Conquest,”

[garadinervi]

Nicanor Parra, (1954), Poems and Antipoems, Edited by Miller Williams, New Directions, New York, NY, 1967 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

Translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton, W. S. Merwin, Patricia Rachal, William Carlos Williams, and others

[nobrashfestivity]

The Secret By Denise Levertov

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

I who don’t know the secret wrote the line. They told me

(through a third person) they had found it but not what it was not even

what line it was. No doubt by now, more than a week later, they have forgotten the secret,

the line, the name of the poem. I love them for finding what I can’t find,

and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that

a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines

in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for

assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.

Copyright Credit: Denise Levertov, “The Secret” from O Taste and See: New Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Denise Levertov. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.