Michael T. Young: Thank you,
Richard, for agreeing to an interview.
Your
latest collection, A Tide of a Hundred
Mountains, opens with a poem that poses a problematic relationship to
objects of desire. Other poems in the
collection seem to touch on questions of desire in some way, such as
“Evolution?” “Hands I Watched,” and “Trick or Treat.” Could you comment on the
exploration of desire in the collection and what you see as its role?
Richard Levine: I’d say that
to the extent that the book is concerned with desire, there’s one object of
desire, and that is my life, what I’ve experienced. Each poem is an exploration of how I’ve
attempted to embrace what is given.
While desire of the flesh is most gripping (sic), the drive to act well
in the world is more enduring and more difficult. And what does it mean to act well in the
world? How do we give that value in a
poem? Look at the two veterans in
“Disturbing The Peace.” They’re in a bar
and one suddenly starts telling a horrific story that’s haunted him for
decades, and he’s shouting, losing control.
His friend shuttles him outside to protect him from the scrutiny of
others at the bar, and to listen to him.
Just as in war, they’re still rescuing each other. Similarly, in “Fences Down” another vet is
having a PTSD episode that drives him into the woods in the night and
rain. Is it a literal or figurative
forest; and the storm?
By morning, emerging from the forest, he wonders “why a storm is
his to carry.” His desire is to be more
stable, but unlike the two vets in “Disturbing …” he’s alone in his
struggle. In “Picket Fences” a young
white man sees racism through the eyes of a black girl friend. They’d both desire an end to prejudice, but
their subjectivity to it is very different.
And there are fences throughout the book’s poems that keep us from or
protect desires. “Parallel Universes” is
a funny parallel to “Picket …,” because two people appear to be looking at the
same thing but what they chose to focus on is very different – it’s their
desires that are different. You and I
both read and write poems, but probably are satisfied by different gifts within
them.
Michael T. Young: Many of the poems in the collection seem to
seek the heart-truth of a situation. I’m
thinking of poems like “Equating Love,” “Late Hour,” or “Measuring
Absence.” Many of these bear witness to
our conflicting emotions. For you, what
is the significance of this conflict in your poems? Also, what does it mean for us – people in
general – in trying to do what is right in the larger world you often confront
in your poems?
Richard Levine: James Baldwin,
in The Fire Next Time, said ‘Most
people know the right thing to do, but they don’t act on it.’ So, for me, one of the most important things
about being in the world is to act for the right reasons. This sounds moralistic—well, why not. What are we here for? We’re living in a time when avarice, cruelty,
and violence are out of control, worse, they’re in vogue ... being a psychopath
is in, man! Gordon Gekko was not our
generation’s Scrooge, he’s an example of and role model for the Koch Brothers,
the Donald Trumps, the Sheldon Adelsons, the IMF, World Bank and a journalism
and world view that makes the global economy more important than global
warming, war more meaningful than peace, information more valuable than
knowledge. People who want to earn their
living by doing things that make the most difference or contribute the most are
looked down on by those who want to make the most money or insatiably acquire
the most things. Writing can be one way
of acting against this psychopathic age of raging greed. I consider myself an activist, and when
social confrontation becomes an occasion for a poem that’s great.
Michael T. Young: In the poem
“His Own Missouri,” it says Meriwether Lewis “wrote of how beauty and violence
wed, in the blind plunge of waterfalls.”
Do you find this yourself in nature?
How do you situate man in his relationship to nature with that mix of
beauty and violence?
Richard Levine: Yes, I do find
this beauty-violence in nature. And I
encourage all nature readers to read the Lewis and Clark journals. What they lack in literary merit they more
than make up for in simple narrative drive and, even dampened by the cool,
distanced military voice, the true ring of discovery. Lewis’ observations, in particular, are
classic left brain-right brain: the practical centers are awed by the force of
nature, while the aesthetic centers are awed by beauty. They got to see the wilderness in a stage of
evolution set for us by eons of explosions and fireballs and the slow knitting
of an organism that sustains us. Lewis
and Clark trekked out long before the Industrial Revolution, so although we
were already attacking the environment in our desire for agriculture and
energy—our fuel of choice and technical capability was wood, trees, at the
time. Now, the changes climate change is
expected to bring are going to be too rapid for us to adapt to, so we’re going
to have to figure out how to survive super storms and weather of unfathomable
force and configurations. As Wordsworth
wrote: “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”
The
week of Tropic Storm Lee, which was about a week after Hurricane Irene, I was
in upstate New York which was devastated—farmers crossing crop fields in row
boats, propane tanks hanging from telephone poles, bridges crushed by
collections of downed trees that had been swept along. I tried to get into town, but couldn’t,
rapids were running over all the roads.
It was frightening. I sat in a
house whose walls and windows strained and at times made me wonder if they
could hold as long as the storm might rage.
The power was out. At night,
there was thunder and lightning, and the lightning was like heat lightning that strobed almost
continuously. It was eerie, like the
whole sky was an eye opening and closing every few seconds. I’ve been through monsoons, but never
experienced anything like that. The
beauty and violence Lewis saw was an expression of how nature evolved to keep
itself in balance, what I was watching was nature’s expression of being out of
balance. And if scientific models are
right, ‘we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ We
don’t have to be poets to see our jones for oil as a destructive desire and addiction.
Michael T. Young: Your poem “Trick
or Treat” portrays Halloween as a kind of holiday that indoctrinates children
into a culture of greed and gluttony.
The poem recalled to my mind Wordworth’s “The World is Too Much With
Us.” I’m curious what you see as the
antidote to that gluttony, our cultural exaltation of “greed as good.” Or even our still unquestioned belief in
perpetual growth, which is also a form of greed.
Richard Levine: Not raising our kids to be Gordon Gekko is
one action we can take. I couldn’t help
thinking after the Sandy Hook school shooting that even in the face of that
there were humans somewhere who were thinking: this’ll be good for business, just lay low until the grieving’s over. And, in fact, it has been good for
business. Sales of assault weapons are
on the rise since then, and this has been true after most mass shootings. And to fuel the sales and rabid paranoia the
wingnuts from FOX and on Limbaugh and Hannity are talking about the possibility
of Obama refusing to leave office, suggesting that he’s got the military and
law enforcement under his command … I don’t think it’s a coincidence that
they’re beating this drum while some leaders are trying to promote a civil and
serious discussion about gun control. One
of the constants of our constitution is the amending of its amendments—so who
hallowed the ground around the Second Amendment? Certainly not soldiers or police. My money’s on the gun manufacturers. It’s a challenge for how to act in the world,
we need to pressure our leaders and they have to enact laws—and, of course, the
wealthy psychopaths are going to act to protect their profits. William Stafford had a line in one of his
poems about being concerned about how to hold his wings in response to some crisis. And I always thought he got that idea from
Akhmatova, who also employs a similar image.
I believe they were both thinking that we are or have the will and power
to be the angels that save ourselves, and through that the world. Like the Talmud adage: To save one person is
to save the world.
Michael T. Young: The closing
poem of the collection, just like the opening one, has the image of snow in
it. The closing poem also bears the line
from which the collection takes its title, A
Tide of a Hundred Mountains. The
title and the poem gave me a sense of location within the larger arcs of
geologic time. I wondered if this was
your intent and, if so, if you could comment on that significance within the
collection’s concerns with desire and shared responsibility.
Richard Levine: The first poem
involves a young boy playing in the snow and the last poem an old man on a
playful sort of pilgrimage in the snow “…carrying his own kind of hunger.” He looks out on “a tide of a hundred
mountains” that were once the bottom of a lake.
So there’s all these different measures of time: the lifetime of years
between the boy and the aged man, but also the time between hunger and
fulfillment, the trees he hikes among growing by annual rings, the geologic
time for the mountains to amass. The
poem opens with the image of a hawk circling—snowball?—and closes with it
diving after prey “from daylight to the dark,/immaculate feet of the
forest.” And just before watching the
hawk’s dive the narrator wonders “What has he found/that he believes in…” And throughout the book there are time
markers: anniversaries, holidays, evolution, the time it takes to ‘become the bearer’. What’s it all mean? Who knows?
What are we here for?
Michael T. Young: You are
politically active or at least a politically concerned poet. We’ve exchanged e-mails on topics mostly
related to hydraulic fracturing. What do
you see as the poet’s role in the framework of his country? Should a poet be politically active? Should that influence what he writes and, if
yes, how?
Richard Levine: This poet
should be politically active. I feel strongly
about it, and I think it influences my thinking and writing. But I never sit down and think I should write
a poem about fracking or climate. You
ask what I think a poet’s role is in their country, I’d say write as truly
about what they’re experiencing, what it’s like to live where they do. Didn’t they lock Brodsky up because he was
more interested in his day to day struggle than the feats of the ‘system’? He has a poem, a sonnet, I think, and the
first stanza is about the nuclear arms race.
In the second, he imagines that one the day nukes start flying he’ll go
across the city to his lover and hopes scientists a thousand years from then
will find them locked in each others’ arms.
Beautiful. Is it political? Does it tell us how Brodsky acted in the
world in which he lived and what it was like?
Will it be read a thousand years from now?
Michael T. Young: You are also a
great lover of jazz. Do you feel this
love has influenced your poetry and if so, how?
Richard Levine: Music brought me to poetry, beginning with
rock n’roll and blues. Chuck Berry and
Buddy Holly, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters made me want to write in rhymes
that were physical, about all that goes on between a man and a woman … and an automobile … I was a kid and didn’t know
about any of that, so it was all exotic and
exciting. Concision is the great lesson
lyrics and musical phrases continue to teach me, the electric emotion one note
or one word can deliver across time and space and make you quake at its
expression, in a concert hall or in your living room, or pouring tin and static
out of a car radio or from a transistor radio under your pillow when your
parents think you’re sleeping. By the
time I was listening to classical and jazz I was reading poetry and that opened
more possibilities, including the idea that anything you could or could not
embrace in the world could be a topic for a poem.
Michael T. Young: Do you have a
favorite poem in this collection? Which
one is it and what is significant about it for you?
Richard Levine: I think
“Disturbing The Peace,” because there’s so much pain veterans carry and since
WWII they haven’t had to do it so much for a greater common good, but for
narrow interests and profit. The way we
treat or ignore them when they return is even criminal. The largest demographic populations of
homeless are Vietnam vets, my peers.
There are over 56,000 names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam on
the memorial wall in DC—none of the MIAs or Vietnamese. More than twice that number of Vietnam vets
have committed suicide! More than
double! The fastest growing demographic
of homeless are the vets of Iraq and Afghanistan, and their suicide rates are
already outpacing those of Vietnam vets.
How can we continue to watch all this degradation and deterioration of
people and our environment, and in the name of profit?
And
the military is no longer democratic; this all volunteer army is a troubling
feature of the increasing distance between the haves and have-nots. I oppose war, in general, but if we are to go
to war I think we should require the support of a majority
of the people, who must be willing to fight and/or send their children to fight. George Orwell said, observing his own time
but it seems to fit well now, too, that the middle class helped capitalism,
which is just a form of fascism by another name, to replace the democratic
state.
I’m
also disgusted by current journalism that no
longer covers war. Why? Who made that decision? And today the Times announced that they are
disbanding their environmental reporting staff.
How could they do that just when politicians are beginning to talk about
climate change? How will we know? So we have no reporting and only the poor have to go to war
(because there are no other jobs because of outsourcing). And soon, if the Times has its way, no
environmental reporting as the world tilts toward the escalating cycle of
biblical storms.
When you think about that you have to ask: A free press? A democracy?
I like to think that the poem addresses some of these issues, and that
poetry can move us physically and emotionally to feel the desperateness of our
situation in ways that an article, report, statistics, or a rant never will—it
delivers that wedding of beauty and violence that exists beyond the syntax of
reason. A few times in this interview
I’ve posed the question, what are we here for?
I don’t want the answer to be self-annihilation, taking down armies of
other innocent species with us. That’s
something worth acting against.
Michael T. Young: Are there any
prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet? What are they?
Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your
poetry?
Richard Levine: I don’t know
how it’s influenced my poetry, other than giving me additional models for
saying things well and true. I read a
lot of nature/science writers from John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry
to Bernd Heinrich, Hal Borland, and E. O. Wilson. And love nature guides. Then there’s social commentary, Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Woody Guthrie, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph
Campbell, Emerson—or should he go in with the nature writers? And where does Michael Pollan go, food
writing? It’s as much science. M.F.K. Fischer. Oh, and great writers who are great reporters
and talkers: Studs Terkel, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill. And David Howarth, if only for 1066, which is extraordinary but what
genre, history, history with fictional structure, historical fiction? I’m not big on literary criticism or theory,
but Brodsky’s Homage to Robert Frost
includes a painstaking explication of “Home Burial” that you could cry
reading. And William Stafford’s Deep Down in My Heart about his time in
CO camps. More ‘witnesses,’ Primo Levi,
Elie Wiesel, Pete Seeger. And like all
the unsung poets in journals, all the unsung article writers in a million
magazines that help us know and understand what life is like in other skins and
other places on this planet. George
Carlin had a great line about how the planet would survive our ecological
crisis, where we are the petard hoisters: “The planet’s going to shake us off
like a dog with a bad case of fleas.”
Then, he’d stick out one leg sideways and shake it.
Michael T. Young: What do you
like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?
Richard Levine: It’s all related
to writing poetry, because that’s part of how I find myself, even at 65. Now that I’m retired I have time to do more
things, and I find that, I do best and enjoy myself most when I do what I did
as a kid: read, play music, draw, run.
Activism takes up time in spurts, but it’s almost daily. I keep a pretty ambitious food garden in
summer, which I call a pot garden, because everything I grow there has to go in
one pot to make pizza and pasta sauces.
And, of course, lots of poems are grown there, too. I’m also trying to introduce sustainable
argo-forestry practices in a woodland I have upstate—I avoid the word “own,”
because trees make the word small and foolish (outside of a court of law).
Michael T. Young: Thanks for your time and thoughtful responses,
Richard. Let’s close with your favorite
poem from The Tide of a Hundred Mountains.
Disturbing The
Peace
1.
“We
were talking about Afghanistan, too,”
one
of the young women at the bar said.
They
knew facts, news, analysis,
some
important names and dates;
history
– we knew what we lived.
They
weren’t even born when we fought
in
Vietnam.
“Do
you want to know what war is about?”
Jake
asked the talkative one.
“Don’t
say it, Jake,” I said. My hand added
insistence
on his arm.
“Did
you ever kill anyone?” he asked her.
She
did not know where to look.
“That’s
what war is about, sweetie! Not fucking
politics! You help with the killing and the killing
helps
you. Then, you go home! Case closed!”
“Shut
up, Jake!”
“Don’t
shut me up, Richard! I’m warning you,
don’t
shut me up!”
We
were sitting at one end, and along
the
bar people looked up, not at Jake and me,
but
at shouting stereotypes, at headlines:
Viet Vets In
Drunken Brawl:
BANG! BANG!
BANG!
Jake
raised a hand to the bartender,
I
shook my hand to wave him off.
“Who
the fuck are you!” Jake slurred,
leaning
in too close, no less loud.
“Did
you ever kill anyone?”
“You
know, Jake,” I said, “but I’ll send
you
my resume, again.”
“Don’t
fuck with me! I’m warning you,
don’t
fuck with me!”
“Back
us all up, here, Steve,” he shouted,
pushing
a fist of cash forward,
and
turning back to the women.
“Did
you ever wake up in a rice paddy
and
kill a fifteen-year-old kid? You
ever
have to do that?”
“Let’s
go out and smoke, Jake.”
He
looked at me knowing I didn’t
smoke.
Fighting did not find words,
but spoke in us like the name
of something we both wanted. He placed
a coaster over the rim of his glass
so
the bartender would know he’d be back.
I pulled on my coat and walked out,
Jake and eyes following.
2.
Here
I will ask for the privacy you’d extend
to
lovers, because a complicated intimacy
is
at the heart of what passed between us
out
there; decades and allegiances carried to
and
laid upon that altar. And I ask, too,
for
the forgiveness reserved for those
who
deserve but cannot forgive themselves
or
relieve the burden of carrying
more
than their own time.
3.
There
is a feral loneliness you carry
from
war to your grave. That isolation
is
why Jake and I were outside the Inn,
forty
years after.
4.
I
am just an old soldier, like all the others
going
back to Odysseus, his story being
the
enlistment of all those before and after,
all
of us forever bound to brothers.
If
we stood on each others’ shoulders,
to
reach beyond the screams of red flares,
the
moon could roll down our rolled up sleeves
to
light fields of fire for a young sentry fighting
anywhere
to stay awake in the dark far
from
a home he’ll never return to,
even
if he comes back.
5.
Jake
and I were not alone on the outside
of
the Brooklyn Inn, late, on that cold winter night.
Divisions
from the expanding Afghan war
and
from battles we had fought and survived
roiled
awake and moved out with us,
securing
the losses we had carried
to
stand here, under a streetlamp that can
no
more bring to light the pain of witness,
than
bare the roots under stubborn curbside trees,
stripped
to winter bones and dormancy,
and
always, especially at night,
alive
with their own shadows.
6.
Though
there are no flares – only flare-ups –
to
mark this spot for a medevac, I tell you this:
a brother is down here. You have only my piss
poor triage to go by: but I’d say no one
is coming
for us anymore. It’s just us out here, just us.
“C’mon
in, Jake. I’ll buy the next round.”
7.
Inside,
in silence, Jake finished the beer he’d left
and
with no more than a nod walked out.
The
round I’d bought him sat sweating, even
after
the young women took their leave, smiling
shyly
and averting their eyes as they went. Then,
it
was just Steve and me, the jukebox jazz,
and
the barroom full of people
with
their own stories to tell, a few, no doubt,
fueled
by drink, going beyond what can be said
without disturbing the peace.
As an activist against fracking, Richard Levine also wrote "The Talkin' Frackin' Blues." Take a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCrTfxOBRo
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