Considered to be one of the greatest living American poets, Denise Levertov is also a long-time activist for peace and justice. Indeed, she sees the often conflicting spheres of poetry and politics as organically and necessarily connected.
It is a central grace in both her poetry and her politics that Denise Levertov maintains a passionate, delicately nuanced love for the daily details of human life alongside an active and uncompromising battle against the forces that seek to limit or destroy life. She has not given in either to the poet's temptation to leave out the horrible when describing the beautiful or the activist's temptation to omit the beautiful when describing the horrible. Because of this she is a voice that can be deeply trusted—a rare and precious thing.
Author of more than 19 volumes of poetry and two books of literary criticism, Levertov travels extensively to give readings and lectures and to teach poetry writing. Retired from a full professorship at Tufts University, she has also taught at Vassar College, Stanford University, Drew University, and several other academic institutions.
Much of Levertov's poetry is influenced by her travels to Mexico and postwar Vietnam and by her birthplace and childhood home, England. She currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
It was while Levertov was poet-in-residence at Tufts that she and Joan Hallisey first met in 1976. Hallisey was working on her doctoral dissertation, which focused in part on Levertov's war poetry. When Hallisey and her professor disagreed about her interpretation of Levertov's work, Hallisey decided to ask for an interview with the poet herself. Her interpretation met with Levertov's approval. They have been in touch ever since, and Hallisey has published several articles on Levertov's poetry since 1976.
—The Editors
Jean F. Hallisey: How do you think your mixed religious heritage and early background contributed to your sense of vocation as poet?
Denise Levertov: I feel that inherited tendencies and the cultural ambiance of my own family were very strong factors in my development. My father's background of Jewish and (after his conversion) Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervor and eloquence as a preacher, entered my imagination, even though I didn't, as a child, recognize that fact. And though in adolescence I rejected my parents' world as restrictive and embarrassing, I could not help seeing, despite my teenage doubts, that the church services were beautiful with their candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, and the incomparable rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Similarly, my mother's Welsh intensity and lyric feeling for nature were deeply influential—and I had more recognition of this.
I didn't go to school, nor had my sister (nine years older) done so except briefly. As I have written in the introduction to my section of the new Bloodaxe Anthology of Women Poets [published in England by Bloodaxe Press, 19851:
The reading I did myself, and the reading-aloud which was a staple of our family life, combined to give me a passion for England—for the nuances of country things, hedges and old churches and the names of wildflowers—even though part of me knew I was an outsider. Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles (secular or Christian) a Jew or at least a half Jew, (which was good or bad according to their degree of anti-Semitism) among Anglo-Saxons a Celt, in Wales a Londoner who not only did not speak Welsh but was not imbued with Welsh attitudes; among school children a strange exception whom they did not know whether to envy or mistrust—all of these anomalies predicated my later experience: I so often feel English, or perhaps European, in the United States, while in England I sometimes feel American....
But these feelings of not-belonging were positive, for me, not negative....I was given such a sense of confidence by my family, in my family, that though I was often shy (and have remained so in certain respects) I nevertheless experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as a part of knowing from an early age—perhaps by 7, certainly before I was 10—that I was an artist-person and had a destiny.
That knowledge was my secret—but the fact that everyone in the family did some kind of writing meant that it wasn't a guilty secret, just a private matter which I wasn't ready to reveal.
To note what I've written in that introduction again: I "grew up in an environment which nurtured the imaginative, language-oriented potential I believe was an inherited gift; and gave me—or almost seduced me into—an appreciation of solitude which, since writing poetry is so essentially a solitary occupation, has always stood me in good stead."
Over the last several years, you have spoken out both as a citizen and as a poet about various issues.
Would you comment on the ways in which you see yourself addressing the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four American women, the Reagan administration's obsession with supplying military aid to Central America, and oppression of peoples, whether it be battered women and children or those suffering from poverty and hunger in our own country and elsewhere?
In regard to the deaths of Archbishop Romero and the four American women, the drama of their deaths seemed to cry out for something to be written, for they were the most visible part of the great iceberg of deaths in Central America.
As a citizen I am opposed to Reagan, and as a citizen I have signed the Pledge of Resistance. What has that got to do with me as a poet? Well, I am a citizen who is a poet and a poet who is a citizen. My political views and opinions sometimes come directly into my poetry; at other times, they don't. There are poems about the nuclear threat and about Lebanon and about El Salvador in Candles in Babylon and Oblique Prayers, but the Pledge of Resistance is a matter of my citizen life, not my poet life, at this point.
In response to the last part of your question, one thing I have found myself doing is using the fact that, as a published poet, I have an audience; I address that audience, in person and in print, but not necessarily in poems, on issues that engage my political concern. Indeed, I often risk shamelessly haranguing my readers and listeners. And why not, for the above causes? I mean, who would refuse?
I do not see myself as "alleviating" any of the pain of battered women and children or of the hungry or poor. But if my reputation as a poet can help organizations like OXFAM to raise money which can help, that is surely the least one can do. I would never "use" poetry itself—what I use is whatever prestige I have. But because the issues—justice and peace and "the fate of the earth"—are always on my mind, they do also enter my poems, and then I have the chance, through poetry, to stir others' minds or to articulate what readers feel but have not found words for.
It is my hope that both approaches—the prose of speeches and conversations and the poetry that articulates engaged emotion and belief—have a political function, just as letters to Washington or demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience do.
In "A Poet's View" you speak about the important role in the struggle for peace and justice currently being played by certain branches of the church, both Catholic and Protestant, and about how this has helped to dispel the sense of embarrassment and uncongeniality that previously had been an impediment standing between you and the experience of a fellowship of belief. Would you comment on where and how you see this being accomplished?
Well, the answer to that certainly has to be, "All over!" Speaking of "churches" in the wider sense, many denominations have become more active in the peace and justice movement in recent years, or they have stepped up their activity, it seems to me. Those that were active in peace movement support during the Vietnam War have gone into the anti-nuclear movement, sanctuary, etc. The greater role played by women and laity in the churches recently has probably helped a lot, too. And then there's the U.S. bishops' Peace Pastoral. The ideas of liberation theology have infiltrated, too, even where they are not totally accepted. Issues have been raised, so the whole climate, in a broad range of denominations, has changed.
So then the question has to be asked, how does this relate to my work as a poet? I think that finding the churches, as I have experienced them in recent years, no longer to be places of embarrassment and uncongeniality, finding that many people already in the peace and justice movement also were involved with some kind of religious observance or experience and that this involvement was much more widespread among such people than I suspected—all of this frees me up to make allusions and use a vocabulary which earlier would have felt awkward to me. But even if that awkwardness had not existed, and I had used or wanted to use such a vocabulary years ago, I would have felt it to be more alienating to my readers than I do now. It is still a problem, though, because if I speak—as I do in some recent poems—in religious terminology and of theological concepts, that's going to put off some of my readers. Maybe my Christianity is unorthodox, but it's still a Christian unorthodoxy, liable to offend both skeptics and members of other faiths.
So it remains to be seen what the reaction to my new poems will be. They're certainly not going to be everybody's cup of tea! But this is the kind of risk any artist has to be ready to take: if some new element enters one's life, it will enter one's work, which is at the center of one's life, and change it in some way. Those who liked what one did before will not always be prepared to follow through these changes. That's an old story! But I'm anticipating, for up to now I haven't lost my public.
Obviously, as an artist, I just have to do what I have to do; and I never have readers in mind beforehand. I am not naive about it, and I realize that this may create problems for me vis-a-vis my public, because they may start putting me in a "box," and they will not hear what I am saying if they think it comes out of a certain box.
In "A Poet's View," you speak about your own spiritual journey toward belief in "the God of the Incarnation" during the last several years. Could you tell us how this journey influences your understanding of your vocation as poet?
I cannot really answer this without jeopardizing my creative work, I'm afraid. It would have to be asked 10 years from now, retrospectively! It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.
In El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation, you reflected on the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero and of the three American nuns and a lay sister. Would you share with us the evolution of this powerfully poignant oratorio and the significance of the meaning of "invocation," as well as "requiem," in your libretto?
Not long after the murders of Archbishop Romero and the four American women in El Salvador, I was asked by composer Newell Hendricks to provide a text for him to work with in composing an oratorio. I suggested El Salvador as a theme and these martyrdoms as a focus, and he was receptive to the idea.
Drawing on my knowledge of Mexico to help me imagine the landscape and culture, I did some research into Central American pre-Colombian and later history as a preparation for my work. And I obtained from the Maryknoll Sisters some copies of letters written home by the four assassinated women and excerpts from Archbishop Romero's homilies.
What I then attempted to write was not conceived as a poem but as a working text for a composer. That is to say, I wanted to avoid certain nuances of rhythm and pitch in my words (which in a poem I would be very much concerned with attaining), in order to produce instead something deliberately incomplete, something broadly sketched which would call for precisely that development the still unwritten music would give it.
I supplied Newell Hendricks with the text in three installments, and he worked on the music in that same sequence. The joint project took us around a year to complete. Until its performance in May 1983, I did not hear the music, except for a brief orchestral rehearsal tape, as I was in California during the rehearsal period.
I had, however, included in my text a few "stage directions," as it were, for in order to meet the challenge of my task at all, I had to imagine the music in some degree. Newell followed through on all my concepts most intuitively and produced what I and the large audience felt was a very strong and remarkable piece of music.
The overall intention that determined the structure of the libretto was threefold: First, because this was a performance piece written for an audience, not for solitary readers—an audience probably different from those who buy my books—I wanted to bring home to that audience the horror of what was going on in El Salvador.
Second, I wanted to inquire into how it got that way and thereby to make, essentially, a political point about imperialism and the economics of imperialism, and how violence and tension in a nation have roots in an oppression which has to do with economics and land use (for profit, not for feeding people).
And third, I wanted to return to the present and to try to give a sense of the significance of all these deaths, an understanding of them as martyrdoms, with the understanding that martyrdom does not just mean victimization but stands for something, signifies something, has a message—that is what distinguishes a martyr from a victim. (A martyr is also a victim, but not all victims are martyrs.) And the message of these martyrs seems to be embodied in those utterances I quoted from them, especially in what I quoted from Romero, which is then summed up and paraphrased in a passage at the end which is sung by the Half Chorus:
Those who were martyred bequeathed, a gift to the living,
their vision:
they saw, they told in their lives that violence
is not justice, that merciless justice
is not justice, that mercy
does not bind up
festering wounds,
but scrapes out the poison.
That 'no one has to comply
with immoral laws',
that power abused is powerless to crush
the spirit.
You asked me to speak about my use of the word "invocation," as well as "requiem," in the libretto. An invocation is the act of invoking assistance, especially, but not exclusively, from a higher power. (Peers can also invoke one another for help.) An invocation is also a form of making a demand in justification of one's cause, and it has the sense of "calling for earnestly." When Romero said to the national guard and the soldiers and the police:
'Brothers, you belong
to our own people! You kill
your brother peasants!
Stop the killing—for no one
has to comply with immoral orders,
immoral laws,'
he was invoking their humanity.
Then we have the words of the Questioner:
What do they ask,
the martyrs,
of those who hear them,
who know
the story, the cry,
who know what brought
our land to this grief?
What do their deaths demand?
This assumption that their deaths do demand something is "invocation" in the sense of "calling for earnestly." And this is further developed in the words of Romero and the four women:
We ask that our story be known
not as the story of Salvador only;
everywhere, greed
exploits the people,
everywhere, greed
gives birth to violence,
everywhere, violence
at last is answered with violence:
the desperate turn,
convulsed with pain,
to desperate means,
which is also "making a demand in justifying one's cause."
Another passage says, "Those who were martyred/bequeathed, a gift to the living/their vision..." which harks back to, "What do their deaths demand?" By bequeathing this vision, they are making a demand, so that also is "invocation."
The next Half Chorus speaks about the longing for peace and says that what is happening, even now, in the territories under the control of the revolutionaries, what they are trying to organize is, "for Peace. For this/our martyrs died,"—for this new society, for this different vision of society. "Their deaths enjoin upon us"—there again it's in terms of the linked meanings of "invocation": to call for earnestly, to enjoin upon, or to demand.
Then in the last chorus there is a further recapitulation of the story, not only of the deaths of Romero and the sisters, but also of the deaths of all the "anonymous" others. And the chorus tells us that,
...horror
won't cease on the earth
till the hungry are fed,
that the fruits of the earth
don't grow that a few may profit,
that injustice here
is one with injustice anywhere,
and that we are our brother's keeper and that we are "able to change," for "This is the knowledge/that grows in power/out of the seeds of their martyrdom."
The passage about present violence and about the structure of life in hidden villages fulfills the meaning of "invocation" as "to demand in support or justification of one's cause." And the last part talks about how the deaths themselves are a kind of summoning or incantation, a conjuring up of something—the making of an "icon," one might say—and this is what makes us see these dead as useful martyrs and not pitiful victims, because they present an image which is, in itself, an appeal. The first meaning of "to invoke" is to call upon a higher power for assistance, but this takes up the second meaning and is calling upon us, is calling upon human power to recognize this appeal.
But then, finally, you have the prayer of Romero and the four sisters:
Let us unite
in faith and hope
as we pray
for the dead
and for ourselves.
This refrain, repeating the words he spoke just before he was killed, is an "invocation" in the sense of prayer, and it is a "requiem," too.
Despite the darkness that is etched in some of your poetry, one senses that a movement toward hope is present in poems like "Mass For the Day of St. Thomas Didymus" and in "Beginners" where you say, "We have only begun to know/the power that is in us if we would join/our solitudes in the communion of struggle." If you are, indeed, hopeful, why?
Well, my religious faith is at best fragile, but if, in fact, that which I hope is true is true, then I think God's mercy may prevent the annihilation of our planetary life, despite human stupidity and violence. I also have strongly that sense of so much being "in bud"—so many things being in the beginning of growth, the first shoots of some different consciousness, of moral evolution, despite the fact that we go on more and more effectively doing the awful things that human beings do.
In other words, on the one hand, you have a new, or at least newly widespread, questioning of whether war, even conventional war, can ever be a tolerable means of settling differences, at all. But on the other hand, technology has continued to make war ever more devastating, and far more civilians get killed than in wars in the past. And we've invented the obscenity of nuclear war. It's a neck-and-neck race, it seems, between what is "in bud" and what arrogant technology keeps devising.
As the 87-year-old atomic scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Professor Rabi, said at a recent teach-in on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the first bomb test, we keep trying to apply technological solutions to moral problems—and moral problems are susceptible only to moral solutions.
But I have some temperamental optimism. And though, as I said before, I can't lay claim to an unshaking faith, there is the deep hope implied in the words, "With God all things are possible."
Joan Hallisey was an English professor at Aquinas Junior College in Milton, Massachusetts, a member of a Pledge of Resistance affinity group, and was involved with the Catholic Connection, a social action center in Boston, when this interview appeared.
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