Quotes from Denise Levertov

The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination's tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking the fruit.

And on our lips the blood of berries before we kiss

That Passeth All Understanding" An awe so quiet I don't know when it began. A gratitude had begun to sing in me. Was there some moment dividing song from no song? When does dewfall begin? When does night fold its arms over our hearts to cherish them? When is daybreak?

The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry. To use it is to misuse it.

To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul's hall.

What I invaded has invaded me.

One can anyway only be shown something one knows already, needs already. Showing anyone anything really amounts to removing the last thin film that prevents their seeing what they are looking at.

To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul's hall-- out in the light it shows clear, whether shrunken or known as a giant wrath-- discrete at least, where before its great shadow joined the walls and roof and seemed to uphold the hall like a beam.

Each minute the last minute.

I witnessed all things quicken to color, to form my question not answered but given its part in a vast unfolding design lit by a rising sun.

I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride'--hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

The roses tremble; oh, the sunflower's eye Is opened wide in sad expectancy. Westward and back the circling swallows fly, The rooks' battalions dwindle near the hill. That low pulsation in the east is war: No bell now breaks the evening's silent dream. The bloodless clarity of evening's sky Betrays no whisper of the battle-scream.

holiness does not dissolve

When I am a woman — O, when I am a woman, my wells of salt brim and brim, poems force the lock of my throat.

The ache of marriage: thigh and tongue, beloved, are heavy with it, it throbs in the teeth We look for communion and are turned away, beloved, each and each It is leviathan and we in its belly looking for joy, some joy not to be known outside it two by two in the ark of the ache of it.

To the Reader" As you read, a white bear leisurely pees, dyeing the snow saffron, and as you read, many gods lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian are watching the generations of leaves, and as you read the sea is turning its dark pages, turning its dark pages.

Looking, Walking, Being I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, Sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes Dig and burrow in the world. They touch Fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, Not only Visible present, solid and shadow That looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms Of echo and interruption? That's A way of breathing, breathing to sustain Looking, Walking and looking, Through the world, In it.

I wanted to know all the bones in your spine, all the pores of your skin, tendrils of body hair. To let all of my skin, my hands, ankles, shoulders, breasts, even my shadow, be forever imprinted with whatever of you is forever unknown of me.

Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust. You are given the questions of others as if they were answers to all you ask. Yes, perhaps this gift is your answer.

and as you read the sea is turning its dark pages, turning its dark pages.

Words taken by lips, tongue, teeth, throat, down into body's caverns, to enter blood, bone, breath

Hugh Kenner, in a lecture, beautifully defined what poets seek if they really are poets) as "the power to make things as moving as the things they have been moved by.

What I invaded as invaded me.

I am so small, a speck of dust moving across the huge world. The world a speck of dust in the universe. Are you holding the universe? You hold onto my smallness. How do you grasp it, how does it not slip away? I know so little. You have brought me so far.