Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn introduces Denise Levertov:
The poet Denise Levertov was born in 1923 to a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican minister. She grew up in a suburb of London and had no formal schooling, but she read and wrote poetry from an early age, sending poems to T. S. Eliot when she was twelve. (He responded with a two-page letter.) She served as a civilian nurse during World War II and emigrated to American in 1948. Her social conscience led her to join forces with Muriel Rukeyser and many other prominent writers in vigorously protesting the war in Vietnam. She is most closely associated with poets of the Black Mountain School, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.
Today and in the days ahead, we will feature poems by this extraordinary woman, “a voice,” as Amy Gerstler has written, “committed to acute observation and engagement with the earthly, in all its attendant beauty, mystery, and pain.”
Here is “The Ache of Marriage”:
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teethWe look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and eachIt is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside ittwo by two in the ark of
the ache of it.
(POEMS 1960-1967, copyright ©1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Levertov’s work is available in ebook format. Image of Denise Levertov via Wikimedia Commons)
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