Denise Levertov, "New & Selected Essays"

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Denise Levertov, "New & Selected Essays" (1992)

 

 

시에 관한 시인 Denise Levertov의 에세이 스물여섯 편을 모은 책이다. 친구 L과 무척이나 자주 만나고 만나면 책 이야기로 시간 가는 줄 모르던 대학생 시절이 생각난다. 9월 말 어느 날 덴버대 캠퍼스에 있는 서점 "Book Stack"에서 이 책을 발견하고 $2.50(기억이 안 나지만, 문학 책이 반값인 달이었으면 $1.25)에 산 후, 마치, 한 주에 두세 번씩 Denise Levertov를 만나서 그녀의 에세이 한 편씩에 대해 이야기 들은 것 같은, 그런 느낌이다. 실은, 이 책을 읽기 시작한 것은 "The Writer's Almanac for Oct. 24, 2023"에서, 아래에 옮긴, 그녀에 대한 흥미로운 이야기들을 읽고 나서다:

 

It’s the birthday of poet Denise Levertov, born in Ilford, England (1923). She decided to become a poet, but she didn’t want to go to graduate school. Instead, she got her nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse during the Blitz in London. She liked the work itself, but she didn’t like the structure — she was just 19 years old, and she had been homeschooled her whole life. She said: “I didn’t like the strain of taking even the one and only examination that I ever took in my life, and I didn’t like the way in which one’s personal life was regulated. I was always crawling in and out of windows to avoid curfews!” She wrote poems each night after her shift at the hospital, and published her first book, The Double Image (1946). She met and married an American poet, Mitchell Goodman, and after the war, they moved to the United States.

 

One of the poets she admired most was William Carlos Williams. In 1951, Levertov send Williams a fan letter; she was in her late 20s, and he was 68, recovering from his first stroke. After exchanging letters for a while, she took a bus up to his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey, to see him. Williams was a warm and receptive host, and after that, she would go to visit him a couple of times a year. She would arrive in time for lunch with Williams and his wife, Flossie, then spend a few hours reading him her poetry, sometimes reading his poetry aloud, and chatting about people they both knew. Williams became Levertov’s mentor, and they exchanged letters until his death in 1962.

 

Levertov published more than 20 books of poetry, including With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959), The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Breathing in the Water (1984), and The Life Around Us (1997).

 

She said: “Strength of feeling, reverence for mystery, and clarity of intellect must be kept in balance with one another. Neither the passive nor the active must dominate, they must work in conjunction, as in a marriage.”

 

And, “I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer.”

 

 

책 본문에서 두 구절과 시 두 편을 인용한다:

 

 

         The Tulips / Denise Levertov

 

         Red tulips

         living into their death

         flushed with a wild blue

 

         tulips

         becoming wings

         ears of wind

         jackrabbits rolling their eyes

 

         west wind

         shaking the loose pane

 

         some petals fall

         with that sound one

         listens for

 

         (p. 88)

 

 

If a poetic translation, or attempted act of translation, is weak or an operation of mere fancy, it does not "increase our sense of living, of being alive," which Wallace Stevens said was an essential function of poetry .... We must have poems that move away from the discursively confessional, merely descriptive, and from the fancies of inauthentic surrealism to the intense, wrought, bodied-forth, and magical -- poems that make us cry out with Carlyle, "Ah, but this sings!" (p. 124)

 

It has been said that the personal is political. I'm not always sure what that means, but I know that to me the obverse is often true, and it is when I feel the political/social issues personally that I'm moved to write of them, in just the same spirit of quest, of talking to myself in quest of revelation or illumination, that is a motivating force for more obviously "personal" poems. (p. 150)

 

 

         To R. D. March 4th 1988 / Denise Levertov

 

         You were my mentor. Without knowing it,

         I outgrew the need for a mentor.

         Without knowing it, you resented that,

         and attacked me. I bitterly resented

         the attack, and without knowing it

         freed myself to move forward

         without a mentor. Love and long friendship

         corroded, shrank, and vanished from sight

         into some underlayer of being.

         The years rose and fell, rose and fell,

         and the news of your death after years of illness

         was a fact without resonance for me,

         I had lost you long before, and mourned you,

         and put you away like a folded cloth

         put away in a drawer. But today I woke

         while it was dark, from a dream

         that brought you live into my life:

         I was in a churdh, near the Lady Chapel

         at the head of the "west aisle." Hearing a step

         I turned: you were about to enter

         the row behind me, but our eyes met

         and you smiled at me, your unfocussed eyes

         focussing in that smile to renew

         all the reality our foolish pride extinguished.

         You moved past me then, and as you sat down

         beside me, I put a welcoming hand

         over yours, and your hand was warm.

         I had no need

         for a mentor, nor you to be one;

         but I was once more

         your chosen sister, and you

         my chosen brother.

         We heard strong harmonies rise and begin to fill

         the arching stone,

         sounds that had risen here through centuries.

 

         (p. 229)