John Levy, 54 poems: selected & new

 

Kyoto

I’m at a temple. A young monk in black robes walks by, looks at me, stops. He points to my long hair. Brown. Then to my goatee. Red. He touches my armpit and looks puzzled. I point to my hair. He points to my crotch. I point to my hair. He invites me in for green tea.

The latest from Arizona poet John Levy, and the first title of his I’ve read, is the collection 54 poems: selected & new (Shearsman Books, 2023). 54 poems offers a selection of poems composed between 1972 and 2022, with pieces having previously appeared across an array of books, chapbooks and broadsides by publishers such as Longhouse, Half Day Moon Press, Figs, First Intensity Press, Sow’s Ear Press, The Haiku Foundation, Smallminded Books, the tel-let series, otata’s bookshelf, Convivo, Kater Murr’s Press, Quenencia Press and The Elizabeth Press. There is something timeless about Levy’s short missives assembled here that (without sections or earlier-publication acknowledgment throughout, simply set as a single, book-length assemblage of lyrics) don’t feel dated, given these are poems composed across a fifty year period. There’s such an interesting consistency to his lyric approach, even within the varieties and explorations on form and rhythm, moving through prose poems and more traditional poem-shapes. His lyrics are deceptively straightforward, and subtle; at times, even delicate.

My Wife

My wife is painting
the ocean. It,

the ocean, looks
real

sort of, on the
watercolor

paper
because

she (my
wife, not

the ocean)
is excellent.

I
can’t

judge

the ocean.

I’m intrigued by the short, sketched-out stretches of Levy’s lyric brevity, the meditative ways in which his poems offer elements of the hush and a halting slowness, holding far more than what might first appear. Levy is capable of some fantastic short threads, woven in that simultaneously sit as asides and part of the larger weave of the poem, each of which propel his short narratives: “The river sound behind me is traffic,” he writes, as part of “Letter to Paul Matthews / from a Parking Lot in Tucson,” “and an American flag hangs / in front of a barber shop’s / plate glass window; the flag’s / reflection resembles / wings.” Through that particular thread, he steps aside from the narrative and simply swirls this element in, allowing his story a further depth. Through the poems assembled here, Levy appears to favour variations on the epistolary form, composing poems directly to, around and through specific individuals, composing poems as postcards, elegies, letters and obituaries. It is almost as though he prefers the suggestion of a poem as something addressed to someone, which has an enduring charm. “Dear Bob,” the poem “Letter to Robert Lax” begins, “I like addressing you, though / you no longer live on Patmos / or in New York, or anywhere on Earth.”