“The Continual Condition”

At age 33, I’m a relative newcomer to reading poetry. In high school, the standard stuff they foisted on us — Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and so on — struck me as dull, dated, and often incomprehensible. In fact, like so much of the literature I remember reading in English classes, many of the poems we were assigned felt like they were written solely to make teenagers hate reading.

Then a few years ago, I stumbled across a few poems by the late Larry Levis in an issue of The San Diego Reader. Something was different about Levis’s poems. They were written in English as we speak it today. They were set in the modern world. Their subject matter was somber, their voice brooding.

I was blown away. The poems moved me. I ran out and picked up a Levis collection called “Elegy,” and read it with delight. I began to realize that the world of poetry offers much more than “My little horse must think it queer / to stop without a farmhouse near.”

the review . com