Day 22: Denise Levertov, Ellen Gilchrist, Joyce Carol Oates

30 Apr, 2026

Poem: Denise Levertov - A Common Ground

I have been delighted by Levertov's poems almost every time I've read one. When I last wrote about her poem "Springtime", I mentioned that I didn't get what the poem was trying to say, but I liked the imagery. I recieved a very insightful email from a Levertov fan who said that:

Williams [Carlos Williams] said many times "no ideas but in things." I don't think that a poem needs to have meaning, or to 'say.' I find it sometimes like demanding meaning of a forty foot tall limestone cliff, or the moon, or your enjoyment of a color; some things just are. Some things just are beautiful.

This really broadened mind on how to enjoy reading poetry. Thank you again for your email Jonathan!

I can't find a standard link to this poem, but it is from her collection Jacobs Ladder and in her Selected Poems.

This poem has three sections, and contains a lot of beautiful objects, motions, tastes, textures and sounds. The second page describes some falling petals

when on the grass verges\ or elephant-hide rocks, the lunch hour
expands, the girls
laugh at the sun, men
in business suits awkwardly
recline, the petals
float and fall into
crumpled wax-paper, cartons
of hot coffee—

to speak as the sun’s
deep tone of May gold speaks
or the spring chill in the rock’s shadow,
a piercing minor scale running across the flesh
aslant—or petals
that dream their way
(speaking by being white
by being
curved, green-centered, falling
already while their tree
is half-red with buds) into\

human lives! Poems stirred
into paper coffee-cups,
eaten with petals on rye in the
sun—the cold shadows in back,
and the traffic grinding the
borders of spring—entering
human lives forever,
unobserved, a spring element...

Whether the lunchroom is outdoors or indoors with big windows, I am unsure, because my attention is on the petal drifting through the air. It reminds me of Richard Brautigan's beautiful novel In Watermelon Sugar, in which a group of people live in some kind of greenhouse with a creek running through it.

Quoting this poem from a copied block of text, I had to manually seperate the line breaks. This made me really focus on why she broke the lines where she did. There is some internal logic to it.

Recently reading Nick Laird's impressive review of the Penguin Book of Prose Poems, Laird speaks of some of the pitfalls of prose poems and their unbroken lines. The main difference being that a sentence in prose connotes a completed and final thought, whereas the line breaks in free-verse mimic the fleeting nature of our thoughts, or the pauses in our speech. We think along with the poet, as if we are also making it up as we go. This thought comes from Leverton herself, quoted in the review:

[line breaks show the subtle] hesitations between word and word that are characteristic of the mind’s dance among perceptions but which are not noted by grammatical punctuation. Regular punctuation is a part of regular sentence structure, that is, of the expression of completed thoughts; and this expression is typical of prose, even though prose is not at all times bound by its logic. But in poems one has the opportunity not only, as in expressive prose, to depart from the syntactic norm, but to make manifest, by an intrinsic structural means, the interplay or counterpoint of process and completion—in other words, to present the dynamics of perception along with its arrival at full expression…. Line-breaks—together with intelligent use of indentation and other devices of scoring—represent a peculiarly poetic, a-logical, parallel (not competitive) punctuation.

I definitely recommend Laird's essay on prose poems. It is one of the best bits of criticism I have ever read.

Lastly, I believe Leverton's poem is about poetry itself, the act of reading it and writing it:

speech akin to the light
with which at day's end and day's
renewal, mountains
sing to each other across the cold valleys.

Story: Ellen Gilchrist - Ninteen Forty-one

Previously I wrote a bit about Revenge, Gilchrist's first story featuring the hellchild Rhoda. I was also a child with fire and malevolence in my blood, so I loved this story for showing the malice of children.

This one takes place a year or so later, while Rhoda is still a small child. It begins perfectly: I love the first sentence: "Rhoda was sitting on the front sidewalk trying to set some paper on fire with a magnifying glass."

I will proceed to quote the rest of the paragraph, only because it demonstrates a new word I learned yesterday: parataxis.

Parataxis is when a writer uses short simple sentences without conjunctions (so, but, yet) to show their relationships.

"Rhoda was sitting on the front sidewalk trying to set some paper on fire with a magnifying glass. She was very worried at that time about what she would do if she was lost in the woods. It would be she and Dudley alone in the woods. Dudley would have the compass but he would not tell her what it said. He would sneak off while she was sleeping and leave her there to rot. She would not panic. She would not wander deeper into the woods. She would stay where she was until help came. She would find water. She would build a fire. But how to do it? Striking rocks on flint didn’t work. How many times had she tried that? Rubbing sticks together didn’t work. No, the best thing to do was carry a magnifying glass at all times."

I like paratactic sentences a lot. They work to show the flow of a character's thoughts, as being generative rather than "finished". They also work well for simple-minded narrators (eg children or dumb guys).

Naturally, after all this worrying, Rhoda turns her magnifying glass to a passing ant.

I love Rhoda so much. She lacks human decency and every other character is exasperated with her.

“Get your jodhpurs on, honey,” her father said. He was sitting on the gate. “Mr. Trumbo is bringing his little girl over here to ride.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m menstruating.”
“Oh, my God,” he said, and climbed down off the fence, hoping to get to her before she said it again and the boys heard it. “ARIANE,” he screamed toward the house. “ARRIIIIIANNNEEE, get out here and get this child. Who told you that?” he demanded, taking her by the arm. “Who told you a thing like that?” His face was as red as the sun. Rhoda’s mother came running out of the house and across the yard and swooped her up.

These stories contain the settings of nostalgic childrens stories- playing in creeks, making tree houses and playing at war - but they oscillate between innocence and edginess, containing enough bad language, violence and animal cruelty to be too distasteful to even nostalgic boomers. Later Rhoda gets injured falling off a horse, has a heartwarming dream about spending time with her "beautiful" old grandfather, Dan Dan.

“I dreamed Dan-Dan and Big Daddy and I were going to sleep in those concrete wigwams where we stayed that other time. Did you tell them yet? Do they know I almost died?”
“They’re on their way,” her mother said. “They ought to be here soon."
“Good,” Rhoda said. “I’ll get them to kill the horse.”

Essay: Joyce Carol Oates - The Parables of Flannery O'Connor

Joyce Carol Oates is an author I'm beginning to really like, though I have only read a few of her stories and a book of her essays. Flannery O'Connor is my very-favourite author, so naturally I was glad when I saw Oates had written about her.

This essay functions as a rich and concise introduction to both O'Connor's own work, her life and her dark and hilarious personality. I am impressed at how Oates intersplices O'Connors quotations into biographical details, shifting naturally from one topic to the next.

As her lupus steadily worsened, O’Connor remained an unfailingly devout Catholic waking each morning, “as soon as the first chicken cackles,” with a ritual reading of prayers from a breviary before being driven into Milledgeville by Regina to attend 7:00 AM mass at Sacred Heart Church; her writing life was compressed into just a few hours, but these hours were precious to her, under the protection of her mother. On her very deathbed O’Connor was determined to work—“My my I do like to work…. I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.” O’Connor had a childlike dependence upon her formidable mother, who was the model, as Gooch suggests, for a striking number of older, garrulous, smugly self-centered and self-righteous Southern women in O’Connor’s fiction, several of whom come to rudely abrupt, violent ends.

The quotes from O'Connor about cackling chickens and filet mignon are gems. I want to get back to reading the book of her letters, in which she writes to her New York intellectuals in her self-effacing hillbilly style.

On of the best parts of the essay is Oates' interpretation of O'Connors conversion of a romantic disappointment into the vicious story Good Country People:

As Nietzsche tersely observed: “A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.” So sorrow in love might be transformed, through the corrosive alchemy of art, into something that, if a sour sort of compensation, can lay claim at least to a kind of quasi permanence.

Lastly, I like Oates' discussions of cartoons and caricatures. O'Connor's characters are often called 'grotesques' but never cartoons or caricatures which would accuse them of being two-dimensional. Rather, O'Connor, like Mervyn Peake, has a cartoonist's sensibility for understanding the entirety of their characters, which can translate marvelously to fiction.

I would read a book of "large and startling" ridiculous characters any day over a book in which all the characters resemble the author (how many more books do I need to read about a literature professor having an affair- Stoner gets a pass though).

#southern