Denise Levertov's Years in Worcester, Massachusetts

Michael True reveals Denise Levertov's unique legacy in Worcester, Massachusetts, in an essay published in Worcester's Telegram & Gazette. "A major American poet of the 20th century, Denise Levertov left her mark on Worcester’s rich literary history through her readings from the late 1960s to the 1990s, through her friendship with local writers, and her poetry workshop at Assumption College in 1974" True explains. From there: 

Earlier, she, Robert Bly, and Stanley Kunitz helped through their poetry readings at the Worcester Public Library to launch the Worcester County Poetry Association, Inc., now in its forty-seventh year. In addition to her The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (a book spanning 1,022 pages), she is recently the subject of two excellent biographies, Donna Hollenberg’s, Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Revolution, and Dana Greene’s, Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life.

A special legacy is Levertov’s encouragement in that 1974 workshop to local poets, who have since received national awards for their poems. In celebration marking the fortieth anniversary of the Worcester Review, John Hodgen remembered her reading at the conclusion of that workshop at Assumption: “Denise filling La Maison Auditorium on a hot summer night, the crowd so enraptured, the room spilling over, so crowded each poem made you hungry for more, so crowded I sat out on the lawn under the window where she was reading, so filled up with poems I was writing even then.”

In the U.S., Levertov taught at M.I.T., Tufts, Stanford, among many other colleges and universities. Although sometimes regarded as a “political poet” (because of her powerful renderings of the effects of the Vietnam War), given the range of her poems, that is a misleading classification. Poems such as “Live at War” convey a vivid sense of that tragic war: “We are the humans, men who can make ... who do these acts,/ who convince ourselves/ it is necessary/... burned human flesh/ is burning in Vietnam as I write.” The same is true of “The Altars in the Streets,” a response to that brutal and unnecessary war, based on Levertov’s time in Vietnam with Muriel Rukeyser: “all the shed blood the monsoons cannot wash away/ has become a temple,/ fragile, insolent, absolute.”

Read on at Worcester's Telegram & Gazette.