2016 Lamont Poet Levin Delivers Her Work

Phillis Levin, the spring 2016 Lamont Poet, shared her poetry with the Exeter community at a reading last Wednesday evening and a question-and-answer session Thursday. Levin has published five collections of poetry and served as editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry London, Yale Review, Kenyon Review and The Best American Poetry. She teaches Creative Writing in the MFA program at Hofstra University in New York. Prior to Wednesday’s poetry reading, many Exeter students read work from Levin’s most recent collection, May Day, in their English classes.

Senior Zanny Merullo, who studied May Day in her Creative Writing class, welcomed the opportunity to hear Levin’s work read aloud. “We had struggled to decipher the meaning of her poems,” she said. “So hearing her read them and comment on them in person was really exciting.” 

English instructor and Lamont Poet Committee member Todd Hearon agreed that hearing Levin read her poems aloud brought new meaning to the words.

“It most always enhances the work to hear it in the poet’s own voice,” Hearon said. “Her tempo and naturalness of delivery made me hear the poems in a new way.”

Lower Olivia Lei, who also read poems from May Day before the reading, found the selection of poems that Levin read particularly pleasing.

“[The poems she chose to read] are just so lyrical and there’s something so graceful about them,” Lei said. Upper Zoe Marshall agreed and noted that the poems Levin chose to read were “diverse and thoughtful.”

“Small changes can play into larger effects, especially in the canvas of the poem where there is enormous attention to even a syllable.”

Physics instructor and Lamont Poet Committee member Tatiana Waterman admired the richness of nature and science that appears in Levin’s poems.

“When I read May Day, cover to cover, I couldn’t contain myself from marking and marking each poem for all the science threads my nerdy brain saw,” Waterman said. She added that Levin’s writing is “accessible and brilliant at the same time.”

According to Hearon, the Lamont Poet Committee meets twice a year to select two poets from a talented pool of applicants. The commitee considers a variety of factors when the committee makes its choices, but Hearon commented that Levin’s “brilliant work alone set her apart.”

In the introduction he read at Levin’s Wednesday night reading, Hearon described Levin’s eye and imagination as “imbued with a touch of the mysterious, the numinous.” He added that “her attention to physicality elevates her observed things into the metaphysical, where image bleeds into and becomes one with idea.”

Furthermore, Hearon explained that the opportunity to read would also help Levin promote her new book, May Day.

On Thursday morning, Levin met with students in the Elting room to receive and address a range of questions, which addressed topics spanning from her work as an anthologist to choices she made in particular poems. Hearon explained that this Q&A gave students a clearer grasp of a poet at work and described the deeper understanding of poetry Levin provided the students with. “While nothing is random in the process, there is a large berth for the unpredictable, for allowing the language to take over, as she said, and to follow where it wants to go,” Hearon said.

Waterman applauded not only Levin’s dedication to the art of poetry, but also her dedication to teaching it.

“Her love of teaching was evident at the book-signing line,” Waterman said. “She engaged in serious conversation with every student who had a question for her; she treated this as a teaching opportunity and not just [a] celebrity signing.”

Levin began writing poetry at a very young age, and described asking her mother to write down phrases for her even before she could write. She recalled dictating a poem to her mother about a spider and said that her childhood fascination of the natural world has yet to leave her.

“I still marvel at water drops,” she said. “The worlds within worlds. But how does one translate that into poetry?”

Levin explained that for her, poetry has to “work on the sonic level,” adding that the language and sound of the poem trumps the significance of the message.

She continued, describing her “allergic reaction to messages.”  “The message kills the poem,” she said. “Once you have a message, you don’t have a poem. Because if it can be summarized into a message, then one needn’t have the poem, one could just read the message.”

She went on to say that this preference for lyricism over narrative does not mean that she ignores meaning.

Rather, she tends to rely on her readers to make meaning, and focuses herself on the language of the poem. “It’s really hard not to have meaning,” she said.

Levin highlighted the importance of the structure and sound of the poem by talking about the serendipity and elegance of rhyme.

“If you rhyme, and you rhyme well, you’re finding a coincidence in the language,” she said. “An absolutely illogical coincidence, where suddenly words illuminate each other and have a new relationship to each other where each one reflects on the other one and it’s just chance.” She went on to say that she constantly seeks to “physicalize the experience: linguistically, sonically, rhythmically [and] visually.”

For Levin, the revision process can often take longer than writing the first draft of the poem. “It’s possible that [there are] not that many changes,” she said, of her editing work, “but enough changes. Small changes can play into larger effects, especially in the canvas of the poem where there is enormous attention to even a syllable.”

In his introduction of Levin Wednesday evening, Hearon admired “the perennial and profound ways her eye seizes upon the things of this world, as if called—a demitasse, a burgundy scarf, a stroller, bats in their World of Darkness, a simple acorn, a dandelion/dent de lion.”

He went on to describe how she communicated these things with the remarkable, “making them strangely familiar and familiarly strange; making them, above all, memorable, seen in the light of a refined attention—a light that surely must issue from love.”