Procrastination is a funny thing. Well, maybe not so funny, but the more I practice it, the better I get at it! Consider this newsletter. I started it over a year ago with the intention to write about poetry and literature, maybe some music too, on a regular basis. At the time, I had so many thoughts and wanted to put them all into words. So I put some of them into words, got discouraged, felt a little silly about people who may or may not subscribe to read whatever it was I felt like saying, and then I started procrastinating.
Now I’m back, with a new title for the newsletter (I always thought The Write Path was a bit lame): Views, RE: Verse. There’s a bit of alliteration and an indication that I’ll be sharing my views on verse in literature. This allows me to write about traditional or contemporary poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction with whatever slant appeals to me. So much appeals to me in poetry, that it will sometimes be hard to choose what I want to share my thoughts on, but if I tell myself that I’m conveying my thoughts based on my years of experience in teaching and writing, I’ll have so much to write about that I can keep going and going for as long as I want—until I procrastinate again.
Today, I’m considering Denise Levertov’s poem, “Pleasures,” (the link takes you to the text available at the Poetry Foundation which has chosen it as the poem of the day for today, September 29, 2023).
Jumping right in, the opening tercet could stand alone but for the lack of a period at the end:
I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies
The rhythm is set up symmetrical, the comma indicating the enjambment that will add a second sentence, making the thought more complex, and I anticipate that it will be image-filled to illustrate what the speaker has found. First, I consider the meaning of “lies” and whether it is a physical definition or a metaphorical one. My years of reading and writing poetry have taught me to expect metaphor, but I also feel I should take the more literal definition into consideration as well. My anticipation is rewarded, but slowly, as the poet has provided punctuation, line and stanza breaks, caesura, and white space in order to slow me down and to savor each image as it reveals itself in the poem.
Levertov has given us additional information on the type of things this speaker likes to find with the second part of the opening sentence that comes in the first two lines of the second tercet and ends with a period before beginning the next with an image ripe for an enjambed thought, and I am not disappointed. The speaker then starts a list of pleasurable finds beginning with “Gull feathers of glass,” moving on to “the bones of squid” and a specific fruit (and here I looked up “mamey” to find it is the fruit of a tropical tree). With the third item on the list, the imagery becomes more detailed, observing all parts of the fruit in relation to the speaker in a quatrain because I imagine, that there was so much more to reveal there, to expand upon. Levertov doesn’t want to leave us wanting before the speaker is reintroduced in the final stanza of five lines which is a single sentence all of its own in which the lasting image of “the juicy stem of grass that grows / within the coarser leaf folded round,” becomes the all-important sustenance for the morning-glory, making it possible for it to bloom.
I am left having found pleasure in Levertov’s “Pleasures,” a satisfying poem for my return from the island of procrastination where other things fill up my day that may not be poetry but that could certainly be fodder for some future poem of mine that I can only hope might move a reader as much as Levertov’s poem has moved me.