National Poetry Month at The Other Pages - Number 01 - Denise Leveretov - The Room

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. This marks the fifth year of this event, where we try to explore at least one poem a day throughout the month of April. This is a good opportunity to discover new poems and poets, or maybe to gain an insight on something familiar.

My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series, with help and contributions this year from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Florida, from Coral Springs, on the eastern edge of the Everglades. Good luck to Robin Berard, who will not be joining us this year, as she valiantly tries to teach creative writing to 240 students.

So, where to start? Something new? Something old? Something that speaks to broad themes? Something more intimate? How about something that speaks to the most common shared experience in the world over the past year:  the idea of isolation, and how our imagination can help us reach outward from that isolation, toward the things we feel we have lost, and the people and places and aspects of life that we are missing.

This is not a new problem, but pandemic has renewed it and spread it globally along with the disease. Today’s poem, likewise, is not new. It was published in Poetry Magazine in October of 1958, and it is titled simply, The Room. It was not written in a time of plague, but during the Cold War. The Americans and Russians were building atomic bombs and starting to launch satellites overhead. Then, as now, as always, there were things to worry about. And likewise, then, as now, as always, there were plenty of fears and worries, things rational and irrational, that drove people to isolate themselves. 

The Room is not about the cause of isolation, but about the existence itself, and how to make it more expansive. If not to participate in, at least to observe the daily rituals of sunrise and sunset, the arc of the moon and stars, and maybe too, all of the daily human rituals and interactions that so many of us have missed so badly. The speaker’s solution, in this poem, is a literal house of mirrors, but she realizes its risks. At least some of them. 

First, let’s talk about the poet. (Priscilla) Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1948 at age 25, three years after the Second World War. The Poetry Foundation has a good biography (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-levertov) and many of her poems online, so I won’t try to compress her story here, other than to comment that, interestingly, she was home schooled by her mother  - largely by reading aloud.

Over the course of her prolific writing career she produced twenty-four books of poetry, five more of poetry translations, and many essays. Her writing has received praise and criticism over the course of her career for her activist stance and themes, and her sometimes prose-like narratives. While she wrote only a few war poems initially on WWII, as time went by she became a strong advocate against the Vietnam war, and wrote about environmental concerns, AIDS, and other contentious topics. These themes were clearly visible (or sometimes the explicit subject) in her works. She died of cancer in 1997, and writing up to the very end. She is recognized for the clarity of her voice, and I think that comes through in today’s short poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=93&issue=1&page=13

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