I stumbled into my first poetry class in college. Then I took another, and then three more—as many as I could. Assigned Contemporary American Poetry, that honker of an anthology, I put a checkmark next to each poet as I read them. Twenty years later, Denise Levertov still appears between Li-Young Lee and Philip Levine, and yes, there’s a little check next to her name. I had only one book of poetry until college: One Hundred and One Famous Poems, first published in 1916—a Christmas gift from my great aunt and uncle. The Lowell I read growing up was not Robert Lowell, but his great grand-uncle, James Russell Lowell!
Denise Levertov trained as a dancer, and so did I. I lost a big toenail to ballet. It grew back strangely—took a year to look right. “Did you have teachers?” is one question in an interview titled “Levertov’s Final Interview,” and she answers: “No…I did lessons at home with my mother. I didn't attend school ever, except ballet school.” Zadie Smith in her essay “Dance Lessons for Writers,” claims these to be lessons “of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect,” and that “writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing.” I think of writers and dancers as people who can appreciate a challenge, a struggle: “Where is the angel for me to wrestle?” Levertov asks in one poem. She was Catholic, and she compares dancing to prayer: “this need to dance / this need to kneel.” I was raised Protestant, but I have catholic tastes: I want all the poetry ever, and even like to disagree with it, or have it disagree with me, because growing up I only had One Hundred and One Famous Poems and the Bible.
-Morgan English