I had the unique experience of being exposed to a poem orally, recited by the poet no less, and of understanding her words enough to be moved by them. Denise Levertov’s poem is called “Life at War.” It was new at this reading. She recites it from her handwritten notebook here, in 1966, starting at minute 11:35 of the video. Her tone and inflection of voice are earnestly neutral, which allows the words to stun, the delivery not distract. Her enunciation has bell-like clarity; her phrasing is deliberate, scrupulous, unforced. The periods breathe and cohere unhesitantly. For my ear and taste, Levertov’s recitation is majorly how it’s done. Respect to a master. 

I’ve transcribed what I heard on the fly. There may be an error in what’s typed here, and obviously it’s not her lineation. It will be in published form somewhere. What’s a poem for? To rusticate on a page or to fly into someone’s ear? This one flew into mine. It came at me straight and hard; I had to get it down and pass it on.

LIFE AT WAR
by Denise Levertov (transcribed from recitation)

The disaster’s numb within us, caught in the chest, roiling in the brain like pebbles.
The feeling resembles lumps of raw dough weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it: My heart, could I say it overflows with business?
But no, as though its contents were simply balled into formless lumps. Thus do I carry it about.

The same war continues. We have breathed the grit of it in, all our lives.
Our lungs are pocked with it, the mucus membrane of our dreams coated with it,
the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it.

The knowledge that humankind — delicate men whose flesh responds to a caress,
whose eyes are flowers that perceive the stars, whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs fairer than the spider’s most intricate web —
still turns without surprise, with mere regret, to the scheduled breaking open
of breasts whose milk runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp fragments, implosion of skinned penises into carcass gullies.

We are the humans! Men who can make, beings so lovely
we have believed one another the mirror image of a God we felt as good,
who do these acts, convince ourselves it is necessary.
These acts are done to our own flesh. Burned human flesh is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles the space in our bodies
along with all we go on knowing of joy, of love.
Our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night.
Nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying.
Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved