Breaking Form Selects: Larry Levis (A Summer Poetry Salon)
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What is the Summer Salon’s focus on Larry Levis and why was he chosen?
Welcome to Breaking Form, a podcast of poetry and culture, where we get real about queer life and art. We're your host. I'm Aaron Smith. And I'm James Allen Hall. If you're listening for the first time, we play spicy literary games. We revisit poems that we love.
We serve hot takes on poetry and po-biz.
We read. You to filth. We gossip. We shade. We laugh. And we are not for everyone.
Hello, Aaron. Welcome to Breaking Form Selects, a summer salon series where we pick one poet and read four poems by that poet, a poet we love and we want to celebrate and dive deeper into. And there'll be no fact check and the bio will be in the show notes.
Who have we picked this week? And today we're going to dive into the poems of Larry Levis. So, you know, hang on because it's hard to read Larry Levis and not read some long poems. So we hope that you'll sit back with a joint or some wine or while someone's eating you out and listen to these poems. That is too funny.
That would be a very Levis kind of thing.
So I'll kick us off with one called The Smell of the Sea. Because they could not blind him twice, they drove a pencil through the blind king's ear. The pencil could not believe the thing it had been asked to do, but by then it was already entering the mind of And there it forgot that it had ever been a pencil. Darkness reigned in the basement of the record store in Ogden, Utah, where all this happened. And there wasn't any king. The other king, the one who came in the night, was blind and mad and owned a record store and was a Mormon. So were his ungrateful daughters who would pretend to pry his eyes out with kitchen spoons.
How does the opening reading of “The Smell of the Sea” set the tone for the episode?
And so within the kingdom was everyone except the fool who repaired chainsaws and snowmobiles and thought of them as small, snarling gods whose faith and hatred of trees was perfect. The man who owned the record store had once suspected God did not exist and had spent a summer lying on the beach at Santa Monica trying hard not to believe in God and was unable to. It was 1967. Wild Thing was coming from a radio. Her name was Dawn. She had dropped a half tab of acid an hour before he picked her up. and didn't say a word until they were driving back and then she said blue lights so many blue lights yeah well it's the airport we're driving by the airport now he explained oh she said maybe it was the acid that had made her seem as distant and withdrawn as the world was stretched across a quiet evening
Where was Wild Thing? Dawn was hazy, overcast, and about as much fun to be with as the third wife at the wedding of a Spanish fork polygamist. The woman in her hopeless gingham dress had looked on, smiled at her husband, then at the teenage bride. "'You're kin to her?' she had asked him. He had come with a friend who thought the whole thing would be amusing. He had no idea who the girl was, that little slut he had wanted to say because he wanted to say something shocking.' He still wanted to until the woman turned to him and said, with so many people showing up, we're stretching it pretty thin. But we got chili dogs and ice cream anyway. We splurged. The way someone had carefully trimmed the yard with its small, parched lawn and strung balloons on a clothesline suddenly filled him with pity.
Faith showed itself in the ribcage. Its bones were visible. He could see them beneath the too small bodice of the woman's dress. Faith resided there, under the shriveled and lost left nipple. He liked music. He liked hearing it while he worked. And now he owned the store, although for an hour or two each night, he was both blind and mad and believed in kings and believed he was a king. And it never once entered his mind that the pencil balanced between the pulse of his temple and his ear had been invented long after the deaths of kings. After they had done the scene, he would remember who he was again. An ordinary man who knew it and would have been insane because of knowing it if he could not crawl toward Dover on his knees.
He couldn't act. When he dressed in weeds, his temple garment showed under them.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Summer Salon’s focus on Larry Levis and why was he chosen?
0:00–2:20
2
How does the opening reading of “The Smell of the Sea” set the tone for the episode?
2:20–10:52
3
What insights do the hosts share about Levis’s posthumous collection *Elegy*?
10:52–15:33
4
Why do the hosts highlight the early poem “Unfinished Poem” and what does it reveal about Levis’s style?
15:33–20:27
5
How does the reading of “The Blue Hat Band” explore themes of memory and history?
20:27–25:02
6
What connections do the hosts draw between fire imagery and Levis’s personal life?
25:02–26:43
7
How do the hosts reflect on the challenges of reading long, complex poems today?
26:43–26:59
8
What final thoughts and calls to action do the hosts leave listeners with?
26:59–27:00
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
Breaking Form Selects: Lucie Brock-Broido (A Summer Poetry Salon)
Breaking Form Selects: Tim Dlugos (A Summer Poetry Salon)
Breaking Form Selects: Melvin Dixon (A Summer Poetry Salon)
Breaking Form Selects: Tommye Blount (A Summer Poetry Salon)
Breaking Form Selects: Lynda Hull (A Summer Poetry Salon)
Dolly Pelliker (A Cherapy Episode)