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Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Idea
Encourage
Understand
Teachers
Jobs
Otherwise
Order
Teaching
Ideas
Wouldn
Things
Teacher
Levels
Talk
Phony

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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains themso would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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