La Chascona #6: Denise Levertov

[La Chascona was the Santiago home of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda—a home in which portraits of Walt Whitman adorn the study]

At the feet of her Welsh mother, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) absorbed the works of Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy. Her father, an Anglican parson, had been raised a Chasidic Jew. Levertov sent some of her poetry to T.S. Eliot when she was 12 years old. His response? Two pages of “excellent advice” and encouragement to continue. Her first poem to be published appeared in Poetry Quarterly when she was 17.

During the Blitz, Levertov braved the bombings to serve as a civilian nurse in London. Her first book, “The Double Image” was released in 1946—leading to her identification with a group of poets called the “New Romantics.” The next year she married American writer Mitchell Goodman (later a codefendant in the 1968 Trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock)—moving to the States in 1948. Living in New York City, they spent summers in Maine. Upon moving to the U.S., Levertov was introduced to the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as the work of William Carlos Williams.

Through her husband’s friendship with Robert Creeley, Levertov became associated with the Black Mountain group of poets—particularly Creely, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson—who had formed the fabled, experimental school in North Carolina dedicated to John Dewey’s principles. Springing forth from the school, these poets were joined by Jonathan Williams and Ed Dorn. An editor of the Black Mountain Review, Creeley acted as a bridge between this group and the Beat poets (such as Allen Ginsberg) when he moved to San Francisco. While Levertov was published in the Black Mountain Review and acknowledged the influences of her peers, she dismissed the idea that she was a member of any “poetic school.”

Levertov’s first American book “Here and Now” was published in 1956, the very year she attained U.S. citizenship. She had developed an open, experimental style—moving away from previous fixed forms—and became an important voice in the American avant-garde. Her output during the fifties and sixties gained the recognition of poets such as Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams as well as her “colleagues” Creeley and Duncan. “With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” (1959) brought her into the canon of American poets—leaving her British origins behind.

We know Levertov as a deeply socially committed poet. This was established during the 1960s, when issues related to civil rights, the Vietnam War, social change, and feminism came to the fore in her work. “The Sorrow Dance” (1967)—with its two “psalms”—poured forth her respective rage and sadness toward the Indochina conflict and the death of her older sister. Her progressive credentials were firmly established: From 1963 to 1965 Levertov served as poetry editor of The Nation and from 1975 to 1978 at Mother Jones. With such colleagues as Muriel Rukeyser, she took on issues such as nuclear disarmament and U.S. intervention—even being arrested in civil disobedience actions.

It was, as a 16 year old, in 1975, that I discovered Denise Levertov. Her wonderful book “To Stay Alive” (1971) “called” to me from the shelf in the bookstore of Muskegon Community College. I was entranced by and fell in love with her highly lyric verses juxtaposed with bits of prose. It was the first book of poetry I ever purchased. Its vision, “conversations,” and weariness remain an inspiration.

Around the time I “found” Denise Levertov, she created “Freeing the Dust” (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Besides her 20 plus books of poetry, Levertov authored four books of prose and translated three volumes of poetry (including works by Eugène Guillevic, Alain Bosquet, and Jean Joubert). She taught at Stanford University from 1982 to 1993 and spent the last decade of her life in Seattle, Washington, during which time she published “Poems 1968-1972” (1987), “Breathing the Water” (1987), “A Door in the Hive” (1989), “Evening Train” (1992), and “The Sands of the Well” (1996).

For decades she had admired the work of and was influenced by Paul Claudel (1868-1955) whose verse dramas espoused his devout Catholicism and broached the sacred and sensuous. In a parallel to her father’s spiritual search and ultimate conversion from Chasidic Judaism to Anglicanism, Levertov made her own spiritual journey—being received into the Roman Catholic Church during those Seattle years. At the age of 74, she died from complications of lymphoma.

Academy of American Poets

Poem Hunter

Denise Levertov.com

Broadcast: Blurred Lines in Transmission

[1. Hostage (1994), Dara Birnbaum. Color video with six-channel stereo sound, interactive laser, four Plexiglass shields, & metal ceiling mounts; installation dimensions & running times variable. 2.The Amarillo News Tapes (1980), Doug Hall, Chip Lord & Judy Procter. Single channel color video with sound. 3. Video Tape Study No. 3 (1967-1969), Nam June Paik. Single-Channel black &white video with sound, four minutes. (Image of NYC Mayor John Vliet Lindsay). 4. Four TV Commercials (1973-77/2000), Chris Burden. Single-Channel color & black & white video with sound, 4:46 minutes.]

Since the late 1960s, artists have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. Indeed, this is the raison d'être of “Broadcast,” an exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, which runs through May 2. From TVTV’s iconoclastic television broadcast on the floor of the self-congratulatory 1972 Republican convention to Gregory Green’s recent pirate radio station installations, artists have sought to examine or challenge the influence and power of TV and radio through various interventions into those systems. These interventions can range from the hostile—such as when Chris Burden took a TV host hostage at knifepoint in 1972—to the collaborative (as is the case with Christian Janowski’s 1999 project for the Venice Biennale. Other artists, such as Dana Birnbaum, appropriate media coverage while still others incorporate broadcasting conventions.

Whether through repetition and interruption of images with music, text, and flow, Dara Birnbaum appropriates media to subvert its ideology and embedded meaning. This is especially so in “Hostage” (1994), Birnbaum’s provocative work that takes—as its point of departure—the media coverage of the 1977 kidnapping (and resultant execution) of German industrialist and former SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Rote Armee Fraktion insurgency. Tersely, “Hostage” asks what the appropriate role might be for media in a sensitive hostage situation in this installation that suspends subsequent monitors from the ceiling playing archival television footage of events related to the tragedy.

Travelling to Amarillo, Texas, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Judy Procter observed the business of news as “artists in residence” at KVII-TV. They accompanied Channel 7 Pro News reporters to the field and watched newscasts from behind the scenes—later taping their own version of the news in collaboration with the crew. This project clearly reflected their interest, as artists, in examining cultural institutions. In Amarillo News Tapes they observed and dissected what made news in a smaller market. In their respective roles as anchor, weathercaster, and sportscaster—and interacting with the real Pro News team on the set—they cast attention to the language and theater of television news. While humorous, their purpose, according to Doug Hall, was not to parody the news for its own sake but to examine its style and ritual, which is as much about fiction as it is about fact.

Considered to be the very first video artist as well as author of the phrase “information superhighway,” Fluxus participant Nam June Paik (1932-2006) has had the greatest influence on the artistic potential of video and television: He was among the very first artists to purchase Sony Portapak video equipment when it first came out in 1965. Creating some of the first video art with his shot footage, “Video Tape Study No. 3”—done with filmmaker Jud Yaikut—is a seminal work in which Paik distorted and manipulated footage from news conferences by embattled political figures President Lyndon B. Johnson and New York City Mayor John Vliet Lindsay. At the same time irreverent and technically crude, Paik challenged the authority of the broadcasts—inserting himself briefly into the footage by wagging his finger at the television screen. Paik even utilized television sets to make robots. His collaboration with Yaikut in “Video Tape” was just one of many in his notable career. He also engaged creatively with such figures as John Cage, Salvador Dali, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky.

Merging radio technology and line drawing in a work referencing Radio Caroline, “12 Miles Out” ( 2005) resonates with the ethos with alternative, off-shore, and pirate radio—ranging from the juggernaut English-language service of Radio Luxembourg to the peace ship of Abie Nathan and “underground radio” in the U.S. during the high-water mark of the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The titanic forerunner of both pirate and modern commercial radio, Radio Luxembourg’s English-language service began in 1933 as one of the earliest commercial radio stations broadcasting to the United Kingdom— effectively circumventing British law vis-à-vis the prohibition of advertising over the domestic radio spectrum and serving as a refuge for stars and shows—from the singer Vera Lynn to the comedy series “Much Binding in the March”—previously heard on the BBC but with whom the BBC had fallen out for whatever reason. With the most powerful transmitter in the world (1200 kW broadcasting on medium wave), Radio Luxembourg captured mass audiences in Britain with programs that made available various songs and forms of music not played over the BBC. Israeli humanitarian and peace activist Abie Nathan (1927-2008) founded the Voice of Peace radio station in 1973, which sailed outside Israeli territorial waters, broadcast 24/7 (mostly pop music) and promoted Nathan’s political activities (that included disaster relief in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Biafra, Colombia, and Ethiopia). Eschewing the loud-mouth babble and fractured U.S. Top 40 radio of the 1960s, DJs on the edge utilized the nascent FM radio band to air longer and less commercial music, more controversial material (including unorthodox coverage of the Vietnam War, political protests, social unrest, and the counterculture), and less restrictive programming styles. Thus “12 Miles Out” (wire, nails, radio transmitter, audio recording, and radios) must be seen in a larger context.

At the intersection of television and internet sources, Siebren Versteeg integrates and contrasts those sources in his examination of media’s filtering influences. In “CC” (2003), a mute TV screen displays a loop of six talking newscasters while a web-connected feed of blog entries stream underneath—literally and figuratively underlying the disconnect between what is presented on the screen and undermining the presumed authority of the evening news. Co-founded by Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez in 2001, the artist collaborative neuroTransmitter fuses transmission, sound production, and mobile broadcast design into conceptual pieces that investigate the politics, history, and power of radio—called “wireless telegraphy” in its infancy. In 2005’s “Frequency Allocations (in 3 parts),” neuroTransmitter explores the power of media conglomerates; re-articulates the role of radio transmission in various contexts, forms, and purposes; and considers new public possibilities for this medium.

Broadcast covers even more ground in this thorough exhibition. Important is the inclusion of performance artist Chris Burden, perhaps best known for his 1971 work “Shoot,” in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of approximately five meters (and for which he was taken for psychiatric assistance). After repeated rejections of Burden’s proposals for television programming, he took his interviewer hostage with a knife held to her throat during a live artist interview at Channel 3 Cablevision in Irvine, Calif., in February 1972. The result, “TV Hijack,” which combines two panels—three gelatin silver prints and photocopy on one mat board and three gelatin silver prints and one chromogenic print on another—is included with “Four TV Commercials,” a video with sound that aired on various channels in Los Angeles and New York during prime time commercial breaks. Today, in the midst of Clear Channel corporate hegemony and the Fox Terror "News," Broadcast is an important collection of works to absorb.

Broadcast

through May 2, 2009

Pratt Manhattan Gallery

144 West 14^th Street, 2^nd Floor

www.pratt.edu/exhibitions

jim nickoff: in memoriam

recently i found out from a college friend that one of our mutual friends died at his ranch in woodside, california on december 16, 2007. jim nickoff, a founding equality california board member, ended his life on that day with a gunshot wound to the head. he was 44 and served as served as eqca’s treasurer for the five years preceding his suicide. creating the entire financial structure for that organization, he helped manage those systems as it grew (from about $180,000 to just under $4 million). jim was a key player in the financial success of gay civil rights organizations and several political campaigns—including those of barbara boxer, mark leno, harry britt, angela aliotto, leslie katz and a host of others. in addition to his work on those campaigns, he served in financial positions with the national task force on aids prevention, project open hand, pacific business group on health, the federation of gay games, and the harvey milk lgbt democratic club.

born and raised in lansing, michigan, jim attended michigan state university and earned a bachelor's degree in accounting there in 1987, and pursued graduate studies in business administration at golden gate university. it is in lansing that I got to know jim—he lived a couple of doors down from me in a heavily student neighborhood off campus. on thanksgiving weekend 1980, i took jim on his first excursion to a bathhouse: we drove down to detroit to the tnt in those more innocent days before aids overshadowed the very act of making love.

after bruce, my friend in long beach, told me about jim, i “googled” him, and was so pleased and grateful that jim’s commitment to the community was so recognized and appreciated. i still appreciate the kindness that he showed me. what, i wondered, could make him feel so hopeless that he would put a gun to his head? unfortunately, i don’t have to go far for the answer. here he had survived the worst darkness of the aids epidemic, and had lived to see so much progress. sad to say, he is not unique in that. in many ways, i think those of us who felt we didn’t “measure up,” never get over our scarred self-images. jim came out at the age of 15 in the late 1970’s, which was an amazing thing for such a young person to do—no matter where you lived. jim was forced to confront so much anti-gay bigotry so soon. he was kicked out of his home at 15 and had to work as a dishwasher and do odd jobs to survive and put a roof over his head. there was no “will and grace” or “ellen.” how can that not have a horrible impact? while our stories are quite different, i can identify full well with jim’s feelings.

when I graduated from msu in june 1982, i circulated an autograph book among friends, acquaintances, and political colleagues. jim’s entry was short: “from the tubs [referring to our bathhouse excursion] to the ms dance.” the latter referred to the dance-a-thon sponsored by delta tau delta fraternity to raise funds for multiple sclerosis research. because they excluded same-sex couples jim and i were part of a large lesbian and gay dance-in to protest that policy. jim was not the only gay man in that autograph book to commit suicide: i know of at least two others. that doesn’t even include those of us lost to aids and murder.

there are two group photographs in my album that include jim and me. they speak volumes about his bravery and commitment. one was taken in may 1981 at the east lansing police station. a host of joe six-packs attempted to violate a large party celebrating msu lesbian & gay pride week: we fought back and filed charges against the rabble. one of our compatriots showed his bruises in the photo. the other was taken in october 1987 at the march on washington for lesbian and gay rights. we were all smiling and holding a large michigan flag.

however, jim will always loom large in my heart for standing up for me [with another mutual friend named phil] in early spring 1982. in the winter of that year, a bunch of us took on the thankless task of reorganizing msu’s lesbian/gay council [now called the lgbt alliance]—complete with a new, and very thorough, constitution. we unveiled the new structure at the beginning of that spring term—including provisions for two at-large board members. the director of the council appointed his boyfriend to the at-large male position. as an outgoing senior, i had hoped for that position. while saying nothing, i was crushed. the next morning i received an outraged phone call from jim, who was furious at what happened. his call to the director must have worked. in less than two hours i was named to the position. i’ll never forget his kindness, sensitivity, and willingness to jump into the fray. when I visited east lansing in the spring of 1986, jim came to where I was staying and woke me up with his usual beaming smile.

reading the obits about jim in san francisco newspapers, i learned that he was a talented athlete who had won several medals in martial arts at the 1994 gay games in new York, 1998 gay games in amsterdam, and the 2002 gay games in sydney. he had black belts in the martial arts of hapkido (3rd degree), tangsoodo (2nd degree), and taekwondo (1st degree)—and taught martial arts to youth. it was during the period of the gay games in new york (which coincided with the stonewall 25 celebrations) that I last saw jim. he was on the other side of a very large crowd, and I wasn’t able to say “hello.”

jim was survived by his partner, dave lawson. i was pleased to find out that he and his partner were the seventh couple married at san francisco city hall during those frenetic days in february 2004 when mayor gavin newsom jump-started the fight for marriage equality in a “winter of love.” in celebration of jim’s life, the jim nickoff student internship fund was started in care of the equality california institute. the internship will provide lgbt youth, who too often suffer isolation when coming out in high school, an opportunity to connect with the community.