Dana Levin
Visiting Poet
In Dana Levin’s most recent collection, Banana Palace (Copper Canyon, 2016), the act of scrolling through a cellphone becomes linked with a sibyl’s prophetic voice and an overheard rant on the street swirls with the force of the oracular. In Levin’s work, this collision of voices becomes a means of interrogating the complex collage of information and human desires in an era that seems wracked with political and global anxieties. These are urgent and inventive poems, determined equally to confront the vicissitudes of our age as well as the interiority of the self.
Levin's first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Sky Burial was noted for 2011 year-end honors by The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, Coldfront, and Library Journal.
Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations.
A teacher of poetry for over twenty five years, Levin has served as the Russo Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico (2009–2011), as well as Faculty and Chair of the Creative Writing and Literature Department at College of Santa Fe (1998–2009) and Santa Fe University of Art and Design (2011–2015). She currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
Select Poems
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat—
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out—
and a voice saying, Don’t don’t—
From WEDDING DAY (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
I was tracking the stars through the open truck window,
my friend speeding the roads through the black country—
and I was thinking how the songs coming from the radio
were like the speech of a single human American psyche—
the one voice of the one collective dream, industrial,
amphetamine, and the starts unmoving—
the countryside black and silent, through which a song
pumped serious killer over and over—
and I could feel the nation shaping, it was something about
the collective dream of the rich land and the violent wanting—
the amphetamine drive and the cows sleeping,
all along the sides of the dark road—
never slowing enough to see what we might have seen
if the moon rose up its pharmaceutical light—
aspirin-blue over the pine-black hills what was rising up—
mullein or something else in the ditches their flameless tapers—
world without fire the song heralded a crystal methedrine light—
while the sky brought its black bone down around
the hood of the truck
the electric migration—
we were losing our bodies—
digitized salt of bytes and speed we were becoming a powder—
light—
bicarbonate—
what we might have seen, if we had looked—
From WEDDING DAY (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
I say most sincerely and desperately, HAPPPY NEW YEAR!
Having rowed a little farther away from the cliff
Which is my kind of religion
Adrift in the darkness but readying oars
How can there be too many stars and hands, I ask you
__
I would be disingenuous if I said “being understood”
is not important to me
Between the ceiling of private dream and the floor of public
speech
Between the coin and the hand it crosses
Mercantilists’ and governors’ and preachers’ alike
The imagination and its products so often rebuff purpose
And some of us don’t like it, and want to make it mean
I would never shoot you, even if you were the only meat
around
__
Anyway, snow-bound sounds gorgeous and inconvenient
Like the idea of ending on the internal rhyme of psychics
and clients
Though I too privilege the “shiny”
And of course, I want to be approved of, so much
Despite the image I’ve been savoring, the one of the self-
stitching wound
Yes, I want to write that self-healing wound poem, the one
with cocoon closed up with thorns
We are getting such lovely flourishes from our poets
Fathomless opportunities for turning literacy into event
It’s the drama of feeling we find such an aesthetic problem,
these days
From SKY BURIAL (Copper Canyon Press, 2011)