I said, I didn’t have a lot of Jewish input, but I
had some, because it was part of my father’s
earliest scholarship and of his work as an Angli-
can priest who tried to educate people about the
Jewish roots of Christianity. Although I was not
‘‘EnglishEnglish,’’ the English countryside was
absolutely formative for me, and I miss it to this
day. I mean, I will watch reruns ofAll Creatures
Great and Smallon TV just to see all the English
details.
Q: Do you trace your emphasis on attentive-
ness back to the early years as well?
A:Yes, and especially to the influence of my
mother. I have a poem inLife in the Forestabout
how in springtime my mother would go down
the garden pathway and say, ‘‘Oh, look, the
snowdrop has come up’’ and ‘‘Look, there’s a
crocus!’’ And I remember recognizing how she
had done that the year before and I was bored,
because I was too young to pay attention, and
now I am a child, not a baby, and I can see what
she was talking about.
She was a pointer-outer. She pointed out
clouds, and she pointed out flowers. She started
one off looking at things. When she was living in
Mexico in her last eighteen years or so, the child
of the family in which she was a sort of paying
guest and an unofficial adopted grandmother,
that one child in that family who had spent a
lot of time with her in her first years, was the only
one who would run in and say, ‘‘Oh, you must
come and look; there is a beautiful sunset,’’
because my mother had made her look at things.
Q: Would your mother also name things?
A:Yes, she’d name them too.
Q: Some would say that pointing and naming
are the poet’s primal tasks.
A:Yes. Very few people really see things
unless they’ve had someone in early life who
made them look at things. And name them too.
But the looking is primary, the focus. I saw the
difference in that child. She wasn’t more intelli-
gent than the other children in the family. She
wasn’t personally particularly sensitive. But she
had had that experience of my mother’s point-
ing. And there’s a curious sort of obliviousness
to things that I have noted with students, quite
intellectual students. I first noticed it when I was
teaching at Vassar, which has a very pretty cam-
pus. That was back in 1966. I don’t know what
it’s like now, but it was not yet coed. Students
came from good high schools, and so they were
rather well prepared. They were much less igno-
rant than the typical student, even in a suppos-
edly good school, is today.
The Vassar campus has a lake, a pretty little
lake, and I discovered that quite a few of these
students (a lot of them were senior English
majors) had never walked around the lake.
They were too book-oriented. I have always
been book-oriented too, but they were study-
and analytically-oriented. So I made them walk
around the lake. A couple of times when it was
warm enough, toward the end of the school year,
we had class and a picnic there. I’ve experienced,
dozens of times in my life, walking with someone
across some campus or park, or just a city street,
and interrupting myself in mid-sentence to say,
‘‘Oh, look, isn’t that gorgeous... ’’ And they’ve
kind of blinked and said, ‘‘Oh, yes! I pass here
every day, and I’ve never noticed that before.’’
So I think that people need a pointer-outer, and
the earlier the better. And my mother gave me
that.
Q: You spoke in class about Pound. I do see in
your early poetry the emphasis on images and on
clear and sharp and accurate imagery. Do you feel
compelled to ‘‘make it new,’’ or to see it in unusual
ways, in order to say, ‘‘look, look; see it in a new
way’’?
A:No, I don’t feel compelled to see it in
unusual ways, but I think anything that one
really sees is new and fresh. I mean, when one
really gives one’s attention to something, you
probably see something in it that you didn’t see
before. But the Pound book that was most influ-
ential for me was not theCantos, nor the early
Imagist poetry. Of course I read them and no
doubt learned something from them. But it was
The ABC of Reading. I don’t use it to teach so
much anymore, but I used to make all of my
students read it. Pound failed to see many things;
he never dealt with his own unconscious, for
instance, and he never really acknowledged it
in others; but what he had to say about preci-
sion, accuracy, and integrity in craft is very
valuable....
Source:Ed Block, Jr., ‘‘Interview with Denise Levertov,’’
inRenascence, Vol. 50, No. 2–Jan, Fall/Winter 1997/1998
1998, pp. 4–15.Marilyn Kallet
In the following excerpt from an analysis of ‘‘A
Tree Telling of Orpheus,’’ Kallet discusses some ofATreeTellingofOrpheus