Larry Levis: Poems That Mean? Poems That Are? (January 1993)

Beginning with Archibald MacLeish’s dictum “A poem should not mean/ But be,” Larry Levis interrogates this dichotomy. Does any poem truly exist outside of reference or meaning? Levis conducts close readings of Pound’s Canto XIII and Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” to show how historical reference enriches and deepens these poems; in poems by Simic and Drummond de Andrade he shows how even writing that aspires only to “be” on its own terms participates in the convention it opposes, and so renews.