Steve Potter Reviews Heller Levinson's SHIFT GRISTLE & QUERY CABOODLE
Shift Gristle by Heller Levinson
Black Widow Press www.blackwidowpress.com 9 Spring Lane, Boston, MA 02109
ISBN 979-8-9880852-0-1 2023, paperback 270 pages, $19.95
Query Caboodle by Heller Levinson
Black Widow Press www.blackwidowpress.com 9 Spring Lane, Boston, MA 02109
ISBN 979-8-9880852-1-8 2023, paperback 166 pages, $17.95
Heller Levinson’s shift gristle &
query caboodle
reviewed by steve potter
Heller Levinson continues his Hinge Theory-fueled explorations of life and language in two new collections of poetry from Black Widow Press. He includes four epigraphs at the beginning of Shift Gristle which give an indication of the concerns he will engage with, and the modes of engagement in the book. They include quotes from Walter Benjamin, John Gardner, Walt Whitman, and this one from Matthew Prichard, writing in regard to the paintings of his friend Henri Matisse: “There are certain truths which transcend the power of the intellect to grasp, which can only be conveyed by evocation.”
Another clue to Levinson's thinking may be found in the following passage of his from Dialogics, a chapbook from Concrete Mist Press containing conversations between Levinson and Los Angeles poet Will Alexander:
“Seen from the viewpoint of the ‘unfiltered,’ of language as an “experiential formation,” we have clearly de-evolved because our language, with few exceptions, reeks of the transactional & prescriptive. It is not driven with the urgency to open & explore, but to compartmentalize, to utilize, … in short, the Vigor of our language has been dangerously compressed. From our prior conversations, I think we both feel that a prime function of today's poet is to restore language to its primordial fire.” [Emphasis mine.]
The heft of Shift Gristle and the stylistic variety of the writing on its 264 pages make it a difficult book to give a general overview of. Often, in reviewing a poetry collection, one may include a sample poem that gives the reader a sense of the style of the poems in the book. With Shift Gristle, one would need to include a half dozen or so poems to give the reader a sense of the range of work included.
one experiences a kind of emotional through-line while reading Shift Gristle, like paddling a language canoe through rapids of nuance
and inflection.
And yet, there is nothing jarring about the variety of work on display. The book stands as a whole. Like William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, it is a collection that may be thought of as one long conglomerate poem, a sort of non-narrative novel. While there isn't a narrative through-line to the book, one experiences a kind of emotional through-line while reading Shift Gristle, like paddling a language canoe through rapids of nuance and inflection.
Levinson approaches his areas of interest via assorted modes of operation that result in different styles of evocation. The poems that open and explore language to convey truths which transcend the power of the intellect to grasp are occasionally interspersed with poems and sections of short prose that operate via more quotidian and commonplace means.
“GESTATE” begins in an evocative, poetic mode and shifts into prose toward the end:
burr a
bruise col or ing
blush
an equation baffling
ignition
Smitten with Edward Hopper's Approaching a City, 10/13/22, Whitney
Museum,
gestating:
approach initializes gateway vacuum swoop,
railroad tracks approaching a tunnel approaching a city. tunnel =
window to the void. Building windows pulsing with peer, sentinels of the
passing. the ‘windows’ have more time to draw the passengers than the
passengers have time to regard* the dwellers.
Imagine the tunnel, the void, looking back, a cyclops eye inquiring,
‘Who are you to enter here?’
Hopper's remarkable ploy peoples the painting without configuring
people. The semi-drawn curtains soften the buildings, exude occupancy,
… personality, as if the windows were extending ‘feelers.’ One can feel
the look.
This interstice of passengers & occupants gestates with the tension of
speed versus repose. The train snakes into the city, approaches the cold
stone of the tunnel walls while the brooding buildings lurk above the
tracks, tingling with unabashed voyeurism.
A few pages after GESTATE, Levinson includes an unpublished letter to the The New Yorker taking issue with an article by Hilton Als in which Als reduces Hopper's work to the theme of “loneliness.” This is followed by correspondence with Seattle poet and novelist John Olson about Hopper's work and the distinction between “aloneness” and “loneliness.”
Another brief instance of correspondence included in the book is between Levinson and philosophy professor and Heidegger scholar Richard Capobianco. “Yes, I feel we're both attempting to emit a similar flavor/ether of the Being-Way,” Levinson writes, referencing Capobianco's 2014 book Heidegger's Way of Being.
As Leigh Herrick pointed out in her 2009 review of Levinson's poetry collection Smelling Mary in Jacket Magazine, Levinson draws “from his extensive knowledge of philosophy, and the proposition that math is the foundation of all life—including language—Levinson positions his poems, and has created a method for them to position themselves, as a means of studying the human condition in a place charged with Universal laws. This is poetry acting as theory of language through language that posits a Theory of Everything, including poetry.”
Yes, this is heady, heavy stuff, indeed, and not for the casual reader of accessible poetry. However, lovers of more challenging writing from the likes of the aforementioned Will Alexander and John Olson, and the unforementioned Jackson Mac Low, Philip Lamantia, and Bob Kaufman, will likely love Shift Gristle. It may be just the book you need now to blast the linguistic cobwebs out of your head.
The Orphic, epistemologically inquisitive poems in Query Caboodle put me in mind of Zen koans and Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions. The questions in the book are not questions to be answered so much as they are questions to be dwelt on and lived with in order to deepen one's awareness of how language operates.
As Levinson puts it in his brief introductory note to Query Caboodle, “In this Hinge Capacity, ‘how much of’ moves toward / consideration rather than conclusion.” The poems in the book make a case for a greater appreciation of inquisitiveness. The spacing of the lines suggests slowing one's pace and adopting a thoughtful, meditative attitude:
how much of
wisdom
is
accumulation
Accumulation is the key to this collection. The synergistic accumulation of questions piling up in its pages leaves the reader in an inquisitive, questioning state of mind that gives the world one sees around one a fresh luster.
I recently rewatched My Dinner With André for the first time in many years. The booklet that comes with the Criterion Collection DVD includes the preface to the screenplay written by the André of the title, Manhattan Theater Project founder and director André Gregory. In it, he relates the details of a discussion he had with choreographer Twyla Tharp that intertwined in interesting ways with my thoughts about Query Caboodle which I'd been reading earlier that afternoon. Gregory and Tharp talked about the problems faced by artists maturing in society:
“Why do we have so few mature artists? Trying to answer this question, we began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning—learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think that you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you'll begin to realize that you just don't know very much—you don't know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work.”
In Query Caboodle, Levinson gives up his life to questioning and makes a strong argument that rather than concern oneself with finding some very small answers, the mature artist ought to remain in that Socratic questioning state of mind and just keep asking.
Steve Potter is the author of the novel Gangs With Greek Names, a short fiction collection called Easy Money & Other Stories, and two poetry collections: Mendacity Quirk Slipstream Snafu and Social Distance Sing. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in publications such as E·Ratio, Otoliths, Parole, and Word For/Word. Real Stand-Up Guys, the sequel to Gangs With Greek Names, is forthcoming.