Looking for inspiration to write poetry post-PPF? Consider Levertov’s Words Left in Your Pocket Exercise

Read Denise Levertov’s poem “September 1961” below, paying extra attention to the lines regarding the death of predecessor poets, three (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, HD (Hilda Doolittle) who are essentially the founders of 20th Century North American Modernism.

September 1961
This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. “It looks like dying”—Williams: “I can’t
describe to you what has been

happening to me”—
H. D. “unable to speak.”
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can’t reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don’t
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea…

Your task is to write a poem which alludes to, or is inspired by, a poet no longer alive. You can write in tercets, but that is not a requirement if you feel in the act of composition that something better is emerging.

Start with thinking of a poet whose work has inspired you and go down to the water (either literally our in your mind) and spend some time thinking about that poet. Perhaps you bring a poem by that poet in your pocket. Maybe you count the words in that poem and that total shows up in your poem.

And if this exercise of carrying words in your pocket sparks something for you, you might find even deeper inspiration in Robert Duncan’s engagement with H.D. and the shaping of American Modernism. Duncan, like Levertov, understood how the voices of earlier poets live on in our present work, guiding us toward organic form.

Our upcoming 5-week workshop, Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book: The Roots of Modernism with Michael Boughn, is a chance to follow those threads further. Reading the H.D. Book with its editor, you’ll explore how Duncan wove the voices of his predecessors into a living poetic vision, and how that vision can open new paths for your own writing. The workshop begins THIS WEDNESDAY, so register today! Scholarships are available to postcard poets, contact us HERE to learn more.