For our Stanzas web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Matthew Nienow—whose poems “History” and “Someday, If I Am Lucky” appear in our Summer 2024 issue—examines a passage from “Anastasia and Sandman” by Larry Levis.
Of course, I’m familiar with the room the stanza represents in the house of the poem, and while I love a room’s individual purpose, I’m more often called to the power of the line alone—the energy that it can build or diffuse. But something else occurs when I’m in the deft hands of Larry Levis, where stanzas feel akin to chapters in his novelistic excursions. In his poem “Anastasia & Sandman,” Levis takes us beyond the surface-level narrative with the insertion of a faux-dramatic presentation given to an imaginary Soviet-era committee, masterfully working the line between a cutting sarcasm and genuine tenderness:
Members of the Committee on the Ineffable,
Let me illustrate this with a story, & ask you all
To rest your heads on the table, cushioned,
If you wish, in your hands, &, if you want,
Comforted by a small carton of milk
To drink from, as you once did, long ago,
When there was only a curriculum of beach grass,
When the University of Flies was only a distant humming.
Levis asks us to consider the holiness of horses and the violence of men, histories of war, dictators, famine, and the real people who lived these horrors. He obsesses, in this poem and others, about what is real—and not solely in the realm of the tangible versus the intangible—but about what is authentic and meaningful as opposed to what is base and morally vacant. And so, this stanza is not so much a digression from the poem’s prevailing interests in narrative and philosophical pursuits but a widening of its imaginative landscape. Perhaps in this stanza, we begin to experience more fully the poet’s true feelings about the qualities of being human, which are seasoned with disgust and wonder alike.
And this is, I think, what truly breaks the heart. It is not solely the loss of life and freedom and agency that we must bear witness to. We must also bear the lived experiences of love and caring and innocence. By being open to these wonders without armor or cynicism, we become more vulnerable to cruelty. We do not get to choose one path and forgo the other. The death implied by “the University of Flies” belongs to the same world as the innocence of children comforted by a small carton of milk. In friction with the subtle and almost playful use of Soviet-era language (i.e. “Members of the Committee…”)—which is linked here with violence, the loss of selfhood, and the power to manipulate how we remember what has come to pass—Levis invokes the inherent humanity of childhood as though to further condemn our simultaneous capacity for brutality.
And so, this is a poem that is not so much about the story or specific history threaded through the heart of the piece, but about these inherent qualities of being human—the parts of ourselves and our lives that seem deserving of love, and the brutalities we condemn but cannot deny. Though in an earlier line the speaker refuses to explain what makes something holy, it might be more accurate to say no explanation could ever fully satisfy how our humanness can accommodate such violences and ever be redeemed. Even so, Levis, in his very work, manifests awe.