Jen Levitt's "Autobiography"

Thoughts on trying.

Autobiography

Is it enough that I tried to do no harm?
I drank the milk before it spoiled,

biked to work, held doors. When I crushed
the occasional spider, I felt mostly sorry.

In the city, nature was hard to follow,
incognito in crevices along the river,

but who can tell a flower from a weed?
I met the not-knowing, & it bloomed in me

like a seed. Traffic blinked, an organism,
while I trained my mind on the mind,

which took forever. I couldn't think my way
into the future, where love was a country

I'd never visited but wanted to. The ocean
repeated while we wandered the lemon groves.


from So Long (Four Way Books, 2023)

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I think that my greatest joy of the start of this summer has been spending time with Jen Levitt’s newest book, So Long — a book that stuns me with its compassion, its noticing of strangeness and absurdity, its longing for something more, its relentless observation. So much, and so much more. Reading it for the first time on the subway that would take me to a ferry that would take me to Red Hook, I dog-eared so many pages; I felt seen by titles (“In Therapy I Make Incremental Progress” or “Some Days I’d Rather Be Anyone Else”) and by lines like these:

In this version we're both better.
You've learned techniques

for cultivating stillness,
I'm not afraid to touch you

in public.

It was hard to choose just one poem for today. I thought I’d pick one to sit with and then I’d encounter another, like “No One’s Looking,” with an ending like this:

We're at a boil now, over-
flowing with want. These are trying times.

But time's trying, asking us to stay awhile
longer inside the length of this moment.

But no matter what, as I read and then even as I put the book down and moved through the world, that question that begins today’s poem hummed and murmured inside me:

Is it enough that I tried to do no harm?

I feel this question echoed throughout Levitt’s book. The book’s final poem, “Dunes” — gorgeous, absolutely — moves through some of the same anxious and yet generous questioning that today’s poem moves through. There’s a small moment in that poem I am still so struck by:

she’d told me I needed
to open, but how? I mean it literally: I can’t figure
out the mechanics. 

That short sentence — I can’t figure out the mechanics — might seem a small thing, a tiny moment of honesty or humor, but I find it heartbreaking and honest. It’s a statement that wonders toward a number of questions, like how do I live or what does it mean to be better or how will I even know if I am better or is it enough or am I enough or is wanting enough when it feels like I can’t or I want to, but how — please, please, please just tell me how.

I feel all of those questions echoing throughout Levitt’s book, and I feel them in today’s poem. I also feel them personally, which is maybe why I am so drawn to Levitt’s work. I have been reading it during my first couple weeks of a needed break from teaching, weeks that — because of this massive swell of unstructured time — have left me feeling more anxious than free, a mess of sometimes-spiraling dwelling and uncertainty that I am sure has flooded into my body after I have let down the wall put up by work, work that, for probably upwards of sixty hours a week for month after month after month, enriched me and drained me and stimulated me and also kept my mind often off of my own mind.

I never thought of myself as an anxious person, but I have come to realize that I am. One of the many side effects of this fast-moving, hyper-stimulating, relentlessly-information-driven world is that, if you are even remotely aware of even the smallest part of it, and if you dedicate even a fraction of your time to listening to it, you then have to digest and make sense of a number of sometimes contradicting variables, ways that you are supposed to be or told to be or things that you are supposed to think about or told to to think about. You find yourself wondering is it enough so much and so often.

The opening lines of today’s poem, coupled with the title — “Autobiography” — capture, so specifically, this sense of anxious selfhood that feels at the heart of the present moment:

Is it enough that I tried to do no harm?
I drank the milk before it spoiled,

biked to work, held doors. When I crushed
the occasional spider, I felt mostly sorry.

Levitt’s word choice here is subtly remarkable to me. Tried. Occasional. Mostly. These are small moments that get at something massive — the idea that we are never (and can never be) exactly the size, shape, or idea of whatever the stenciled notion is of who we are somehow supposed to be. What we encounter changes. What we feel is in flux. Our inconsistency — and this world’s inconsistency — must be an important truth worth acknowledging. That to be human is to be trying. That to be human is to be occasional. That to be human is to be mostly. Never always. Never exactly.

The choice, too, to title this poem “Autobiography” offers a real sadness that feels so much a part of this life. Instead of a narrative about a life, some structured relaying of accomplishment, a hero’s journey, an arc and climax and resolution, what today’s poem is instead is a depiction of the well-intentioned questioning, longing, and anxiety that can make up a life today. Today’s poem is not, as mentioned above, a poem of consistency; it is instead a poem of inconsistency. It is not a poem of certainty; it is instead a poem of uncertainty. It is not a poem of doing; it is instead a poem of trying. In depicting a life this way, I find in Levitt’s writing a real generosity, a longing to name the difficulty of trying to do or to be anything at all in a world that so often tells us to do or to be so much.

I sense this generosity in Levitt’s wondering about answers. I sense it in these lines:

In the city, nature was hard to follow,
incognito in crevices along the river,

but who can tell a flower from a weed?

Out with friends the other night, I watched as someone wondered about the name of a flower and then as someone else showed them how, using your phone, you can take a picture of the flower and your phone will tell you its name. Some people at the bar overheard the interaction and exclaimed. There was astonishment in the air. I felt a little lonely. I wondered about the need for such an application. I wondered, to be frank, about such an application’s application. When answers are so readily available, what happens when we are faced with what we don’t know? Can we find astonishment there, or only anxiety?

In this world that seems to relentlessly remind us of an imperative responsibility to better ourselves, to engage in some near-constant upward trajectory toward individual progress, whatever progress is, and to internalize a whole host of cliches in service of those tasks, cliches like do no harm or love yourself, cliches without specific directions or anything other than the short task they outline, I feel in today’s poem a reminder that any societal imperative, any internalized demand, any mass-produced and shareable cliche, any instant answer, is almost certainly generalized, lacking in the sort of complexity that actually allows for us to do something as deeply trying as loving oneself, as doing no harm, as sitting with nature or the mind.

I just finished Kate Zambreno’s Drifts the other day, and found, in the novel, moments of resonance with today’s poem. Here are some lines from Zambreno’s novel that struck me:

All I had left was the precarious life of a writer.

So often now I just want to weep—what am I mourning?

Lately I just want to shrink as small as possible. To write as small as possible.

The novel captures that sense of precarity that comes with being not just a writer, but also with someone trying to be radically and yet ordinarily conscious of how they are moving through the world. It can feel isolating to drift, to allow oneself that sensation of moving through and between definition. To be incomplete, not quite there yet. It reminds me of one of Levitt’s poems, where she writes:

I'm still learning how to step inside
my life & just float

I think it is that insistence on still as an adverb that makes me love Levitt’s work. That insistence on continuance. Still learning. Still trying. Still being. I am reminded that life is a still-ing thing, and that we are caught up in this stillness together.

And yet, I sometimes well up when I consider all the trying that makes up a life. And I sometimes grow angry or resentful when I consider all that exists in the face of that trying. Or when I consider all the time and effort spent trying — and for what, for what, for what? It takes effort, then — another form of trying — not to be cynical today. It takes effort to believe, to hope. And yet then you have to choose: believe in what? Hope for what? And all this effort — another form of trying, all while one must be trying so much.

I think of these lines from today’s poem:

Traffic blinked, an organism,
while I trained my mind on the mind,

which took forever. I couldn't think my way
into the future, where love was a country

I'd never visited but wanted to.

The choice of words here. The training. The not-being-able-to-think. All of it a form of effort in the face of something larger. All of it still filled with longing. This longing — it is the stuff of a life, isn’t it? And even our longing sometimes diminishes in the face of our effort. And we lose it, or we feel ashamed by it, or we look for it and cannot find how to get it back. But still our longing remains, sometimes for the most simple things. In Drifts, Zambreno writes:

I just want more time. I want him home, raising the baby with me, in some utopian and impossible arrangement I can’t imagine. Where we both can think and write and make things.

It must be a shame and symptom of our society, right, that sometimes it feels like we can’t even imagine attaining the most ordinary things? That the simple arrangements of a life can feel like impossible utopias? A shame, right — that the world tells us our imagination should be for something larger, when the humane needs of the person being told to use their imagination might not be being met? I think about this often, the way structures of power and ideas of progress sometimes take us away from sustainable futures, in this country where it is still a difficult thing to be a mother. What is as large or as lovely as the ordinary? Why is the ordinary not guaranteed?

I find solace in the first journal entry of May Sarton’s At Seventy, where she writes:

What is it like to be seventy? If someone else had lived so long and could remember things sixty years ago with great clarity, she would seem very old to me. But I do not feel old at all, not as much a survivor as a person still on her way.

There it is again, that word: still. When I read this passage or Levitt’s work, I feel a desire to move into the parts of me that are still — the parts of me that are still trying or still longing or still thinking. “Forget progress,” Levitt writes in one poem. Progress: so often not a form of stillness. I want to give space to those moments of continuance, of drifting, those moments that are forever incomplete. I don’t want to feel diminished by them.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about all week, as I read Levitt’s poems. These poems come from that place of diminishment that the world so often molds or forces us into, that narrow room where we are each only our progress, or only our lack of progress, or only our wants, or only what we do not have. They arise — these poems do — from that room which also contains our sense of power and our powerlessness, our future and our lack of one. And they sing. They sing with desperation and humor and wit and absurdity and compassion. They try, I think. They try. They try at things that matter. And yet who is to say what matters? Well, it is probably important that we try to say what does. And these poems — from that narrow room of our self-imposed and societally-imposed and imposed-by-so-many-other-things diminishment — try at compassion, and reflection, and care. When you encounter that trying in anything, not just a poem, but a person, a loaf of bread, a still of a movie, it’s special. You want to hold onto the feeling of that encounter for as long as you can.

I just watched the short documentary How Do You Measure a Year? In it, the filmmaker briefly interviews his daughter each year, from the ages of 2 to 18. Early on, when the daughter is really little, he asks her what she wants out of life, and she says: “To be a good person, and learn, and not be perfect.” That’s the form of trying that I think I mean. It’s the form of trying at the heart of today’s poem. And it’s the form of trying — especially the last bit, to not be perfect — that goes often unrecognized by the world. It can be an alienating form of trying, is what I am trying to say. But I am trying to try at it, as both time and the world do their trying things. And I am trying, too, to notice it.

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