Ken Roberts

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

                        —Denise Levertov

We were in the Jones Room at Stanford—second story English building room, large, shabby, a bit dark—where eight MFA students and four Stegner Fellows met each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon with the workshop instructor. Ken Fields fall term, Denise Levertov winter, W.S. Di Piero spring. It was winter. Probably one of those clear, chilly Palo Alto days that caused the Californians to wince at the unusual cold. Faced with such complaints, I kept my face on straight. I was a housewife/high school teacher from Klamath Falls, Oregon. At home, snow could cover the ground from October through April. There, I’d watched flurries fall on the Fourth of July. Here was a landscape where magnolias bloomed right through winter. A landscape to which Seamus Heaney paid a visit and sat with us at a table outside the student union, sharing our pitchers of beer. Landscape where I would be sent to fetch Stanley Kunitz from the San Francisco airport and then drive him to the Faculty Club. One where Denise Levertov would spend the winter months looking at our poems and talking to us about poetry. Amazing. I was there because some wild stroke of good fortune had made me a Stegner Fellow. I mostly listened.

Edwin was talking. Brilliant, star-of-Harvard, fellow Stegner Fellow Edwin, whose cerebral turns and trackings as he discussed aesthetics and theory were a wonder to hear, whose characteristic lofty air seemed, if not always appealing, at least justified. He was saying—to the nodding agreement of several others in the room—that no one nowadays wrote carpe diem poems. The modern mood of understatement and irony precluded it. “Not so!” I heard myself blurt. “O Taste and See. What about that?”  Silence. Uncharacteristic silence. Good lord, I’d challenged our resident genius. With Denise’s work, no less. Denise lowered her eyes, bemused, preoccupied for five, ten seconds. Then raised them, turning to Edwin. “Yes,” she said—lifting her disarming, Wife of Bath gap-tooth smile to him—“What about that?”

Denise did write carpe diem poems. Suffused with spirituality, with passion, this is a poet who tells us “The world is/ not with us enough.” And because the world is with us not enough, her poems bring it to us, demanding we seize it. The cumulative power of her work suffuses the landscape of our senses and sensibilities with light, with a clear, unflinching numinous light. This is a poetry that demands we take into ourselves “…all that lives/ to the imagination’s tongue.” We are in the garden, in its orchard. We are hungry, and there is marvelous fruit to be plucked. “O taste and see.” Indeed.