The guests were sitting at their tables on the lawn, when suddenly I saw them rise in a line and approach a door that opened onto a field of clover and rye. I was in awe of them, the way they stood in the shadow of the door and sipped their wine. The way they laughed and cried. I watched a Cessna hum across the sky as something that was there for a while in the form of pure idea, as something that would burn one day like straw. I saw the endless line move along, move along, pulling me in like a cloud, forgetting everything as they passed beneath the high dark beam of the door and were gone.
from the book IN MY UNKNOWING / University of Pittsburgh Press
I wrote "Reception" at a wedding reception for a friend after most of the guests had left. It was a beautiful summer evening in southern Vermont. The sun was setting. A single engine plane was flying over a distant ridge. I started writing on a napkin with my back to the last few guests finishing their drinks on the terrace behind me. The newly wedded couple stood beneath a large white trellis. The trellis turned into a "high dark beam" in my poem and the guests an "endless line" passing beneath it. The "pull" of spectacular clouds and a small plane turned my poem away from what started out as an Epithalamion but turned insistently into an elegy.
"Levine lamented that poetry had become 'unpeopled,' and he sought out to correct its course by populating his poems with a tapestry of characters drawn from everyday life. These characters were often, though not always, of working-class background and disposition. Levine gave them a voice."
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"Working on the poem, I saw clearly how the recurring image of black hair signifies within the specific context of Asian femininity, and yet in my hands—in my mouth—the phrase 'black hair' began to make space for a second set of values and vulnerabilities as informed by my racially specific experience."
