Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (17 page)

Li-Young Lee
was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. His great-grandfather, Yuan Shikai, was China’s first republican president (1912-16). His father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a deeply religious Christian physician, was personal secretary to Communist leader Mao Tse-tung. After they fell out, Lee’s father escaped to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University, but was later imprisoned for 19 months in Sukarno’s jails and in a leper colony, before he managed to escape and take his family out of the country. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964, where Lee’s father became a Presbyterian minister. Assisting his father on preaching trips in Pennsylvania was another of Li-Young Lee’s formative experiences. That turbulent background is transformed in his redemptive poetry, which fuses memory, family, culture and history to explore love, exile, family and mortality, searching for understanding and for the right language to give form to what is invisible and evanescent.
‘From Blossoms’ [80].

Denise Levertov
(
b
. Ilford, Essex, 1923-97), one of the 20th century’s foremost American poets, was born in England, the daughter of a Russian Jewish scholar turned Anglican priest and a Welsh Congregationalist mother, both parents descended from mystics. She emigrated to the US in 1948, where she became involved with the Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of poetry, and was much influenced by the work of William Carlos Williams, a lifelong friend and correspondent. Her poetry is notable for its visionary approach to the natural world and to the dynamics of being human. ‘Meditative and evocative, Levertov’s poetry concerns itself with the search for meaning. She sees the poet’s role as a priestly one; the poet is the mediator between ordinary people and the divine mysteries’ [Susan J. Zeuenbergen].

Many of poems in the
Staying Alive
trilogy celebrate the joy of living, the beauty of the natural world and the pleasures of the body and the senses. Denise Levertov’s ‘Living’ [
14] captures the vitality of nature and the preciousness of every life and every minute of life, while ‘O Taste and See’ [
79] tells how the world ‘is not with us enough’, urging us to connect with ‘all that lives’ through all our senses.

Philip Levine
(
b
. Detroit, 1928) is an American poet of Russian-Jewish immigrant stock viewed by many as the authentic voice of America’s urban poor. Born and raised in Detroit, he spent his early years doing a succession of heavy labouring jobs. He taught for over 30 years at California State University, Fresno, and was US Poet Laureate in 2011-12. Much of his poetry addresses the joys and sufferings of industrial life, with radiant feeling as well as painful irony. Always a poet of memory and invention, Levine has continually written poems which search for universal truths. His plain-speaking poetry is a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit and the persistence of life in the face of death. His books include 17 collections of poetry, two books of essays and his recent UK selection,
Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems
(2006).
‘Starlight’ [47], ‘The Simple Truth’ [81].

Michael Longley
(
b
. Belfast, 1939) is an Irish poet of English parentage who has spent most of his life in Belfast and at his second home at Carrigskeewan on the coast of Co. Mayo. A dedicated naturalist, he studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin, and worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991. Longley’s poetry is formally inventive and precisely observed, spanning and blending love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, art and the art of poetry. He has extended the capacity of the lyric to absorb dark matter: the Great War, the Holocaust, the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’; and his translations from classical poets speak to contemporary issues.
‘All of These People’ [103].

Thomas Lux
(
b
. Northampton, Massachusetts, 1946) grew up on his family’s dairy farm, later becoming an acclaimed university teacher and writer. After starting out as a Neo-surrealist poet in the 1970s, he ‘drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me.’ [
Cortland Review
interview, 1999] That distillation is clearly evident in ‘A
Little Tooth’ [
53], which pans through a whole life in nine tightly rhymed lines.

Norman MacCaig
(
b
. Edinburgh, 1910-96) always lived in Edinburgh but had family links with the island of Scalpay and often visited Assynt in Sutherland, the setting of his Highlands poems. He worked as a schoolteacher for 30 years, and was a central figure in Edinburgh’s often fractious postwar literary set. Mac-Caig studied Classics at Edinburgh University, a strong formal influence behind the precision and lucidity of the poetry he wrote after shaking off the ‘Apocalyptic’ style of 1940s poetry. The surprising metaphorical conceits which were the hallmark of much of his mature poetry predated the less inventive contrivances of the English ‘Martian poets’ of the 1980s by decades.
‘The Red and the Black’ [104], ‘Memorial’ [116].

Louis MacNeice
(1907-63) was born in Belfast, the son of a rector (later a bishop), and educated in England. He worked as a BBC writer-producer for 20 years, and died from pneumonia after going down pot-holes to record sound effects for a radio play. Somewhat overshadowed by his friend W.H. Auden during the 1930s, MacNeice is the quintessential poet of flux, openness and possibilities. Many of his poems defend individual freedom and tolerance, and kick against conformism and restrictive ideologies. In ‘Snow’ [
41], he writes that: ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion / A tangerine and spit the pips and feel / The drunkenness of things being various.’ In ‘Entirely’ [
89], written over half a century ago when the threat was from fascism or communism, MacNeice opposes the fundamentalist view of the world as ‘black or white entirely’, seeing life as ‘a mad weir of tigerish waters / A prism of delight and pain’, which is very much the world view expressed by many different writers throughout the
Staying Alive
trilogy, not just in poems on global or social issues but in highly personal love poems, meditations and elegies.