Foreword to Running Grass:
Poems 1970–1977
by Peter Levitt
Peter Levitt tells a charmingly useful story of himself, to wit: He was one day walking the streets of Los Angeles, and a classic black heavy comes up to him and asks his help apropos the following. It seems a local bartender owed him some money but wouldn't pay off, so he figured that if Peter were to come with him, not get involved you understand, but just stand in the doorway where the man could see him, then he'd come across. So Peter, being of sympathetic disposition, accompanied his new friend to the bar, took his position at the door while the other went in to accost the bartender—and then, to his wonder, he sees him pull out a gun, point it at said person, and ask for all the money in the till. At which point Peter splits.
The point is, it truly takes a "willing suspension of disbelief," as Coleridge put it, to get into this world at all. It isn't just taking a chance, to see whether this or that will pay off, but climbing out on the proverbial limbs forever, no matter the cynical laughter of the very probable observers. Jesus, a poet , man? You got to be kidding. What do you do for real?
I was young once, like they say, and I've hardly forgotten what that all was like. Certainly love —of all that would stand still for it, and of the words you could give them instead of the rent. There's a very close company between so-called con men and people of Mr. Levitt's and my disposition. I suppose the only difference is that
Peter Levitt, Running Grass: Poems 1970–1977 (Point Reyes, Calif.: Eidolon Editions, 1979).
they're trying to get out, while we are trying to get in. Again it's our wistful naivete that saves us.
It's a particular pleasure to be even this small part of this active demonstration of what poems can do. For example, consider the shopping list here turned to mantric power: tomato sauce/ mushrooms/ and dog biscuits . . . Or the melos of let seeing, let/ sighing, empty/ persons filled/ with love,/ be enough, ever . Or the whole damn world: Landscape for Han-shan .
Finally—because there's a definite Chinese edge here—consider Pound's translation of this Confucian analect (XVIII, 1.): "He said: Those who know aren't up to those who love; nor those who love, to those who delight in." Fair enough.