Occasionally a poet's name makes a certain

amount of sense (Pound, Spicer). But
Levy? An amount taxed? Troops
mustered? Except

my family pronounces it to rhyme with TV,
not bevy, so that puts Levy
into the enormous

Meaningless Name School of Poets, with

Lorine Niedecker a nearby neighbor
on one side and Kenward
Elmslie going the other way though he

has the distinction of argu-
ably
having a meaningless first

and last as if he himself were hurtling syllables
"thanks to a blessed motor disturbance in the Heavens"

 

Audience for My Poetry

Audience sounds
plural. For my stuff audionce

sounds more like it. When I read
my poems out among trees

the roots may listen too. Inside
the tree the rings

look as if from an inner
bell, spreading out

into the single trunk
listening. And then there's the sky,

the audience the tree grows towards, unheard.
An audience that applauds with

no hands. That's the sound of no hands
clapping.

 

Copyright © John Levy, 2006.

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John Levy works as a public defender in Tucson, Arizona. A contributing editor to the very first series of Shearsman in 1981-2, his publications include Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs (tel-let, Charleston, IL, 2003)