Denise Levertov's "Witness"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997), a British-born naturalised American poet.[3] She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Levertov wrote and published 24 books of poetry, and also criticism and translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honours, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Heidi White, and today is Thursday, July 20th, 2023.
0:10.3	Today's poem is by Denise Levertoff, and it's called Witness. I'll read it once and offer a few remarks and then read it one more time.
0:20.3	Witness.
0:27.2	Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud.
0:34.9	Sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue.
0:45.0	When I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards of the road on a clear day to reconfirm that witnessing presence.
0:56.9	Denise Levertov lived from 1923 to 1997. She was born in the UK, but she became an American citizen, and she was very popular and respected as a poet, and she was also the recipient of the prestigious Lannin
1:02.6	Literary Award for Poetry. Levertov was a prolific and confident poet. She wrote a letter to T.S.
1:10.5	Eliot at the age of 12 and received a
1:13.0	personal reply with lots of good advice. So she just really owned herself as a poet from a very
1:18.8	young age. She has an accessible, clear, precise, and lucid style. She received no formal education,
1:27.0	but she grew up in a literary home. Her father was an
1:30.2	Anglican minister, and her mother was a cultured woman, a book lover, who read 19th century
1:35.5	classics allowed to the family. Her father wrote in Hebrew, Russian, German, and English. So she was
1:42.6	raised in a home where she read and discussed a wide variety
1:45.8	of books in many languages across cultures, having been born in one culture and moved to another.
1:51.7	And that versatility translated to her writing. Levertov wrote short and long poems, nature lyrics,
1:57.7	love poetry, political and social poetry. She was an activist later in life
2:01.7	and religious poetry. And she's known for her direct, concrete, precise voice and style,
2:09.0	which is very different from other poets of her time, like T.S. Eliot, who she wrote to earlier in
2:14.5	her life, or Ezra Pound, poets like that, whose poetry is highbrow and
2:18.9	full of illusion and mystique. Levertoff, on the other hand, was much more direct. And this particular
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