Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. I grew up essentially in Birmingham

and then moved to London in life. I am a city man. I like tall buildings, traffic noise,

crowded streets, little interpollution, constant stimulation. So I thought today I'd look

at a couple of city poems by a poet who I love called Denise Levitov. Someone said to

me that I've chosen a lot of American female poets on these podcasts that they've sought

to become my default position, not deliberate, but Denise Levitov wasn't naturalised

American, but she was born in Ilford in Essex, and so I'm slightly bending it. She met a

GI. She was one of those, moved to America and became an American. So the setting for these

poems, I suppose, is somewhere between NYC and Thorick. Anyway, I discovered Denise Levitov,

as I've discovered so many poems and poets, by reading the Penguin Modern Poets series, which

is, if you see any of those, kicking around in a second and bookshop, just grab them because

there's always some gold in there. Denise Levitov features in Penguin Modern Poets number nine,

which was published in 1967, and it's always a trio of poets. She shares number nine with Kenneth

Rex Roth and William Carlos Williams. And one of the poems, one of the Levitov poems in that book,

is The Rainwalkers, which, well, I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't like it. So I'm just going to,

it's a simple, it's one page in this book, four stanzas, and I'll give you the first stanza.

An old man whose black face shines golden brown as wet pebbles under the street lamp, is walking

two mongrel dogs of disproportionate size in the rain, in the relaxed early evening avenue.

So it's a sort of journalistic beginning, quite simple, Levitov creates the scene,

and what do we get? We get the old man's black face shines golden brown as wet pebbles under the

street lamp. He is illuminated this guy. Remember, this is an old, an old man of color in this period of

America with two mongrel dogs in the rain, maybe a person who wouldn't normally be noticed,

...