Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Happy Birthday to Denise Levertov



Poet Denise Levertov was born this date in 1923 (she died in December of 1997). She appeared in Kerouac's Desolation Angels as Alise Nabokov. Levertov was an influence on my poet friend, Charlie James (whose excellent and award-winning collection of poems, Life Lines, is available here). Charlie turned me on to her husband, Mitchell Goodman, via his activist treatise, The Movement Toward a New America. It's so classic we own multiple copies and have given it as a gift several times.

Check out a brief bio and several of Levertov's poems here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-levertov

Also, you can check out her bio on the Duluoz Character Key here. Just do a Control-F and type Levertov in the search window. This is an indispensable web resource for Kerouac fans (in case you didn't already know of it), and it gets better all the time with the addition of new information (thanks to the continuing efforts of Dave Moore, the editor, and contributors like Kurt Phaneuf).

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