Mark Levine. The Wilds. University of California Press, 2006.

Review by Lily Brown

The poems in Mark Levine’s third book, The Wilds, question the nature of representation through language: how we make meaning, how we characterize experience, and whether our representations can be trusted. Throughout the book, one senses a speaker who is inside and outside of the poems at once, both making meaning and undoing it as it is made. The speaker continually complicates the poems’ propositions, sometimes revising verb forms, sometimes insisting upon the information he provides until one wonders what all of the justification is about. Is the speaker trying to convince the reader that what happened happened, or is he, perhaps, creating realities in these poems that generously include all kinds of facets of experience: how we embellish stories for effect, how we question actions and portrayals, how we feel both inside and outside of our bodies and experiences, experiences that include writing poems.

The revisions and transformations of The Wilds are apparent in “Ontario,” the first poem in the collection; they happen across individual lines, over line breaks, and in repeated diction that changes as it moves through the poem. Consider the following excerpt:

Beauty in its winter slippers

approached us by degrees

on the gravel path. We were

hitching a ride out; had been hitching.

Here, “we were hitching” appears in the past continuous tense, and is then re-imagined in the past perfect continuous tense, “had been hitching.” At first, the speaker presents the action of “hitching” as something that happened at a specific moment in time, but then rethinks it as a continuous activity begun but later interrupted. In a connotative sense, “we were hitching” has a storied feel to it. One expects a narrative to follow: “we were hitching a ride out to…” Instead, the semi-colon interrupts this possible narrative and the speaker modifies the story with the verb fragment, “had been hitching,” with its sinister implication that something interrupts the hitching. Here, though, the speaker interrupts the hitching and thus enacts the approach of beauty “by degrees.” Though the speaker first claims that is it beauty that acts, “approach[ing] us,” in fact, in making the poem, the speaker linguistically fashions the approach by degrees.

The poem continues to unfold by these degrees as “we” “lift…tools from the shed / while the old man, old enough, look[s] away.” Here is another kind of alteration—“the old man” is quickly re-characterized as “old enough,” but “old enough” for what? Old enough not to notice he is being robbed? Old enough to use as a character in the poem’s shifty narrative? Both possibilities coexist in the poem, just as the old man exists both in the memory recounted here, and in the poem itself. What feels most significant about this doubling is the way in which it accounts both for actual experience and for the depiction of that experience in writing.

The tug between experience and the stories we make of it is echoed in the treatment of beauty in the poem. Beauty is both actor and acted upon; it is both “in us” and outside of us at the same time:

…Beauty, dipped

in resin beneath its shag

was always ready with the right

curse to recite to

our nature. It is

in us, it is,

in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man

looked away. Song of

experience.

The jarring enjambment here reflects the multiple function of beauty in the poem—how it is doubly layered, "dipped / in resin beneath its shag,” but also has agency over the human: “ready with the right / curse to recite to / our nature.” The line breaks here delay and complicate, creating double meanings—“the right” functions alone as a noun, and with “curse” as an adjective. Beauty is both personified in its ability to recite a curse, and further implicated as the curse is recited to “our nature,” which functions as both the natural world that we claim as ours, and as our human nature. The “it” that appears in the fifth line of this excerpt is obscure. Though grammatically “it” refers to the subject of the previous sentence, “beauty,” because “it” shares a line with “our nature,” one must read the meaning in this context as well. The pairing of “our nature” with “it is,” furthermore, aligns “our nature” with beauty, so that when the speaker insistently states, “[i]t is / in us, it is,” both nature and beauty are brought inside the body.

Just as quickly, however, the interior is made exterior again: “in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man.” A dialectical relationship is created, then, between the doubled nature—as both natural world and personality—and beauty, as they coexist in what we make (the smokehouse), what we’re given (the natural world of the woods), and who and what we are (the old man). This long, unpunctuated line runs into the next, and we find that “the old man / looked away. Song of / experience.” The formal pairing of “looked away” and “song of” connects looking away to representations of experience. The figure of the old man looking away might be considered a metaphor for the way the poems in The Wilds work: by looking away but simultaneously remaining conscious of what happens around and inside of oneself, by blurring the distinctions between interior and exterior, as they are blurred in experience and our depictions of it. The invocation of both Whitman and Blake, (“song of experience”), adds a further dimension to the old man, as he becomes a poet figure.

If “Ontario” examines the reality of the poem and the reality it seeks to describe simultaneously—thus pointing out its own artificiality—subsequent poems delve more explicitly into questions of the speaker’s role in making the poem. Here is an excerpt from “Belongings”:

We were there yet

sizing up the scenery

through the spokes of

the one wheel moving

this way, the other

that. There were four

corners of us promenading

in the sensation of

walking boots.

…

This was a place

we were in it

in sensation going there.

Did I speak of the shadow the sun made of us…

This poem begins, like “Ontario,” with a “we” figuring prominently. In this poem the conjunction “yet” shows the distinction between being in a place and reflecting on that place: “We were there yet / sizing up the scenery.” In the later stanza, the enjambed “in it” serves as a hinge between being in a place and being in sensation: “This was a place / we were in it / in sensation going there.” In these two examples, “sizing up” and “going there”—the phrases used to describe reflection—are active, while the past tense forms of the verb ‘to be’ are comparatively passive: “we were there,” “we were in it,” etc. This privileging of thought process and sensations opens into what feels like an enactment of the speaker’s experience of being “in it / in sensation.” First, he asks, “Did I speak of the shadow the sun made of us,” and then “who was the speaker / (hand in a bowl of dates),” and “what piece of him dug with his unshod / heel…” The speaker is broken into body parts and pieces. He asks a question in the first person, then asks multiple questions in the third person. The speaker even refers to himself as “the speaker,” following that question with the parenthetical “(hand in a bowl of dates),” a self-reflexive gesture that establishes this ethereal, shifting speaker as a person in the world with body parts, who touches things. Simultaneously, the speaker is a part of the “we”: “We were / people with our belongings. / We watched the animal eat its fuel.” Is it possible that “I,” “he” and “the animal” are all the same creature? That the speaker enacts his own varying distances from his experience by oscillating between the first and third persons, and by making the human an animal and vice versa?

These varying distances are at work in the following stanza:

The leg of the speaker

rends its trouser-leg

on a thorn of the raspberry bush

in which it bends for the hand to steal

from nature.

This stanza follows the line “[w]e watched the animal eat its fuel,” and portrays the speaker picking raspberries, suggesting that the speaker could be the animal. The speaker is so disconnected from the body that his leg becomes a character in itself, rending “its trouser-leg.” “The hand” that steals “from nature” implies a kind of double anxiety, not only about humans’ effect on the natural world, but also perhaps about the writer’s tendency to appropriate nature for his or her own use. Here, of course, the word “nature” recurs, a word already examined for its multiple meanings, and particularly for its implication of human nature.

The poems in The Wilds interrogate human nature and upset ideas of our place in the natural world. Their repeated use of words and phrases relating to place, “there,” “in it,” etc. lead to questions rather than answers, and subvert received ideas about what it means to be anywhere. When, in the poem “Animal,” the speaker states, “Lay there touched. // Got up and lay there / outline full of me,” the changing use of “there” is representative of much of the fascinating shiftiness of the poems in this book. The first time the word is used, it feels entirely literal. The second time, we have just learned the speaker “got up” and yet, he “lay there,” his “outline”—maybe the impression his body leaves on the mattress—still “full of me.” Perhaps this is an apt metaphor for the frightening and compelling realities of Levine’s poems: that we are both part of and outside of our experiences. In Levine’s poems, however, this way of representing experience may require a certain amount of twisting and turning and wildness: the poems’ maker may be third and first person at the same time, may not tell the story straight, but instead may do so while “look[ing] away.” And this way of coming at representation from multiple perspectives is unsettling and strange, but true. The last stanza of the last poem in the book, “Willow,” gets this oddity head-on:

You take it in or you don’t.

You hide the sky or else.

Things lived in you.

You, stranger.