Poets create art with words. Poetry, its essence, connects us through emotion and imagination. When crafted with this in mind, words can go beyond and reveal in bits and pieces what it is to be human.
“We tease ourselves with possibility,” writes Jeffrey Levine in his poem “My Antonia,” “because we can’t help counting the stones and counting the heartbeats and the widening spaces between.”
Levine is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry: Mortal, Everlasting and Rumor of Cortez. His poems are sometimes reverent and reflective, sometimes witty and entertaining. He contemplates love and life, shares his version of the stories of Adam and Eve and Odysseus, and recounts fictional experiences of Vincent Van Gogh.
With his delightfully descriptive narrative works, he takes us to a wintry night among Eskimos where “the sky is clear and piped with stars” and then to his study where he is lost in imagination while finger painting with his son. He writes, “My fingers twist the shapes of crooked streets slurring thumbs through the pigment-ooze.”
Levine is the founder and editor in chief of Tupelo Press, an independent literary press in Dorset, Vermont, and he recently won the 2007 American Literary Review Poetry Prize.
Levine will conduct a poetry reading, followed by a booksigning at Rhodes College on Thursday, March 13th.
Jeffrey Levine, Thursday, March 13th, 7:30 p.m. in Clough Hall at Rhodes College. Free.
