Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
The Wealth Poverty Buys
By Charles Simic
The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov
edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi
Stanford University Press, 858 pp., $39.95 (paper)
They wrote over 450 letters to each other between 1953 and 1985, often twice or three times a week, exchanging poems and commenting on them, copying for each other long passages from books they were reading, gossiping about their contemporaries. When they began corresponding, and for many years after, they were two unknown poets, Denise Levertov in New York or Mexico and Robert Duncan in San Francisco, struggling to make ends meet and depending on a small circle of literary friends for moral support. 'Poetry's the wealth poverty buys,' A.R. Ammons says somewhere. They published their poems and essays in small magazines with tiny circulations that were nearly impossible to obtain outside a few bookstores scattered across the country.
Review, 4118 words
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