Let’s start with the rain, “the passing of one drop / Gathering speed, one drop / Chasing another”—which means starting with the title poem of Phillis Levin’s new (and sixth) collection, “An Anthology of Rain.”  I start here not only because the poem is gorgeous, but also because it serves as a perfect overture to the book, orienting us to the book’s tone and themes: the passage of time, experience as transformation, the way stories unfold, move, and change, like raindrops evaporating, fattening on a window. 

I quote the poem in its entirety below;

An Anthology of Rain

For this you may see no need,
You may think my aim
Dead set on something

Devoid of conceivable value:
An Anthology of Rain,
A collection of voices

Telling someone somewhere
What it means to follow a drop
Traveling to its final place of rest.

But do consider this request
If you have pressed your nose
Of any shape against a window,

Odor of metal faint, persistent,
While a storm cast its cloak
Over the shoulder of every cloud

In sight. You are free to say
Whatever crosses your mind
When you look at the face of time

In the passing of one drop
Gathering speed, one drop
Chasing another, racing to

A fork in the path, lingering
Before making a detour to join
Another, fattening on the way

Until entering a rivulet
Running to the sill.
So please accept this invitation:

You are welcome to submit,
There is no limit to its limit,
The instructions are a breeze

As long as you include
Nothing about yourself,
Even your name. Your address

Remains unnecessary, for the rain
Will find you–if you receive it
It receives you (whether or not

You contribute, a volume
Is sent). And when you lift
The collection you may hear,

By opening anywhere, a drop
And its story reappear
As air turns to water, water to air.

This poem begins with a kind of dare, “You may think my aim / Dead set on something // Devoid of conceivable value.” By floating the idea that we may see this (this book? This poem? This gathering of collective voices?) as unnecessary, Levin is essentially challenging us to submit to it, to join in, maybe as readers, maybe as poets, or storytellers, or even as observers. She challenges us, when we find ourselves with our noses pressed to the window, watching the rain, as a storm gathers in the distance, to “say / Whatever crosses” our mind. 

Embedded in this challenge is the question: Is this enterprise indeed “Devoid of conceivable value”?  Nodding to the idea that poetry can be considered by many to be, as the title of David Orr’s book suggests, Beautiful and Pointless, Levin appears to be offering a resounding “No” to this question. Consider what follows, how watching these raindrops gives them their own individual lives and experiences, as we trace their movement down the window pane, they are transformed (or possibly die) and a story emerges: “And when you lift / The collection you may hear // By opening anywhere, a drop / And its story reappear / As air turns to water, water to air.” When either the raindrops are born or when they die, a little spark of story is created. I find this beautifully strange. 

But my response goes beyond beauty, beyond strangeness. When Levin asks us to “please accept this invitation: / You are welcome to submit” she is inviting not just to read and respond, but to experience poetry, in the same way we experience rain, “if you receive it / It receives you.”  And like the rain, we too can be changed. 

Poetry is useful because it provides an experience that changes us. 

The New York Book Review called An Anthology of Rain, “a masterclass in noticing.” Levin pays attention. These poems make an invisible world visible, shining light on hidden emotions like contentment, bliss, sorrow, regret and grief. Take the poem “Woman Washing a Street in Delft” about a lost Vermeer painting. Here Levin notices the unnoticed woman, “For now you remain unknown, / Facing away from view” and the unnoticed work of washing the stones, some of which “glint” and others who “refuse to surrender their grit.” Levin reveals this woman who would be otherwise invisible, “Whoever you are, kneeling figure, / Daughter, sister, mother, little // Patch of color” and her invisible labor. 

My favorite poem of the collection is “Blueprint.” In this dreamy poem, Levin tells her reader that she wants to build a vestibule for a poem and she describes the architectural plans for this structure:

The poem I want to build needs a vestibule
Inviting all who wish to be bidden
Welcome: an ample parallelogram
With a skylight open to a patch of stars.

This stanza echoes “An Anthology of Rain,” in that it is another invitation to the reader, this time into the poetic space which becomes a literal building with a skylight. Once the readers are there, they can, as in the next stanza, look out through the windows to see:

Horses, of course there will be horses
Gathering in darkness
Under those stars in a field of grass
Extending far enough for an eye to gras

I love these horses, standing in the darkness where it might be tempting to think we cannot see them, but Levin beckons us in with that last line. Our eyes grasp them, their “Bounty uncontainable.” 

I found myself looking up from inside Levin’s poem, through that skylight to a patch of stars and surrounded by horses. This reminds me of Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher, who wrote a book I keep near my desk, The Poetics of Space. In essays centered around the architecture of humanness, Bachelard writes about hidden domestic spaces: “drawers, chests and wardrobes” as well as natural homes: “nests,” and “shells.” These spaces allow us to explore our own imaginations and how they interact with inhabitation. Levin examines a similar convergence. The speaker of “Blueprint” isn’t sure where to “store a roomful of ash” but finds a “crypt in the cellar, / Adjoining vaulted chambers of seed / Saved from flowers buried / In pockets in a dream.” And the delight continues with an attic that can keep:

scores of unheard music,
Notes from expired currencies, toys,
Diplomas, film reels, a shoebox of shells,
Centuries of things to be sorted later

(Albums, letters, keys, locks of hair),
Sealed to keep the past from taking over.

What a fascinating headspace! Some of these items are unused—the music has never been heard, or not valuable, the currency has expired. There is a lovely litany of junk: diplomas, film, shells. It all needs to be sorted later, in the future, presumably in a time when a person in the present moment confronts the past. However, there is another list of items that are sealed “to prevent the past from taking over.” Here, I found Levin’s relationship to time to be curious. Time has agency, can change things, is a force; the past is something that can change the present. She is making time, an invisible thing, visible in its agency. Just as Bachelard notes in his chapter on “drawers, chests and wardrobes,” where he points out that drawers, these “images of intimacy” are where humans, “great dreamers of locks, keep or hide their secrets,” Levin’s “albums, letters, keys, locks of hair” could potentially reveal a secret to a curious person rummaging around in an attic. In “How It Is,” Levin addresses the problem of time head on, beginning

Say how it is
How easy
Too easy to say

How it is
Is not how it is
It keeps changing

Before it becomes

A was already it is 
Something

This is a poem about looking at the present moment and feeling how quickly moments change, a few stanzas down and “A streetlight goes on / Somewhere else an // Elastic band snaps / It burns a moment.” These are small gestures—bubbles popping in lakes, streetlights flickering on, elastic bands snapping—and so curiously, they are changing not the present to the past, but instead looking at “before” the past, i.e. the present: “Before it becomes / A was already it is / Something.” There seems to be a reversal in chronology here. Before the past is the past, it is the present. 

Levin seems to be arguing that invisible, motionless things are worthy of our attention because they provide us meaning. In “Light Meter,” Levin writes about a daughter who doesn’t want her father to take a photo of her: 

A father wants his daughter to pose:
She doesn’t want to,
Doesn’t want to be caught, though

One day she will wish she’d been
Willing to stand inside time

Levin steps into the poem as a speaker who is outside of time positioned as a stranger and a witness to this scene or perhaps as one looking back on a memory. It is a sad poem about the problem of fathers: they die, often before their daughters. We might imagine a father wanting to print the photo and store it in the attics we explored in “Blueprint.” Or perhaps it is a more literal documentation of memory. The father wants to take a photo of his daughter in the present moment so that he can remember her later. This harks to the quick passage of time, Levin writes about in “How It Is.” Delightfully, the last line of the poem shows him “Outside time, adjusting a lens.” This space is a land of ghosts and memory, where fathers and daughters can reunite and adjust the focus and the light meters of the cameras they use to look back on their lives.  

Whereas some books have a soggy middle, An Anthology of Rain gains velocity, just like Levin’s raindrops. In the second half of the book, in a beautiful lyric essay of a poem, “Secret Rites,” Levin writes about the oval rugs on her floor when she was three. This is a memory (the shadow of a present moment) which Levin again is writing down to preserve it, to make seen what would have been invisible.

Within this poem, we find another metaphor for this entire collection via a childhood memory: the speaker would find threads inside coats and take them with her, or leave little threads from her own clothing for someone else to find:

What thrilled the most was knowing someone might buy
this coat, that the two of us would be joined, my thread
carried by whoever wore the coat. Unrelated threads,
connected. 

This poem is broken into stanzas that feel more like paragraphs because they have a dinkus (an ornamental symbol) separating each passage. In the third paragraph, Levin writes of a college friendship: 

A friendship starts in an instant, an affinity grasped at first 
sight, a word not yet spoken: knowledge tangible as an 
electrical charge. Within a week we are talking every day; 
she reads my poems, sets some of them to music. One 
evening, as we sit across from each other in the campus pub, 
a candle between us on the table, the slowly burning flame 
suddenly goes out.

However, the friendship dissolves, “The following spring, she decided to cut the thread / between us, break the attachment, put out the candle.”

Moreover, Levin wonders “Should I call her, write / to her—or let the severed thread dangle?” We can read this poem as Levin’s way of putting a little thread in this old friend’s pocket and seeing if she will reach down and find it. It  is as if we, the readers,are reaching into these poetic pockets and finding the threads that Levin has placed in it: that little intellectual and emotional connection and transformation Here is a metaphor of the book, similar, if not the same thing, as the raindrops, each poem becoming an experience that Levin wants us to have so that she and her reader are connected. “[T]he rain / Will find you . . .” and “when you lift / the collection you may hear, / By opening anywhere, a drop.” Call them threads or call them raindrops, they are symbols of the usefulness of poetry. It binds us with these invisible experiences.

Finally, Levin ends the book with a beautiful, long poem entitled, “Wooden Spoon.” This poem bookmarks the collection; we began with a clear liquid (raindrops) and end with the firmness of a wooden spoon. The poem begins:

It is good to cook with a wooden spoon.
Heat doesn’t travel from the pot
To the handle and burn one’s hand,
The utensil doesn’t transfer hot or cold

To or from what it is stirring.
Oh to be like that—not adding
Or subtracting anything.

Levin sets up an interesting desire: to be something that doesn’t change the temperature of what’s around it. 
She continues, remembering a self that behaved like a wooden spoon:

But once I was: watching, outside
Always, away from others, not mixing
In their business, not involving
My body or self in theirs.

Those were the days
I wished to live an ordinary life,
With emotions extreme and mundane.

Levin continues a few stanzas later, “All at once I was the boiling liquid / Laping at a frozen pond, no longer.” Is this a memory of an adolescent self and its stormy moods? However, the desire to be the spoon continues and becomes more complex. In the last stanza, Levin writes:

It is good to be a wooden spoon
And not be broken.
A wooden spoon stirring,
Stirring, changes everything.

Perhaps this poem isn’t about selfhood at all, but rather, about being a poet. This speaker, taking on a more active role than the earlier speaker who invites us to watch the rain, becomes a very tangible object that is able to create change. The wooden spoon is a symbol of visibility, of thickness, of girth. The placement of this poem at the end is important, suggesting Levin’s ability to change her reader by giving them the experience of poetry. Poetry can be like a “collection of voices” that tells us some greater meaning, or poetry can be like a wooden spoon that stirs our emotional state and changes us. I find this satisfying; a clear affirmation of poetry’s usefulness.

An Anthology of Rain is not just a book, it is a series of meditations that creates a journey for the reader. We are taken through the invisible world of grief, sorrow, regret and contentment. We are shown the animacy of inanimate forces (raindrops and time). And in the end, I am changed by this book. Levin has been described as a “poet’s poet” and I wonder if it is because so much of this book is about poetry itself and what it means to be a poet, both a witness (as in “Light Meter”), an architect (as in “Blueprint”) and an agent of change (as in “Wooden Spoon”). 

As a child, Levin would draw pictures on her father’s (an engineer) graph paper. When asked what these drawings were, she replied, “Poems.” Later, Levin’s father defined excellent design as “Minimum number of lines, maximum ramifications.” Levin responded, “Well, that sounds like the most succinct definition of a poem I’ve ever heard.” This definition of poetry is the foundation for this collection. Levin’s poems are tight, clear and controlled proving that poetry, like good design, has ramifications.