Levine Philip - Elegy

I have written elsewhere of my long relationship with Larry. I met him when he was a freshman at California State University, Fresno. He was the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. We soon became friends, and for over twenty-five years we had exchanged poems and drafts of poems. For at least fifteen years he had become my essential critic. I do not know if I filled that role in his poetic life.

My educated guess is that I filled that role until about 1990; somewhere around that time he became his own essential critic. Before his death I had seen only a fragmentprobably one out of fourof the poems in the present collection. Nonetheless, his sister, Sheila Brady, the person I believe he was closest to, asked me to edit this book, and I accepted the task. I have rewritten nothing. I have revised nothing. I have done my best to determine which poems Larry felt were completed or had gone as far as he could take them.

I've tried to include the final or the last versions of these poems. By no means have I included all the poems I believed Larry considered finished. I had no choice but to trust my own taste; I believe that if we had had that June meeting I would have helped him eliminate those poems not up to his own very high standards. He had helped me shape my last three books and had advised me to eliminate a number of poems. I had done the same for him with all his previous volumes. I could say that this time I was on my own, but it would not be true, for twoof Larry's oldest friends, superb poets in their own right, were invaluable; without their advice I truly doubt that this collection would exist.

Peter Everwine first showed me that Larry was not cannibalizing certain passages from some poems in order to heighten and enlarge other more ambitious poems, but that in fact he was using these motifs or riffs to unify the collection he had in mind. Peter's taste seemed unerring, and I used it almost without fail in determining what belonged in the collection and what did not. To David St. John I owe the scheme which finally determined the structure of the book. His sense of the shape the collection required was far more judicious and compelling than my own, and so I adopted it with some modifications. Without the generous guidance of these two poets I would still be at sea and this collection would not exist.

All the final determinations were my own, and if there are mistakes in taste and judgment here they are mine. Greg Donovan, Mary Flinn, and Amy Tudor, Larry's three close and loyal friends in Richmond, his final home, worked tirelessly to supply me with (and when it was possible to date) the various versions of the poems, the ones that are here and the ones that are not. Without their help there would be no book. The poems themselves require no introduction from me or anyone. They were written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers.