I’ll be your mirror, Thom Donovan and Andrew Levy at the Poetry Project Monday night. Donovan integrates Howe, Duncan, Hart Crane, and recent Bernstein into a deeply felt assemblage that goes Gizzi at the end of phrases. Glad to be no longer set in that time “before we were all queers and querying,” his readings tend toward the oracular (perhaps the Edwardian) yet their slightly broken, choked quality acknowledges that “power is given by stupid smart knowledge.” He’s investigating the body, especially as reproduction: “we are word / and meaning united / you are thought / and I am sound.” The potential for intimacy frequently segues into a loss of intimacy, but his tonal range remains a true believer. We owe the pathos of this situation to his powerful conception of poetry as a twilight music, “words made only from palpable shadow,” which comes before image itself (was it Keats who said “I cannot see these flowers at my feet”). In this way, Donovan taps into the very core of the medium.

Andrew Levy also employs a focused range of affect to create an impressive variety of effects, but his version is at once wan, wry, and oddly flat, evoking a dead-on humor in the way it swerves: “I never host an event without crystal.” I’m reminded of a chloroformed David Byrne telling you cheerfully that people are coming from everywhere to look at the new mall, “driving… and not just driving... parking!” Levy read from “Big Melt,” “Scratch Space,” and "After Such Knowledge," the piece he wrote for Jackson Mac Low that appeared in issue 2 of EOAGH. His Ashbery-like use of chipper and disturbing poetic questions (“How much of it is real? What are these world-shaking plans?”) segues effectively into deferments of a coherent scene: “we are the synergy of anguish / look what’s on my head!.” Such shifts in Levy's work often also involve a change in speaker, voices coming and going from different directions. Barbed hinting occurs through action upon bodies in the context of motivated utterances: “Where do you want the oil first?” Multiple hardboiled narrative scenarios are evoked and then dropped (“clamped to his genitals / the giant ice-shelf splits asunder”) and there’s a marvelous fumble and recovery of the political directive: “society’s unmitigated hate / looks like a whopper.” Too many great lines here to quote, and “I don’t think I’m going to get to vote.” Really? Well, for example I recently caught wind of a worldview in which you’re either a pitcher or a catcher. Andrew expands this taxonomy into “those who make things happen / those who watch things happen / and those who wonder what happened.” Much better, I’d say with all sympathy, “so involved with the decay / of each word, and try to make its attack / sourceless.”