News of the sudden and untimely death of Larry Levis in 1996 left the world of contemporary American poetry stunned and dismayed. His work was of such depth and such amazing resonance, it was admired and studied by an entire generation of poets and readers, regardless of esthetic, political, or cultural predispositions. Levis’s poems crossed borders, broke down barriers, and invited a sharing of the strange, sweet loneliness of being that is the fundamental human lot.
A Condition of the Spirit brings together reviews, essays, interviews, and meditations by more than forty American poets profoundly affected by Levis’s life and work. It also contains twelve previously uncollected essays by Levis himself, making it a virtual handbook for the study of the poet’s thinking on the craft of poetry and the craft of life.
