A Sense of Doubt blog post #4258 - Larry Levis, Elegy, and Cut and Paste

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4258 - Larry Levis, Elegy, and Cut and Paste

I love Larry Levis. He may be my favorite male, modern poet. Yes, he is.

His posthumously published book Elegy changed my life, changed how I write, changed how I think about writing and poetry, and is one of the FEW books of poetry I have read cover-to-cover at all late alone multiple times.

I cull out Levis' poems for ideas, structures, phrases, or just words to work into my own poems like nuts kneaded into bread dough.

I encouraged my students to read Levis, learn from him, but also to make a list of words (or use mine, below) and write a poem with all the words (which also follows).

Here's lots of Levis poems that can be found on the Internet, though, sadly, no easy to obtain digital copy of Elegy. Buy a copy. It's great! A fact that makes it all the sadder that Levis died of cardiac arrest before the age of fifty.

Thanks to David Dodd Lee (also a great writer and poet), with whom I attended grad school, who turned me on to Levis in the late 1990s. Just in case, he sees this post on social media: Hi Dave, thank you.

This is Writerly Wednesday for October 14, 2026.

Thanks for tuning in.

SUBJECT: LARRY LEVIS: Read Poems; List Words: Write a poem with the list you made

As both announcement and discussion post for maximum visibility.

I rarely read books of poetry from front cover to back cover. I pick and choose poems that look or sound interesting. I am attracted by titles that catch my attention.

I read Elegy by Larry Levis all through and then I read it again, and again, and again, and you get the idea.

We writers “borrow.” Some call this “stealing,” but it’s really the highest form of homage.

One of my favorite assignments in creative writing was being given a list of words and assigned to write a poem with all of the words. I shared my list and the resulting poem farther below.

Recently, I started to read Levis again and pull out words or images that I might use whole or modify for my own poems. Sometimes the words are well known and just something I may not think of on my own, like bridges, dead tree, river, grace, moonlight, and ossuary.

Others are images or ideas like blackness of winter, singing in her blood, when the dead come back, raspy hum, invisible birds and animals, the breath of moving traffic, the committee of solitude, walking chemistry sets, under the missing and innumerable stars.

It’s a lot like the cut and paste methods of construction that David Bowie borrowed from William Burroughs and then David Byrne used for Talking Heads’ album Speaking in Tongues that focused on cliches and common phrases strung together in song.

It’s fun! I challenge you!! Make a list or use any of these lists and make your own poem!

Here’s some LEVIS. 

I could not find an entire PDF of Elegy, but I did find some of the poems and a collection of poems that includes more, notably “Anastasia and the Sandman” that I referenced in a previous post.

ELEGY WITH A CHIMNEYSWEEP FALLING INSIDE IT

Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage

Down Memory Lane: Larry Levis’s ELEGY

LARRY LEVIS: POEMS

Elegy For Whatever Had A Pattern In It

LARRY LEVIS

Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand

One was a bay cowhorse from Piedra & the other was a washed-out palomino
And both stood at the rail of the corral & both went on aging
In each effortless tail swish, the flies rising, then congregating again

Around their eyes & muzzles & withers.

Their front teeth were by now yellow as antique piano keys & slanted to the angle
Of shingles on the maze of sheds & barn around them; their puckered

Chins were round & black as frostbitten oranges hanging unpicked from the limbs
Of trees all through winter like a comment of winter itself on everything
That led to it & found gradually the way out again.

In the slowness of time. Black time to white, & rind to blossom.
Deity is in the details & we are details among other details & we long to be

Teased out of ourselves. And become all of them.

The bay had worms once & had acquired the habit of drinking orange soda
From an uptilted bottle & nibbling cookies from the flat of a hand, & liked to do
Nothing else now, & the palomino liked to do nothing but gaze off

At traffic going past on the road beyond vineyards & it would follow each car
With a slight turning of its neck, back & forth, as if it were a thing

Of great interest to him.

If I rode them, the palomino would stumble & wheeze when it broke
Into a trot & would relapse into a walk after a second or two & then stop
Completely & without cause; the bay would keep going though it creaked

Underneath me like a rocking chair of dry, frail wood, & when I knew it could no longer
Continue but did so anyway, or when the palomino would stop & then take

Only a step or two when I nudged it forward again, I would slip off either one of them,
Riding bareback, & walk them slowly back, letting them pause when they wanted to.

At dawn in winter sometimes there would be a pane of black ice covering
The surface of the water trough & they would nudge it with their noses or muzzles,
And stare at it as if they were capable of wonder or bewilderment.

They were worthless. They were the motionless dusk & the motionless

Moonlight, & in the moonlight they were other worlds. Worlds uninhabited
And without visitors. Worlds that would cock an ear a moment
When the migrant workers come back at night to the sheds they were housed in

And turn a radio on, but only for a moment before going back to whatever

Wordless & tuneless preoccupation involved them.

The palomino was called Misfit & the bay was named Querido Flacco,
And the names of some of the other shapes had been Rockabye
And Ojo Pendejo & Cue Ball & Back Door Peter & Frenchfry & Sandman

And Rolling Ghost & Anastasia.

Death would come for both of them with its bridle of clear water in hand
And they would not look up from grazing on some patch of dry grass or even

Acknowledge it much; & for a while I began to think that the world

Rested on a limitless ossuary of horses where their bones & skulls stretched
And fused until only the skeleton of one enormous horse underlay
The smoke of cities & the cold branches of trees & the distant

Whine of traffic on the interstate.

If I & by implication therefore anyone looked at them long enough at dusk
Or in moonlight he would know the idea of heaven & of life everlasting
Was so much blown straw or momentary confetti

At the unhappy wedding of a sister.

Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form
It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with.

Heaven was a weight behind the eyes & one would have to stare right through it
Until he saw the air itself, just air, the clarity that took the shackles from his eyes
And the taste of the bit from his mouth & knocked the rider off his back

So he could walk for once in his life.

Or just stand there for a moment before he became something else, some
Flyspeck on the wall of a passing & uninterruptible history whose sounds claimed
To be a cheering from bleachers but were actually no more than the noise

Of cars entering the mouth of a tunnel.

And in the years that followed he would watch them in the backstretch or the far turn
At Santa Anita or Del Mar. Watch the way they made it all seem effortless,

Watch the way they were explosive & untiring.

And then watch the sun fail him again & slip from the world, & watch
The stands slowly empty. As if all moments came back to this one, inexplicably
To this one out of all he might have chosen—Heaven with ashes in its hair

And filling what were once its eyes—this one with its torn tickets
Littering the aisles & the soft racket the wind made. This one. Which was his.

And if the voice of a broken king were to come in the dusk & whisper
To the world, that grandstand with its thousands of empty seats,

Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment

Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?
He would have to look up at quickening dark & say: Me. I do. It’s mine.  

(reprinted by permission of The University of Pittsburg Press)

---

   Contributor’s notes   
   Levis Remembered  

LARRY LEVIS

Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope

I
All I have left of that country is this torn scrap
Of engraved lunacy, worth less now

Than it was then, for then it was worth nothing,
Or nothing more than

The dust a wren bathes in,

The fountain dry in the park off the Zeleni Venac,
The needles of the pines dry above it,

The green shutters of the fruitsellers’ stands closed
For the afternoon so that in the quiet it seemed

The wren was the only thing moving in the whole city
As it beat its wings against the stone

To rid itself of lice as the dust rose around it.

The sound of its wings, I remember, was like the sound
Of cards being shuffled, as repetitive

And as pointless.

The characters met on faint blue paper.
They were thin as paper then.

They must be starving now.

~

I don’t feel like explaining it,
And now I have to.

To illustrate its money, the State put lovers on the money,

Peasants or factory workers staring off at something
You couldn’t see, something beyond them,

Something that wasn’t Titograd.
They kept looking at it with their faces

Averted, as if they were watching it take place.

In the casinos, these two lovebirds would lie there
Absorbed in it, staring beyond the green felt

Counters of roulette & baccarat tables, beyond the action,
Beyond the men & women in formal attire.

~

Then someone told me what the money meant,
What they kept looking at:

They were watching the State wither away.

When I tried to imagine it, all I could see
Was a past

Where the ancient goat paths began reappearing,
Crisscrossing a straighter footpath,

Nothing else there except three pedestals lost in moss,

And a man washing a cart horse with soap & tepid
Water, &, at that moment, placing

A plaster of sticky leaves over the sores on the horse’s

Withers, the long muscle in the mare’s neck rippling
As he does so, as she goes on grazing without the slightest

Interruption, standing there in the shade of an oak
At the exact spot where the Palace of Justice

Finally turned into the mist it had always resembled.
In the moment before it vanished

Flies still buzzed in lopsided circles in the courtroom

And a witness accidentally inhaled one while testifying,
And then apologized to the court, apologized

For inhaling a fly, but no one knew what to say,
The room grew suddenly quiet, & then everything disappeared,

And a crowd strolled out of the matinee into a village
That was waiting for them, strolled casually

Out of history,

And into something else: forgetful, inexact,

A thirst, an arousal, a pairing off with whomever they desired,

Strangers even, trysting against walls,

Or in a field of dandelions, on wagonbeds, the moment
Scripted in the involuntary,

Lovely convulsion of thighs lathered as a horse’s back,
Because, as Marx said,

Sex should be no more important than a glass of water.

~

I can’t imagine it back.

I can’t get the miles of dust rubbed away from it,
Or the layers of sheetrock.

The fruitseller’s stand on Lomina Street with its closed
Green shutters was what

Reminded me of Big Sur in 1967,

Reminded me of the beach at Lucia with the vacant
Concession stand, the two unemployables

Entwined like salt in a wave inside it, asleep,
Naked in each other’s arms.

I can’t imagine it enough.

I can’t imagine how to get back to it, with something
In your eye, something always in your eye,

And everything becoming a scrap of paper:

The sprawl of the surf there & the cries of the lovers
Just pin-ups or illustrations behind the counter now:

“Gimme a Coke. Gimme a hot dog too, then,” someone
Says to him, tattoos from the navy over

His forearms, not liking what he does, not
Imagining doing anything else now

Except this. Just this.

What withered away?

I watch the guy working fast & suddenly it’s me who’s

Wrapping the hot dogs in waxed paper, me who
Half turns, grabs the lids & straws for the Cokes,

Adds it up without pausing & hands them the change.

I can’t imagine it enough, & even if I could, one day

That, too, would be the wave’s sprawl on the empty rocks,
The hunger in the cries of the gulls.

He pulls the shutters down & locks it up.

“Gimme This & Gimme That. You O.K., Mr. Sea?”
He says to the sky, to the gulls,

To the slur of water receding
On the rocks, to the empty sprawl of the wave

Showing its hand at last before it folds.

II
The lovers must have stepped out of their money
A few days after the State stepped out

Of its thousand offices.

At night you could look up, & all the black glass
Of the windows would glint back at you

Once, as if in recognition.

The lovers must have stepped out because I saw them

Sitting at one of the tables outside the Moskva & shouting
At each other, shouting so loudly

They did not notice their friends beginning
To gather around them.

I gazed past them at the crowds on Terazije passing by
Amid the smells of exhaust

And grilled meat & the odor the sticky bark of the trees
Gave off in the summer afternoon,

The leaves still & exhausted & not turning or
Falling or doing anything yet

Above it all. I liked them. I liked the way the leaves
Had a right to be there & say nothing about it

Hanging there, motionless, without expression,
Without faces, not looking at all

Like passing generations but exactly as leaves look

When they’re still, looking as if
They are refusing to enlist, looking as they always did,

If I glanced up from the book I was reading,
And rubbed my eyes,

And tried to trace her shape I had thought
I’d memorized,

But hadn’t.

Her shape like the sun on the roads.

~

Too bad, with all the evacuations,
All the troop movements & closed offices,

Each black window shining like a contradiction,

“You’d think the Parliament would . . . 
You would think out of common decency, that . . . ”

But the State did not wither away,
It looked just the same, with the rain

Falling between the treeless, bleached yellow
Of cheap housing projects, the rain

Showing them the way home, showing them the Future:

When they get there they find her uncle living
With them, he’s eating dinner

When they arrive, he’s sucking on a fish bone
When they walk in.

In a few weeks Failure & Limitation
Shows its hand in the cold bud

Of her body refusing to open itself,
Refusing to wake up in the morning,

And the uncle by the end of summer walking naked
Through the apartment, pausing one day

Beside her, leaning over her a little, not to
Seduce her but to show her a few things,

To introduce her to

The real head of state grinning through its veil

Of skin as if there was

This joke, something just between

The two of them.
And later the uncle just grins at her,

Grins & says nothing.

~

Love’s an immigrant, it shows itself in its work.
It works for almost nothing.

When the State withers away it resembles
The poor sections of Wichita or Denver.

They held hands the first day & walked under the trees,
And so they were warned about the trees,

About straying into the parks.

A fuzzy haze of green in someone’s yard comes back,
But then it forgets it’s there.

The streets are forgetting they are streets
And they cross other streets

And at the intersections those streets
Begin to forget.

Most of the stores are boarded up, most of what
Is left is braced with two-by-fours in X’s

Over the doors like spells with no power in them,
The sun like neglect bathing the walls,

Bathing the beams you can see right through to,

It’s always the day after the day after here,
And every rebellion’s a riot,

The riot goes on though no one’s there, the streets
Looking burned still, looking as inexplicable

To them as it did the first day
They saw it,

The days are inexplicable,
Their unvarying routine where children not yet

In school peer through the chain link
Of a storm fence above the boulevard & the traffic

To watch for cops,

Where their older brothers with their girlfriends
Sprawl on a car seat ripped out

Of a van & placed here to overlook the city, the river,
Its history an insult in which

They were property.

When it was over, history became a withered arm,
And everyone entered history & no one could find them.

The children keep staring through the chain links

Of the storm fence. The older ones on the car seat
Get high from a glass pipe & watch

The planes on the runway taxi & take off,
They get high again & watch the planes

Glide in & land, & do one last hit before
They stand up & one of them pisses into a small ravine

Of trash. The five-year-old girl keeps peering
Through the storm fence without letting

Her attention stray

Because the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,
Her brother tells her, laughing,

And because the task assigned to her is sacred.
I can’t imagine her enough.

I remember standing in broken glass at the foot
Of a stairway, the woman beside me

Frightened & crying, & the way the glass felt
Like a river freezing under my feet.

I remember how expensive it all seemed,

And after we had split up, in the years that followed.
I would feel my body turn

Slowly away from others so that it could live alone,
So that each afternoon it could

Become wholly a body. It swept the floors of the house
Each day until it was a routine,

Until it became the finite, thoughtless beauty
Of habit.

Whenever the body swept, it could forget.

And the habit was neither pleasure nor work but an act
That kept the stars above it

In the night, kept the pattern of the stars
From rattling out of their frames,

Whether you could see them above you or not,
Whether you looked up & noticed them or not,

The body swept the floors & kept the light above it.

This is why

The girl keeps squinting through the storm fence,
This is why the task assigned to her is sacred,

Why her love for her brother
Is unconditional,

And though she suspects that her brother
Will one day turn into mist behind her,

A space on the car seat, that he will
Disappear like the others have,

It hasn’t happened yet.

I swept the floors to let the worlds blur
Into one another.

But the lovers, the emigrants?
I never see them anymore.

I don’t know where they went.

III
I remember the idiot in the park near Zeleni Venac,
Standing there without a shirt on,

With his fly undone,

The way he’d hold his penis in one hand, & simply howl
And keep howling to anyone passing by

On Lomina Street, because, as Ratko explained it to me,
He believed that he held one end of a leash

He would never find him, this Master he had waited for,
This owner whose whistle he listened for

In the faint blue stillness of the summer daybreak.

In the mornings he would seem calm & play cards
Without understanding them with the others

Who slept in the park & tolerated him, but by
Late afternoon he would begin

To stammer & beg beside the dry fountain, the pine needles
So dry by now they seemed

About to ignite above him, & then, at the certain moment,
He would seem to realize

What had happened, he would become completely still
At that moment, & then . . . 

Then the howling would start up again.
It was not the howling of an idea.

It was the flesh being flayed.

~

My friend Ratko used to drink brandy constantly

In little sips throughout the day & could lie
So beautifully about anything

That the government awarded him, each year, a grant

To write stories, but of course he never wrote them
Except on the air as he walked with friends

Through the city.

Continuing his almost endless commentary,
Asking if the idiot did not admit, without knowing it,

The great truth

About us, that a broken string or snipped-off thread
Is all we remember, & that even this is

Less real than the pulpy flesh he held between his fingers.

History has a withered arm.

And the love of these two adhering to paper, delusional,
Vestigial, the daydream of Capitalism,

The last transaction of the State by which it vanishes,

The flies caking the face of the horse standing there
In its innocence again,

I can’t imagine them enough to bring them back.
After a while, when any subject is forbidden,

All thought is deviationist.

And the young schoolteacher in Rijeka is . . .  where by now?
And the young Muslim poet from Sarajevo is . . . where by now?

And the harmless, lazy bellman at the Atina Palace is . . . 
Where by now?

And the pipe-smoking translator with his office overlooking
Princip Street & the river,

Who was last heard on the phone shouting to someone
As the beams & window glass let go of themselves

In the laughter that shatters all things is . . . where by now?

~

Those nights when I couldn’t sleep in Belgrade,
When I could no longer read,

When there was no point in going out because everything
Was closed, I’d glance at the two of them

On their worthless currency, as if I might catch them
Doing something else, & once,

I turned from their portrait to the empty street
Beneath the window, the thick trees like a stillness

Itself in the night,
And . . . I saw them there. This time they were

Fucking in the rain, their clothes strewn beneath them

On the street like flags

After a war, after some final defeat—fucking each other
While standing up, standing still in the rain & the rain falling

In sheets as if there were no tomorrow left
In it, as if their mouths, each wide open & pressed against

The other’s mouth, stilling the other’s, & reminding me
Of leaves plastered to the back of a horse

Trotting past after a storm, leaves plastered to the side
Of a house by the wind, to what is left of some face . . . 

Had taken the breath out of everything. I thought of
The horse passing easily

Under the exhausted-looking mulberry trees, under the leaves
And the haunted scripture—

Some of its characters shaped like blossoms, others
Like a family of crows taking flight, others like farm tools,

Some of them moving in circles like swirls in a current—

All of it written in the cracked, weathered Cyrillic of some
Indecipherable defeat, though once its shapes had been

Perfect for showing one things, clear as a girl’s face,

The girl who skipped rope in her communion dress,
Dry & white as a petal—

Jedan. Cesto?, Nema, Zar ne?
Chaste & thoughtless as the thing she chanted

And then lost interest in, until I could hear only the endless,
Annoying, unvarying flick of the rope each time

It touched the street.    

“Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope” from Elegy, by Larry Levis, © 1997. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

I did this assignment long ago with words from Thomas Merton given me by the teacher. My list of words was

steelbright
wildworld
whispering
honeycomb
cocoon
cloistered
encircle
evaporate

I created this poem, which has been revised many times. I think this is the original, though I will present the multiple revisions next week or the week after.

MOONLESS SOLITUDE
               THE WELCOME SORROW OF NIGHT

        Cunning guides me
        down night's streets.
        Driving me into the cocoon
        of trash. Here, in this alley
        unwashed by the sky, I am
        cloistered by a quicksand
        trash. I am entombed
        by gutters, and the gravity
        of discarded menus.

        A fence of valuable friends encircles
        my home. It rises every evening to taunt
        my arrogances. Altars are born
        of sidewalks -- we worship conversation,
        rubbish and tribulations.

        "Sorrow offers a chance for ecstasy,"
        I murmur.
        Innuendoes honeycomb the half-heard
        truth. I compose hymns
        to the pagan vanity of love.
        My razor shaves their skins
        adrift in a soapy sink. But nothing,
        not the sharpest razor, nor the keenest
        mind could save us from the chasms
        between our souls.

        We are purged in an eternal
        lent and we, she and I, resist
        the evening love in contrition
        for our walking sin.

        Garbage evaporates;
        steelbrightining the world.
        Dawn creeps through the shutters
        of my heart, turning it to relieved sighs,
        yielding gradually
        the emotions that fuel the morning tide.
        Our souls remain -- a wildworld of
        frozen shadows.

        The whispering of her hair
        and the whinnying horses
        wakes me from dreams.
        She's up before me
        burning the coffee on the stove
        and grooming the mounts.
        I mix myself with the lazy smell
        of hay. I drink the
        barn, tower silos, hay bales,
        corn, grain, mice, air, the excess
        dribbling from mouth's corners,
        staining the quilt
        of our makeshift bed.

~ peace, chris tower, your friend in learning!
“Always look on the bright side” - from THE LIFE OF BRIAN

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2610.14 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4122 days ago & DAD = 776 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4239 - Annie Dillard RIP

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4239 - Annie Dillard RIP

I love Annie Dillard.

The Writing Life is one of my favorite books on writing, one whose passages I read to students frequently.

So, this is sad.

She will be missed.

Thanks for tuning in.

Annie Dillard brought poetry into prose, pioneering a mystical form of creative nonfiction that critics both admired and misunderstood

Published: September 18, 2026 1:40pm EDT

https://theconversation.com/annie-dillard-brought-poetry-into-prose-pioneering-a-mystical-form-of-creative-nonfiction-that-critics-both-admired-and-misunderstood-290676

Annie Dillard is rightly celebrated as a pioneer in creative nonfiction after her death on Sep. 15, 2026, at age 81. But the dazzling, disorienting feel of Dillard’s work might be best understood as the often overlooked influence of poetry on her prose.

Dillard published her first full-length work of creative nonfiction, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” when she was only 28. Winning her the 1975 Pulitzer Prize, this early book set the tone for her later work in creative nonfiction: the essay collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” and full-length works “Holy the Firm” and “For the Time Being.” They all attend closely to the natural world, with a theologian’s eye and a poet’s idiom.

Dillard’s creative nonfiction about nature owes a debt to the lyrical prose of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, whom Dillard cited as a major influence in her work. She was also overt about the central role that fiction played in her thinking in her book of literary criticism, “Living by Fiction.”

But Dillard’s nonfiction, though undeniably prose, can have “the shape and intensity of a poem,” as her New York Times obituary puts it.

As a writer and writing professor, I think often about how blurred the boundary between poetry and prose really is. Annie Dillard’s work embodies this permeability.

Prose and poetry, in combination

Not all writing is the same. Prose typically features continuous sentences arranged in paragraphs. Poetry tends to be differentiated from prose by a deliberate organization of language that’s not determined by the page itself.

Prose poetry, the lyric essay and other hybrid forms of literature play at the intersection of genre, which usually defines these separate categories of writing. Creative nonfiction likewise aims to accurately convey reality while emphasizing literary style. The literary features of creative nonfiction are often drawn from fiction, with devices such as dialogue, scene and flashback.

But one of the distinctions of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction is how much her prose owes to poetry.

Poetry can be defined in many ways, but it tends to be characterized by honed, heightened language. Poems are often noted for their memorable images, rich sounds and foregrounding of emotion. Dillard’s nonfiction is shot through with images that arrest readers with their beauty or confront readers with their terror – as in her Harper’s essay “The Death of a Moth,” where the insect is drawn to a candle flame, becomes stuck in the wax and is transformed into a burning wick. In Dillard’s words:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

It’s no accident that Dillard describes herself as reading the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud by the light of the moth. She previously wrote that she loved how language sounds in French symbolist poetry, and Rimbaud was known to combine prose with his poetry in a way Dillard herself does.

Writing prose as a poet

In “The Writing Life,” Dillard describes the process of writing “a favorite, difficult book” – likely “Holy the Firm” – as akin to writing poetry. She notes that the writing was “so intense and accented, and the world it described was so charged with meaning,” that the idea of going further exhausted her.

To help her write, she read Conrad Aiken’s poetry aloud, describing it as “pure sound unencumbered by sense.” She would read a poetry anthology’s index of first lines because “the parallels sounded strong and suggestive.”

She also describes repeating a single line of Wallace Stevens’ poetry “for hours, like a song” while writing.

Dillard purposefully channeled poetry’s sonic density in her writing process; it comes as no surprise that the heightened register of these poems made its way into her prose.

Inspired by ineffable nature

Dillard’s virtuosic, visionary style isn’t for everyone. Writer Eudora Welty praised Dillard in her review of “Tinker Creek,” but Welty also admitted “not (knowing) what she’s talking about” at times and that her writing “leaves something to be desired.” That something was what Welty called “straight narrative,” the clarity of “point, direction, and shape” more often demanded of prose than poetry. The solitude of the narrator in Dillard’s nonfiction and her apparent disengagement with society also was a source of criticism. As critic William Deresiewicz put it, “There is no economy and no society” in “Tinker Creek.” “We don’t know how Dillard lives, or how she makes a living, or much of anything about her circumstances.” Her mix of cultural disengagement and theological concern smacked to Deresiewicz of “hypocrisy and spiritual snobbery.”

In the contained world of lyric poetry, especially nature poetry, this hermetic perspective would be less of a fault. Her mystical encounters with the divine through the natural world are reminiscent of poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver. The narrow lens of her attention can be viewed as a poetic feature played out at length over her nonfiction essays and books.

Like an expressionist painting, poetry draws attention to how something is being depicted, not just what is being portrayed. Prose can do this, too – creative nonfiction, especially, and Annie Dillard’s writing most of all.

Annie Dillard, Meditative Author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ Dies at 81

Her Thoreau-like account of journeys in the woods, published when she was 28, was the first of many ruminations on life and nature, good and evil.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/books/annie-dillard-dead.html

By Daniel Lewis

Published Sept. 16, 2026

Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Mass. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. No further details were given.

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Ms. Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a best-selling autobiography and another best seller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.

Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Ms. Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins College (now University), the women’s liberal arts school in Roanoke, Va.

Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty.

Unlike Thoreau, Ms. Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.

Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to compare Ms. Dillard to Henry David Thoreau, but unlike Thoreau, she didn’t live a solitary life in a cabin in the woods. At the end of the day, she returned home to the suburban house she shared with her husband.Credit...Jill Krementz all rights reserved

That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God.

Among the many things she saw at Tinker Creek was a little green frog, half out of the water, “deflating like a football” before her eyes. It was in the clutches of a giant water bug whose bite had liquefied the frog’s innards. Such encounters could cause “nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans,” she wrote.

“But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure,” she added. “I walk out; I see something, some event that otherwise would have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”

 

“Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Ms. Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances. Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.”

Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington State and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Mr. Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work.

“The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.”

She added: “If the Greeks had looked at Mt. Baker all day, their large and honest art would have broken, and they would have gone fishing, as these people do.”

The Problem of Evil

Those lines are from the first fruit of her relocation, “Holy the Firm,” published in 1977, a three-part metaphysical tour de force in 76 pages honed almost to the shape and intensity of a poem. It took 14 months of full-time work, by her account, in a one-room house as “plain as a skull,” her only companions a cat and a spider.

“Nothing is going to happen in this book,” she writes. “There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”

But by that point, she has already told an excruciating account of a moth that gets stuck in the molten wax of a candle and itself becomes a wick that burns for two hours. Just ahead is the story of a 7-year-old girl she calls Julie Norwich, who gets safely to ground after her father’s light plane clips a line of fir trees on takeoff, only to have her face burned off by a splurt of hot fuel.

Which brings Ms. Dillard once more head-to-head with a question known to religious thinkers as the problem of evil: Could it possibly be that a loving, all-powerful God allows bad things to happen just to make goodness stand out in sharper relief?

Ms. Dillard’s years in Washington inspired some of the essays in her celebrated collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (1982).

Its jewel was “Total Eclipse,” which in 2000 was included in “The Best American Essays of the Century,” not long after “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” appeared on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books.

On the morning of Feb. 26, 1979, Ms. Dillard and her second husband, the anthropologist Gary Clevidence, sat atop a 500-foot-tall hill in the orchard country of the Yakima Valley to view an eclipse. They put on welder’s goggles. When the show began, Ms. Dillard experienced something like a psychedelic trip, minus the acid. The light was all wrong. The grass was platinum. Her hands were silver.

“The hillside,” she wrote, “was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded.”

The first of Ms. Dillard’s two novels grew out of her Washington sojourn as well: Published in 1992, “The Living,” a 19th-century pioneer saga, centered on what became Whatcom County.

All the while, she had been teaching classes at Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University). In an account written by Paul Lindholdt, a former student working on a critical biography of Ms. Dillard, she came across as a chain-smoking force of nature: “She was by turns disorganized and inspiring, prickly and brilliant. She required her students to foot-stomp aloud the meter of favorite poems, including ‘God’s Grandeur’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

Though she had once said that she might remain in the Northwest, she and Mr. Clevidence moved east in 1979, and from then until 2001 she taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Pittsburgh-Born

Annie Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh. Her father, Frank Doak, was an executive with the American Standard corporation and a great-grandson of the founder; her mother, Pam Lambert Doak, was known as a platinum-haired wit with a taste for modernist furniture and a passion for liberal causes.

In “An American Childhood” (1987), an autobiography, Ms. Dillard recalls her young self as a serious reader, an explorer who was allowed to roam freely as soon as she could recite her phone number, and a roughneck who played football with the boys.

 “You got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs — either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat on your chin, with your arms empty before you,” she wrote. “It was all or nothing.”

As a teenager, she later wrote, “I would give my heart to one oddball boy after another — to older boys, to prep-school boys no one knew, to him who refused to go to college, to him who was a hood, and all of them wonderfully skinny.”

She was suspended from school for smoking. She unfairly blamed her parents for everything that was wrong with North America. And when it came time for college, she went to Hollins on the recommendation of her high school principal, who thought the place might smooth her “rough edges.” She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, in 1967 and ’68.

Ms. Dillard and Mr. Clevidence divorced in 1988, and Ms. Dillard married Robert D. Richardson Jr., whom she met after sending him a fan letter about his book “Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.”

Mr. Richardson died in 2020. Ms. Dillard’s survivors include a child from her second marriage, Cody-Rose Clevidence; four stepdaughters, Carin Clevidence, Shelly Clevidence, Anne Richardson and Lissa Richardson; and two sisters, Amy Fields and Molly Simonds.

Ms. Dillard’s first book was a collection of poems, “Tickets for a Prayer Wheel,” published a few months before “Tinker Creek.” Her later books included the journalistic “Encounters with Chinese Writers” (1984); “The Writing Life” (1989), which offered, instead of tips, reflections that amounted to “a spiritual Funk and Wagnalls,” in the words of one reviewer; “For the Time Being” (1999), which included a series of essays exploring what it means to be human; and her second novel, “The Maytrees” (2007), an uncharacteristically warm story of love set in postwar Provincetown, Mass., at the tip of Cape Cod. It was the last book she wrote.

Ms. Dillard’s papers are held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where Diana Saverin, a researcher and Dillard fan, went through them and reported on her findings for The Atlantic in 2015. Of particular interest were the journals in which Ms. Dillard talked herself through the fear that no one would read a book like “Tinker Creek” because it was written by a woman.

“It’s impossible to imagine another situation where you can’t write a book ’cause you weren’t born with a penis,” Ms. Dillard wrote. “Except maybe ‘My Life With My Penis.’”

And Then Silence

Ms. Dillard was not immune to criticism. She took heat for fictionalizing part of “Tinker Creek,” which was billed as nonfiction — specifically the opening scene, about a fighting tomcat that smeared blood on her. It turned out to be a story she had borrowed with permission from a graduate student.

More generally, some readers who admired her bravery and virtuosity faulted her for leaving out what Thoreau had included: a sense of connection to the world most people live in. No news of the Vietnam War, Watergate or the energy crisis ever reached Tinker Creek. Writing about the book in The New York Times, Eudora Welty — herself a Pulitzer winner for her novel “The Optimist’s Daughter” — observed that Ms. Dillard was “the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world.”

Ms. Welty added, “Speaking of the universe very often, she is yet self-surrounded, and, beyond that, book-surrounded.”

Forty-two years later, in a sweeping appraisal of her work, the author and critic William Deresiewicz noted in The Atlantic that “Dillard, like Thoreau, is never shy about pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the way her fellows live.” He thought that the alternative she represented smacked of spiritual snobbery and hypocrisy — a mystical way of life for the few who could afford it; like, for instance, the daughter of a wealthy family who became a success before she turned 30.

Mr. Deresiewicz’s article was occasioned by publication of “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New” (2016), in which the only “new” thing was 11 years old. Ms. Dillard had, by then, been silent for nine years, since “The Maytrees.”

She was last photographed in public in 2014, when she went to the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama for her “profound reflections on human life and nature.”

 

Ms. Dillard at the White House in 2014, when President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for her “profound reflections on human life and nature.”Credit...Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Her website told readers, “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books.” It stated her religion as “none” — she had been a Protestant and then a Roman Catholic and then neither — but acknowledged her connection to Christianity and Hasidism. She spent recent years at her Cape Cod home, painting.

She had written with all her might, and had tried to light the same fire in others. Amid the pyrotechnics of “Holy the Firm,” she told the following story of a day in her classroom.

“How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers?” she wrote. “I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me … All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? You, Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?)”

She added: “And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax.”

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2609.25 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4103 days ago & DAD = 757 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.