Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Debt by Mark Levine
William Morrow, 1993

Reading Mark Levine’s Debt, it is not hard to find the poet’s voice. In fact, despite the discrepancies that exist between poems in terms of the speaker’s persona (for instance, in “Work Song” he says his name is Henri, a Frenchman from Toulouse and in the next poem, “Debt,” he is “The Jew Levine”), the speaker seems to be the same throughout most of the book. So how might this speaker be the same if his name and origins change? The answer lies in the issues and themes to which the speaker most often remains loyal. Levine’s speaker deals with fragmentation, the relationship with his parents, and his own identity. The first two, of course, have an effect on the last.

Levine accomplishes his task with a very particular style. He tends to defy conventional logic in his poetry, creating his own logic in its stead. This new logic works within the context of the poem’s world. For instance, in the poem “Battle Hymn,” the speaker describes a world with dreamlike logic. The first two lines read: “I lie down in the hot sheep-pasture fog and wake up / chained to a dry-ice machine, dog tags chiming” (1-2). The logic of lying down in a hot fog and then waking up chained to a dry ice machine is bizarre yet consistent. How could one wake up chained to a dry ice machine? Who knows, but it probably accounts for all that fog in the first line. This logical consistency also includes a somewhat fierce dichotomy between narrative structure and the leaps that dominate Levine’s poetry. The constant leaps that shatter real world logic are often held together by the narrative nature of these poems. Many of the poems in this book might be described as narrative journeys through a world of dream logic in which the traveler often pauses for reflection on what he has seen.

Fragmentation occurs a number of times throughout the book. In “Poem For the Left Hand,” we are given these lines in the fourth stanza: “What little control I have / over my lost parts! I did not mean to, but / my dreams are taking a turn / for the real, like the rock thrown through my window” (15-18). Once again, Levine has thrust us into the world of dreams, this time clearly indicating the speaker’s fragmentation by lamenting over his “lost parts.” The mention of the rock thrown through the speaker’s window also implies a fragmentation - the shattering of glass, which may serve as a metaphor for the shattering of the speaker’s mental state. Another example of the speaker’s fragmentation can be found in the third stanza of the poem titled “Poem.” Levine writes: “They prop open my mouth with splinters. / They carve their initials on my thighs. / Their placard hangs from my cock. / Their time clock ticks at my feet” (9-12). Here, instead of lamenting at lost parts, the speaker lists what the bodies (mentioned in the previous stanza) have done to various parts of himself. In describing his own body piece by piece, the speaker fragments himself. Instead of seeing the speaker as a whole in the movie of this poem, we instead see pieces of a person that alone can create no identity. In the last stanza of “Battle Hymn” the speaker is “bought and divided and placed on the hearth” (26). His pieces are then used by children as a play thing. The speaker is yet again subjected to fragmentation and objectification, which seem to indicate an existential dilemma. Clearly one cannot live like this, constantly being torn apart and used like meat by the rest of the world.

But these are not the speaker’s only problems - he has issues with his parents as well. In “Work Song,” Levine’s speaker assumes the role of Henri the Frenchman, but he is really the same speaker with the same problems. In the second stanza, Levine writes: “Children are always / drowning or falling through cracks. Parents are distraught / but get over it. It’s easy to replace a child. / Like my parents’ child, Henri” (11-14). Levine has created a morality here where a child is something easily replaced, much like a pet or a possession. The speaker, Henri, accepts this as reality and uses himself as an example. Thus the speaker objectifies himself. He is not something unique but rather something that is quite replaceable. The manner in which he refers to himself, “my parents’ child,” is also self-deprecating. The speaker has labeled a child as something not unlike an object in the logic of this poem and then refers to himself as someone’s child. He has distanced himself from his own identity. He has also created a logic in which parents are not truly attached to their children. “Debt” continues the parental theme in its third to last stanza. “Once my father pointed his finger at me. / Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter” (44-45). Here we begin to see an Oedipal complex arising within the speaker. There is a rivalry between he and his father who points his finger at him, perhaps in a gesture of reprimand or accusation. The second line draws a somewhat sexual relationship between the speaker and his mother. It is not unusual for a mother to kiss her child but it seems to border on the taboo that she kisses him on the lips. “In winter” often implies agedness and thus may imply that the speaker was not a child when this happened. Winter also implies a negativity that negates any sense of innocence that the reader might try to label this kiss with.

The example in “Debt” might be construed as an innocent kiss by some, but later examples of a sexual relationship between the speaker and his mother are much clearer. The first full stanza in “Double Agents” reads: “Go away, I say, I’m in bed / with my mother, I can’t be disturbed. She denies it– / claims ‘bed’ is a toddler’s sand-pit; claims what we’re doing / is molding a medieval fortress with plastic pails. / –She calls herself ‘Renee.’ / I touch her like The Flood, I touch her / like a vacuum cleaner” (2-8). The second line in this stanza shocks us as it refines the line “I’m in bed” by adding “with my mother.” Either the mother or her son, the speaker, misunderstands the situation. The son believes he is having sex with his mother while the mother believes she is playing in a sand box with him. There is a fundamental disconnect between this man-boy speaker and his mother. “ Sculpture Garden” is a poem that spends a lot of time dealing with the speaker’s parents, but perhaps the most attention-grabbing stanza is the third to last: “Once in a dream I made love to my mother. / It did no good” (40-41). In these two lines, it is clear that Levine has melded his dream world with the oedipal theme that he often gives his speaker. It seems obvious that making love to one’s mother would do no good and yet the speaker needs to explain that. To any reasonable person, the concept of making love to one’s own mother could never yield positive results. However, for this speaker, there is such a break that exists between he and his parents (particularly his mother) that their relationship remains ambiguous. The speaker must learn through experience that sleeping with his mother is not the best way to approach their relationship.

In Debt, these themes of the speaker’s fragmentation, and his deeply troubled relationship with his parents converge to create an all-encompassing lack of identity. This makes sense. If the speaker experiences such disconnect with himself and with those who created him, how is he to establish an identity for himself? There may be no answer to this question, as the speaker himself does not know how to understand his own identity. Returning to “Battle Hymn,” the speaker says, “Police with thick gloves point mirrors at me. / That’s me? Just what do I think I am doing? / Answer: posing. / As what? A person? God? Something for sale?” (18-21). For the speaker, finding his own identity seems hopeless. His attempt to answer his first question, “Answer: posing,” serves only to raise more. And he continues to objectify himself - “As what?” instead of “As who?” He thinks he may be “Something for sale,” a commodity to be used. Perhaps the height of the speaker’s identity crisis lies in the poem “Self-Portrait.” The speaker wakes up next to himself and he becomes many of the objects in the poem: “–I am a TV. I buzz I receive everything . . . what I’ve become one even laughs eyeing the screen (me)” (13, 18). The speaker’s identity deteriorates to the point that it is no longer perceivable who or what the speaker really is. Finally, it culminates with two of the speaker making love to each other (himself). Similarly to his ambiguous relationship with his mother, the speaker has an ambiguous relationship with himself. He tries to understand both relationships through sex.

These themes are thoroughly repeated throughout Debt and they are not alone. There are many more major themes throughout the book that arise again and again with similar impact on the speaker. This thematic consistency strengthens the idea that Levine’s speaker is also fairly consistent, or rather as consistent as a speaker with such a fragmented identity can be. Levine’s speaker is repeatedly vulnerable in this way, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect of this book. Debt is a veritable epic of personal problems as told by a speaker who does not understand himself, and it is easy to get lost with him. But the fact that Levine has sculpted his problematic epic into a surrealistic dreamscape makes it unusual and compelling without sounding too much like a speaker who just feels sorry for himself. And it seems impossible for this speaker to feel self-pity as he can pin down no real sense of self at all.

Further Reading

Levine, Mark. The Wilds. California: University of California Press, 2006.

Levine, Mark. Enola Gay. California: University of California Press, 2000

Levine, Mark. “With the Wind At His Heels.” Outside March 1999. 2 May 2006 http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/0399/9903bikewind.html

Martinez, Michael J. “Interview with Mark Levine.” George Mason University’s Nonfiction Universe. 2 May 2006 http://nonfiction.gmu.edu/Visiting%20Writers/MLinterview.html

Rehak, Melanie. “‘Enola Gay’ by Mark Levine: A forceful book of poems about our barely disguised appetite for destruction.” Salon 30 May 2000. 2 May 2006 http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/05/30/levine/index.html