Mark Levine is the author of four books of poems, Debt (1993), Enola Gay (2000), The Wilds (2006), and Travels of Marco (2016), and a book of nonfiction, F5 (2007). The recipient of an NEA and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, his poems have appeared in numerous journals and in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Hybrid and American Poets in the the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. A member of the Workshop faculty since 1999, he has also worked extensively as a journalist for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The New Yorker, and he currently writes a monthly column for Bicycling.
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DebtPoemsFrom"Debt"
The Banker trails behind me with his abacus
and crowd of yes-men. I hear
the gold coins rub together in his vest.
The stoplights remind me. And the scars
on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.
Once my father pointed his finger at me.
Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.
I could have been a man like those men
on the roof, eyes narrowed at me
like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns
and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires
wound beneath their chests –
they remind me of me. All in sync
they cup their ears to the antenna.
Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect
with his chisels and his sack of flesh.
Debt:Poems -
DebtPoemsFrom"Sculpture Garden"
This is the house my father tried to build.
That patch of dirt raked
in geometric plains is a Japanese garden.
Those gaps the pigeons roost in are French windows.
The step-ladder, a spiral staircase, a helix. My father hasn’t
slept in six weeks. There is a crack in the living-
room wall. There is an icy roof.
He is watching the plaster.
Certain the house will collapse.
Should I talk to him when he doesn’t talk back?
His tongue coated white.
Should I touch him? He is dirty.
Debt:Poems -
DebtPoemsFrom"Warrant"
By midnight I get over it. I start hammering again.
The guards stand by the fire pit, burning papers.
So many numbers, so many names.
Hammer gently, they say: we’re trying to think.
The guy next to me can’t stop coughing.
The guy next to him can’t stop singing “Glory to God
in His sacred groves.”
When is this going to stop?
The ovens stay lit all night. Everything sounds the same
when it burns, like newsprint, like the telephone book,
like name, rank, number, date of birth.
Once I start talking, what’s there to stop me?
When I run out of nails I hammer pens.
Ink stains the wood the color of my tongue.
I don’t need my pens anymore. They know it was me.
They can sign my name to anything
and they won’t be wrong.
Debt:Poems
“ . . . startling and slippery images, and fast-moving, even disorienting poems depict postmodern scenes so fragmentary, noisy and degraded that the would-be poet, prophet or rebel can barely see or say what's going on.” —Publishers Weekly [on The Wilds]
“Reading Mark Levine's Enola Gay is a near-religious experience . . . You could read contemporary American poetry for many years and not come across a work as distinctive as this.” —Seth Abramson, Huffington Post
"Mark Levine's poems conjure a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world. Here things tend to be rusty, wet, subject to dry rot, incomplete, or just plain out of kilter. Reading Enola Gay is an unforgettable experience." —John Ashbery
Selected Works
