Praxis
Portriat of Denise Levertov at Flagg St, Cambridge, MA
Elsa Dorfman
“Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin' ”
—Four Dead in Ohio, Lyrics by Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1970
One of Denise Levertov’s guiding principles, I quickly learned, was her belief that if as an artist your life was whole and not compartmentalized — as hers certainly was not — then it was inconceivable to share your work — poems in her case — both on the page and in public forums, without also sharing your convictions, especially in such troubled times when America’s urban ghettos were burning and an unpopular war was being waged overseas in Vietnam. From early on in her career as poet/activist, she viewed invitations to read her poems as opportunities to educate audiences about social injustice and the immorality of the Vietnam War, and to persuade them to join in social action and resistance to the war’s continuation.
One such occasion took place in January 1970, just as the second and final semester of Levertov’s M.I.T. poetry workshop, in which I was enrolled, was beginning. Boston that year was a hotbed of draft resistance and antiwar protests, with an office in Cambridge staffed by student activists from campuses on both sides of the Charles coordinating “actions” across the entire greater Boston area. It was command central for rallies and demonstrations on the Boston Common as well as at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Northeastern, among other schools. Each protest or disruption of the status quo planned for one campus drew student radicals from the others, joining their comrades in what they viewed to be acts of revolutionary solidarity.
"Northeastern Conspiracy – A Call to Action" read the fliers handed out on street corners, stapled to telephone poles, tacked to bulletin boards, and pasted on walls across the city that January. I don’t recall now just what the “conspiracy” was thought to be, if I ever knew, but I remember that the plan was for three days of demonstrations against the visit to the Northeastern University campus by General Electric job recruiters — GE being a notorious defense contractor. The culminating event would be a January 29th rally to protest the talk by San Francisco State University President S. I. Hayakawa scheduled to be delivered as part of Northeastern’s distinguished lecturers series.
Hayakawa was a lightning rod, attracting student protesters wherever he appeared, in no small part because he had been widely praised by the likes of President Nixon, Nixon’s oratorical hatchet-man Vice-President Spiro Agnew, and California governor Ronald Reagan for “standing up” to students. They held up Hayakawa as a model for college administrators nationally after his refusal to negotiate with student agitators and their faculty supporters at San Francisco State. Instead, he had closed the campus for several months, locking students and faculty out, refusing to give their complaints a hearing. Attempts to rally opposition to his decision were met by ranks of San Francisco police and National Guardsmen, mobilized by Hayakawa and Reagan. Photographs of protesters brutally beaten were widely circulated through the underground presses at the time.
But that same January evening, Denise was scheduled to read her poems as a fundraiser for Ecology Action. The venue was the meeting hall of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church (OCBC) in Harvard Square, the basement of which was a warren of office cubicles given over to activist groups of every cause and persuasion. Denise felt obliged to keep this commitment, despite her ardent desire to take part in the demonstration against Hayakawa. (“You remember, Mark, you were there.”)
Fellow workshop student Margo and I had arranged to meet Denise at the Harvard subway station and accompany her on the short walk to the church. Listening to her agonize about her inability to be in both places at the same time, we hatched a plan to mollify her disappointment. It went like this: Margo and I would leave Denise off at the church to read her poems while we proceeded across the river to the Northeastern demo. We would periodically report back what was happening there via payphone to a designated church staffer, who would pass our messages to Denise; and Denise, in turn, would inform the audience. According to this scenario, after her reading, if our reports indicated that the demo still had life to it, Denise, and anyone in attendance she could enlist to accompany her, would cross the river and add their voices to the protest against Hayakawa.
Margo and I were confident that Denise would draw connections for her audience between the corporate power-structure (that was responsible for policies resulting in the destruction of the environment) and Hayakawa, who advocated support for the status quo, including the war in Vietnam. Knowing her powers of persuasion, we were also confident that she would be able to recruit some of the attendees to follow her lead and cross the river to join the demonstration.
We caught The People’s Bus, a van that at the time conveyed hitchhikers free of charge along the central artery, Massachusetts Avenue, across the Charles to where it intersected Huntington Avenue in Boston. Disembarking there, we found a pitched battle already in progress: sirens wailing, police in riot gear, acrid clouds of tear-gas in the air.
As it happens, Huntington Ave passes under Mass Ave by way of a tunnel. Where Huntington re-emerges, a physical barrier divides the street down the middle, separating northbound from southbound surface traffic. We joined a seesaw battle between police and demonstrators that was taking place on either side of the brick-walled tunnel exit and the wrought iron fencing that borders the subway tracks. A phalanx of police, using shields and truncheons, pushed the mass of protesters back down one side of Huntington, only to find us running around to the other side of the barrier, trying to outflank them and gain access to the Northeastern campus grounds behind. Over the fray, a block or two beyond, I could see students clashing with police, others chased, running, some being clubbed, still others dragged to waiting paddy wagons. Newspaper reports later revealed that in the fracas that night, police had arrested not only protesters but any college-age male they encountered, including innocents coming from evening classes or from studying in the library.
Margo and I twice left the skirmish to find a payphone and report what we had observed to the OCBC staffer. “It’s a police riot. Bring as many people as you can round up,” was our last message for Denise back in Harvard Square, shouted into the telephone over the din. The battle raged on, but our contingent on Mass. Ave. was unable to outflank or break through the police lines. All the while, Margo and I kept an eye out for Denise, fully expecting her at any moment to step off the People’s Bus and tap us on the shoulder.
But the plan we’d hatched had a fatal flaw. We had forgotten that there were multiple ways to travel from Harvard Square to Northeastern University. The Arborway branch of the Green Line subway for one. It emerges from underground at the Huntington/Mass Ave intersection, then continues on the surface with a stop at Northeastern University. Half an hour after our last phone report, we saw, to our shock and horror over the heads of the police at the point where the subway disgorged passengers at the Northeastern stop, Denise emerging from one Green Line car into the midst of the melee, followed by half a dozen young men.
They were immediately surrounded by police, the young men clubbed, cuffed, and dragged away to waiting vans. Although we could not hear what she was shouting, we could make out Denise’s figure through the clouds of gas, her arms flailing, shouting at the riot police as she followed behind her young comrades.
Our contingent was eventually pushed back onto Mass Ave when police reinforcements arrived and then dispersed with tear gas. There was no way we could reach Denise. All other avenues of access to the campus were blocked, so Margo and I returned to Cambridge. Meeting up the next day, Denise told us that she was never arrested, no doubt because of her age and professional attire, but had spent the night in the jailhouse helping to arrange bail for the others.
In the ensuing days, I learned details from friends who had been inside the auditorium about how they and fellow radical students had succeeded in planting themselves in the audience, despite screening at the entrance by campus security personnel, and had disrupted Hayakawa’s talk, shouting “War Monger” and “Fascist!” Most were dragged off by police, some severely beaten. Outside the auditorium, their supporters clashed with squads of police, resulting in the skirmishes that we had witnessed from a distance.
Denise’s social justice advocacy and opposition to the Vietnam War were, however, not always greeted with approval or listened to with deference by those attending her poetry readings. Fast forward to May 8th, 1970; almost five months after the Hayakawa demonstration, and just one month after four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State during an anti-war protest. I wasn’t present at Goucher College in Maryland where a chapel service was held in the dead students’ memory to which Denise had been invited as a participant, but she later documented what occurred in a poem.
“The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why,” describes how, after she read two of her best-known Vietnam poems, “Life at War” and “What They Were Like,” she told those seated in the chapel, addressing the fact that all four of the Kent State students were white,”
…let us be sure we know
our gathering is a mockery unless
we remember also
the black students shot at Orangeburg two years ago,
and Fred Hampton murdered in his bed
by the police only months ago.
According to the poem, as she continued speaking in this vein, “girls, older women, men,” began to stand up, turned their backs to the altar, and walked out.
By then the pews were almost empty
and I returned to my seat and a man stood up
in the back of the quiet chapel
….
and said my words
desecrated a holy place.
Denise concluded her poem with these lines:
And a few days later
when some more students (black) were shot
at Jackson, Mississippi,
no one desecrated the white folks' chapel,
because no memorial was held.
__________________________
The above was an excerpt from Mark Pawlak’s forthcoming memoir, My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging Loose). His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir, is forthcoming in 2021 from MadHat Press.