Phillis Levin (left) and Diane Mehta (right)
DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN’s conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. Though what appears below can only be fragments of their full exchange, the two poets—both previous contributors to The Common—share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, formal constraint, and expressing multiple perspectives in poems.
Diane Mehta (DM): From the first sentences in your first book, Temples and Fields (1988), through your sixth, An Anthology of Rain (2025), is a history of weather, clouds, and rain. In Rain, you pick up on a concept you introduce early on: the life cycle of a raindrop. Here are lines from the lead poem in Temples and Fields: “Yet there is something about windows // That makes me want to tell / The story of my past: / How I traced the life of a raindrop / As it raced to the sill, / How a wish split the wishbone / And the truth divided.”
In An Anthology of Rain, the raindrop in the title poem is older, improvisatory, and seeks connection: “lingering / Before making a detour to join / Another.” This raindrop has a full life (“fattening on the way”). You turn to the reader (“So please accept this invitation”) and welcome us into your book and your life.
Your books are about what it feels like to be that raindrop—to feel where you move through life and encounter it with your full attention, question everything, notice absences and missed connections, fall in love, form opinions, go to Rome.
Phillis Levin (PL): What a marvelous overview. The lines you note from “Something About Windows” in Temples and Fields document a fall of sorts in the breaking of the wishbone: language and desire separating the child from an undifferentiated sense of and relation to the world, language and desire giving us a means to touch the world and recall wholeness.
The experience of studying the behavior of a waterdrop is manifested in my newest collection—not only in its title poem but in the meditation on an orb of light in my father’s hair that captured my attention as an infant. There is a primal attraction to light and to shapes that spark thought processes. As a child, I spent time watching raindrops running down a windowsill—I had to entertain myself because my mother was so terrified that I’d be kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby that she wouldn’t let me go outside to play. (She followed me in an old gray Buick when I walked with other children to school.) The title poem returns to that early memory.
Coincidentally, the word “weather” is in the first line of your first book of poetry, Forest with Castanets (2019). The word “sizzles” follows—your reader and speaker are immediately immersed in multiple sensations, touch and sound and sight.
A flood of associations and memories ensues, a fantasia of cultural and personal histories—casualties of natural disasters, casualties of human massacres; and a need to escape (or be shielded from) an unbearable weight of ancestry and history, the “remains” that remain; a need for shade and waters that wash away. What seems obvious didn’t occur to me until now: the motif of water coursing through your work as well as mine.
DM: In “Anne Frank’s High Heels” (Mr. Memory & Other Poems, 2016), you build a remarkable doll’s house of compound words: “Sorrow-girl, wait-for-me, / Happiness-around-a-corner- // One-day, hurry-back, don’t-tell,” with an insistent, whispering pleasure that is unlike anything I’ve come across in English-language poetry. In “Blueprint” in An Anthology of Rain, lines roll forward and parentheticals guard our beloved objects—“Albums, letters, keys, locks of hair”—and leap stanza breaks as if clearing an abyss: “(a void // Is a wilderness sustained / By the margin.).” There is no dead space in your language. It climbs onto itself—with hidden rhymes, repetitions that evolve, and agitating B and D sounds.
PL: Both of us think things through in our poems—and thought for you is an emotional experience, as it was for John Donne. Among the numerous delights in your work, I savor these words in “On Seeing Fra Angelico’s Annunciation”: “ . . . being / inside what you are seeing is as immediate as truth gets,” which is related to the capacity to make a simulacrum, a reality. One of the ways a poem accomplishes this feat is through sonic texture, through attentiveness to the physicality of language—you use sound mimetically, to embody feeling.
DM: In my Phillis immersion, I see the engine of sound-making at work—the way language gets delivered, the tug of it. This passage in “Tabula Rasa” (Mr. Memory)—“Startled by starlings, darlings of the eye, apples / At home in their lunar glow, piano scales / Welling below”—is so playful with diction that it takes a minute to realize it’s a list. You’ve made everyone’s favorite poetic device, an off-the-rack list that more often than not replaces the work of the poem, and stitch by stitch, you’ve made it couture.
You are one of the sparkiest poets I have ever read, with the careful pacing and music of George Herbert and the popping syllables of Gerard Manley Hopkins (my own true love). But I want to go back to the weather metaphor to underscore your technique, with its jetstream line breaks and air masses lingering in transitive verbs. If I did not believe in the power of the line break, I might not notice the way your verbs propel us forward. Forward motion is not all you suggest. In “Cloud Fishing” (Mr. Memory) you come at us with a brilliant turn in perspective that offers a gentle warning: “What will you catch? / With what sort of bait? / Take care or you’ll catch yourself…”
Like you, I also put epigrammatic little sermons in my work, and I wonder if the religious poets we admire (Herbert, Hopkins, Donne) influenced the way we talk to the reader. Those seventeenth-century poets spoke directly to God and used erotic language to express spiritual longing. You have a habit of talking to inanimate objects (an ash, a tree) and offer recompense by placing windows and doors in your poems: here’s an escape route, and another.
PL: As a child, I loved cartoons in which a character with no way out draws a door. We hit a wall and make a door. We both love hiding words inside words. In the little poem “December Tanka,” which closes Issue No. 29 of The Common, the last line is “Under a lattice of ice”: the word ice resides in the word lattice. It’s a way of adding perspective. I think we’re both constantly moving around objects and memories, a Cubist attentiveness to point of view, to get beyond one way of seeing, or one outcome only.
DM: That’s what Bishop’s doing in “At the Fishhouses” with geometric movement: “steeply peaked roofs” and gangplanks “slant up” (or down). In “The Way to Mount Aetna,” there’s an explosion of vertical and horizontal movement, and the directional words (climbs, funnels, spark, fails, blooms, falls) reveal the reversals of fortune that characterize the human condition.
PL: I suspect you noticed this compelling technique (I was only half-aware of doing it) because you do it yourself. I am simultaneously outside and inside the euphoria you generate in so many of your stanzas and oftentimes within a single line: the speed of associations, leaps daring and joyous from one thought or observation to another, as in your “Willem de Kooning’s Woman I” in Tiny Extravaganzas, where the third line of your third stanza encapsulates one of your characteristic tendencies: “but I see all the perspectives all at once.”
This all-at-once-ness feels central to how you perceive the world and what rhetorical turns and prosodic moves you make to create a simulacrum of lived sensation, moments fractured and whole, multiple and singular. It’s not a coincidence that one of de Kooning’s paintings became a canvas for your experiment with speed and thickness.
There’s so much information in the first two lines of the poem alone: “Again that day when I drop everything and train it midtown / to see her, my still-life mind eager for her distorted ….” You’ve got this in media res effect from starting with “Again”; you turn “train” into a verb and “midtown” into a prepositional phrase unto itself; you throw us into the medium of painting while also conveying an entire quality of thought with the efficient “still-life mind.” Those two lines are also sped up by their enjambment. And then in the third line you have an extraordinarily rich sonic texture—“… gloss of figuration unfiguring herself, figuring out something …”—where the triple-echo of “figuration unfiguring … figuring” is buttressed and bookended by an opening G sound in “gloss” and a closing one in “something.”
Reading these lines, I can hear and feel your affinity with Hopkins, who is often amazingly dense. Take the opening of his sonnet “The Caged Skylark,” which I know is important to you because your astonishing and heartbreaking “The Caged Skylark Reflected on a Green Vase” is an extended meditation upon it: “As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage, / Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.”
Your poems often create and celebrate simultaneities. Making a verbal object that embodies and expresses multipleperspectives is a driving force in your work. Eros is a drive that seems intrinsic to the creative force, yet it can subsume or even annihilate. It’s an age-old problem. You talk about this in your essay collection, Happier Far—how, in your marriage, your CDs got shoved to the back of the rack.
DM: I got my music back over time! I want to observe that we both use a musical lexicon to talk about things that have nothing to do with music, but then you up the stakes by using that lexicon to describe the art of composing a poem, which does have to do with music. In Temples and Fields’s “The Stairwell,” you have “The deepening glissando of steps / Where the bannister spokes became a harp / On which my untuned song was played.”
I love this poem. “The Stairwell” is a visionary poem about opening yourself up to the sublime. You enter a dream-state and jump off the staircase, “Lifted by the flare and fission / Of a thousand thoughts”—and before we even get to the leap, the house has undergone a transformation. The bannister spokes have become a harp, and gravity no longer works inside the house. You float.
Another visionary poem in your first book is “Machines,” an ode to the human condition and the fullness of life: noisy, passionate, “outmoded.”
PL: “Machines” has a hidden architecture. I devised a rhyme scheme that would simulate the way gears interact, surrounded by a belt: in each six-line stanza, the first and last lines rhyme and the interior four lines have an alternating rhyme pattern. (The six-line stanza alludes, also, to a six-day work week.) The structure and its rationale don’t need to be discerned. I love old machine parts: the poem began when I looked into a dusty window in downtown Manhattan and saw a scattering of them.
DM: You have an obsession with machines and the machinery of image-making.
PL: What fascinates me about echocardiography (cardiac ultrasound) is how sound waves are used to create an image, a cardiac echo. What’s interpreted diagnostically is the visual image, but the image is based on sound waves. I feel as if there’s a connection between that and lyric poetry, where the ideal is often to generate an image via sonic elements, including rhythm.
DM: Both create an image of what’s going on in the heart. We’re really living fully if we can do that.
PL: We can also live fully when standing in front of a painting or listening to music. Erotic experience is another way of being completely present. This sense of belonging (and forgetting oneself) happens, as well, when we’re in transit. I like not knowing things, being open to the unknown. And something sublime can happen when you’re open to experience.
DM: It’s invigorating to be lost. I’m collaborating with a ballet company and am always in a position of failure, in that I know nothing at the beginning.
PL: It’s akin to the delight of a foreign language immersion. That’s how I feel about reading your poems sometimes. The texture of your lines is dense in terms of the rate at which they convey information. You have so much packed into a line that it almost buckles; while I slow down to unpack it, the line accelerates.
In your poem “Groomed Water Descending in Prisms,” when you say, “certain I know / less than before,” the enjambment reconfigures the sense of the statement, and the reader must recalibrate its meaning. What I’m beginning to sense is that we both tend to inhabit a poem and feel at home in it. Our poems create weather systems and climates for others to live inside of. We live within the weather and the climate, and it lives in us. And both of us seek to catch the wind in nets we weave out of rhythms and syllables.
DM: During the pandemic, we’d go out walking no matter what the weather, and it changed my relationship with walking. The only thing to look forward to was discovering the landscape of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
PL: “You are welcome in Prospect Park because you are on foot, and that is what we have in common.” From your essay on camaraderie in Happier Far.
DM: When a cherry tree bloomed it was like she was the prom queen, and everyone wanted to take a photo standing next to her in her lilac gown.
PL: In another essay, you say, “I do believe in camaraderie because it loosens the noose of loneliness,” and in that park essay, when you take a walk with a friend on a windy day and he puts his arms out like a hang glider, you do the same. A stranger across a field sees you and puts his arms out, and all three of you stand there swaying. “We are stewards of what happens to us,” you say.
DM: That camaraderie is in your poem, “Duel of Roses” (Rain): “Rose in hand I raised my arm / to the sky, en garde, / en garde, and she, / rose in hand, raised hers.” Speaking of camaraderie, both of us are drawn to the sonnet. What about the sonnet resonates with you? After all, you edited The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.
PL: Each sonnet struck me as distinct, but many were also in conversation with, alluding to, or echoing others. The sonnet offers an ample home for some of your most ambitious work, a place where compression and expansion coexist. As Donne observes, the sonnet is “a little world made cunningly.” A sonnet sequence accommodates the compression of the single sonnet and the unfolding of a narrative; an epic impulse propels the work of the sequence.
DM: I felt the same when I was obsessed with John Donne’s Holy Sonnets—I have an entire 15-poem sequence riffing on them in my first book, Forest with Castanets. His sonnets really swing. He’s moaning, but the lines are upbeat and full of life. It has jazz in it. If the sonnet is home, with a blueprint for holding in and conducting the way to live a proper life in a proper house, the rhyme scheme composes the architectural elements of doors and windows, and what goes on in the room is the syntax of life. You can jitterbug through it.
PL: You jitterbug through the sequence of your “Unholy Sonnets,” whose “Ravaged, unredeemable” speaker takes the reader from “Street life scattered into broken nouns” to “New cadences I strut around with” to “Shake the dark out and shape myself free.”
DM: Sound and rhythm help me become more of myself inside a poem. If I can get the music right, I feel doubled, buoyant—without that, I might feel like nobody. In Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, the narrator has this monologue about being nobody; he’s unsure whether he’s alive or dead. Maybe there’s motion, maybe not, but in any case he cannot move his body. It’s an existential dilemma. This reminded me of Beckett when, in May Day, you begin by saying “I’m going to waste all my time.”
PL: “I’ve decided to waste my life again.”
DM: Like Beckett moving rocks around his pockets in Molloy. He’s doing for rocks what Woolf did for the moth and what you’re doing for the raindrop.
Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and grew up in Bombay and New Jersey. She is the author of Happier Far: Essays (2025) and two poetry books: Tiny Extravaganzas (2023) and Forest with Castanets (2019). She is poet in residence at the New Chamber Ballet in New York City.
Phillis Levin was born in Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently An Anthology of Rain (2025) and Mr. Memory & Other Poems (2016), and the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (2001). She lives in New York.
