Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Every year, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs holds a conference in a different American city. A few years ago, when the literary industry descended on Kansas City, a poet I know posted on Instagram that he wanted to go to Charlie Parker’s grave. The pilgrimage was based on a Larry Levis poem. I threw my hat in the ring to join him.

I met Rob in the lobby of his hotel around 8 a.m., Marriott coffee clutched in my hands against the grim weather. We called a car (well, a rideshare minivan) and made our way to the outskirts of town, rising up the hills from the valley in which Kansas City rests. The driver questioned our destination — and with good reason. The drop-off point was a dirt road flanked with brambles and a chain link fence. Still, we saw headstones beyond a low utility gate, which we hopped to enter the cemetery.

After we visited the grave and read the poem out loud together, we made our way to the proper entrance and called a car back downtown. While we waited, we talked about the future of our own remains. Neither of us were totally certain about what we wanted. But we knew that we valued places to find our own dead. And that we want to be remembered, memorialized, when we are gone.

I don’t mean this to sound grim, but I think poetry is like a living wake. Poets sing the songs of everything that matters to them in this life. They tell you where to find them when they are gone: in the wind, in the faces of others, on the page.

Today’s poem is the one we read together in that Kansas City cemetery.

WHITMAN:
by Larry Levis

“I say we had better look our nation searchingly
in the face, like a physician diagnosing some
deep disease”                   —Democratic Vistas

“Look for me under your bootsoles.”

On Long Island, they moved my clapboard house
Across a turnpike, & then felt so guilty they
Named a shopping center after me!

Now that I’m required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a fool.
Now what I sang stops breathing.

And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I began to live again—
First in the thin whine of Montana fence wire,
Then in the transparent, cast-off garments hung
In the windows of the poorest families,
Then in the glad music of Charlie Parker.
At times now, 
I even come back to watch you
From the eyes of a taciturn boy at Malibu.
Across the counter at the beach concession stand,
I sell you hot dogs, Pepsis, cigarettes—
My blond hair long, greasy, & swept back
In a vain old ducktail, deliciously
Out of style.
And no one notices.
Once, I even came back as me,
An aging homosexual who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl
At county fairs, the chilled paint on each gondola
Changing color as it picked up speed,
And a Mardi Gras tattoo on my left shoulder.
A few of you must have seen my photographs,
For when you looked back,
I thought you caught the meaning of my stare:

Still water,
Merciless.

A Kosmos. One of the roughs.

And Charlie Parker’s grave outside Kansas City
Covered with weeds.

Leave me alone.
A father who’s outlived his only child.

To find me now will cost you everything.

"WHITMAN:" by Larry Levis from WINTER STARS © 1985, 2026 Larry Levis. Used with the permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.