Tracy K. Smith: Alternate Take:Levon Helm
![[book cover]](life_on_mars.jpg)
American poet and educator Tracy K. Smith's poem "Alternate Take: Levon Helm" is dedicated to Helm. It was first published in 2009 in The New Yorker magazine, and then included in Smith's collection Life on Mars, for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
"Alternate Take" is about the labor-like process of writing, and how (Levon's) art is helping to make (her) art. Music writer Greil Marcus describes it as:
A slowly building poem in which the writer wants nothing more that to feel like the singer must have felt as he sang–what would it have been? 'Chest Fever'? 'The Weight'?"The poem ends with a description of a frustrating writer's block broken by Helms' music:
Alternate Take: Levon Helm
I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil
Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth.
And this whole time a hot wind's been swatting down my door,
Spat from his mouth and landing smack against my ear.
All day pounding the devil out of six lines and coming up dry
While he drives donuts through my mind's back woods with that
Dirt-road voice of his, kicking up gravel like a runaway Buick.
He asks Should I come in with that back beat, and whatever those
Six lines were bothered by skitters off like water in hot grease.
Come in, Levon, with your lips stretched tight and that pig-eyed grin,
Bass mallet socking it to the drum. Lay it down like you know
You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back,
So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.