"I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet." -- Philip Levine
Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. He taught for many years at California State University, Fresno. Until recently he was the Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
"Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.""But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.""But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.""For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.""I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.""I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.""I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.""I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.""I write what's given me to write.""I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.""I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.""I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.""If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.""It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.""Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.""My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.""My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.""My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.""My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.""No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.""Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.""The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.""There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory."
Levine grew up in industrial Detroit. The familial, social, and economic world of 20th century Detroit is one of the major subjects of his life's work. His portraits of working class Americans and his continuous examination of his Jewish immigrant inheritance (both based on real life and described through fictional characters) has left a monumental testimony of mid-20th century American life. It can be best found in books such as "They Feed They Lion," the National Book Award-winning "What Work Is," "A Walk with Tom Jefferson," and in his "New Selected Poems." Growing up, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Levine began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit and working days at one of that city's automobile manufacturing plants. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
Levine's working experience lent his poetry a profound skepticism in regard to conventional American ideals. In his first two books, On the Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968), the poetry dwells on those who suddenly become aware they are trapped in some murderous processes not of their own making.
In his first two books, Levine was somewhat traditional in form and relatively constrained in expression. Beginning with They Feed They Lion, Levine's poems are typically free-verse monologues tending toward trimeter or tetrameter. The music of Levine's poetry depends on tension between his line-breaks and his syntax. The title poem of Levine's book 1933 (1974) is a good example of the cascade of clauses and phrases one finds in his poetry.
On November 29, 2007 a tribute was held in New York City in anticipation of Levine's 80th birthday. Among those celebrating Levine's career by reading Levine's work were Yusef Komunyakaa, Galway Kinnell, E. L. Doctorow, Charles Wright, Jean Valentine, and Sharon Olds. Levine himself read several new poems. He thanked his students and asked them to refrain from asking for any more letters of recommendation.
