"What Work Is" by poet Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2011-12, is worth reading. At this page an audio version captures Levine introducing the poem. No matter what class you're in, you might like to read it and listen to it. You can also watch him reading it to AFL-CIO members. Here is an interview Levine did with Bill Moyers about the American worker. Good sites with Levine biographical information and examples of his poetry: American Academy of Poets, Poetry Foundation, U.S. Poet Laureate program, and the Bill Moyers program with poems about work. Here is a profile of Levine, below, from the PBS NewsHour.
You can also see it at the PBS NewsHour site where "Poet Philip Levine Recalls Life at the Factory". Remember Levine's reference to Wagner in his poem? Here is a sample of Wagner's music: if you've seen the film "Apocalypse Now" you'll know Ride of the Valkyries; and here's one of his operas, Lohengrin. Maybe you'll like Wagner more than Levine does.
Levine, born January 10, 1928, died February 14, 2015. You can read his New York Times obituary here. The Times also ran an appreciation here.
A New York Times interview showed that "Philip Levine Still Knows How to Make Trouble". Philip "Trouble" Levine makes an appearance in this 2012 profile in the LA Weekly. David Kippen, owner of Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros, had this this to say about Levine being named U.S. Poet Laureate. Levine's inaugural reading as U.S. Poet Laureate was videotaped, and so was An Evening with Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate. It was part of the L.A. Public Library's ALOUDla. Here is a video of an interview Levine did with Bill Moyers:
When curious about the authors you are reading always check the Paris Review to see if they had ever taken questions from the magazine. Philip Levine did. Here's an excerpt from the interview that appeared in the Paris Review, Summer 1988:
INTERVIEWER: In Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass says that rhythm in poetry provides revolutionary ground through its direct access to the unconscious . . .
PHILIP LEVINE: We all agree with that. Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand. We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first in poetry . . . perhaps simply in speech, in prayer, preaching. That made me want to create it. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. I spoke them and I memorized them. I constantly changed them. I would go out and work on my rain poem and improve it.
INTERVIEWER: Rain was always a favorite theme?
LEVINE: Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense.
INTERVIEWER: When did you start writing?
LEVINE: Writing was something I did in school with some enjoyment because I did it well. And then, you know, I put it aside, the way you do—I guess I started getting interested in girls, what have you. I don’t remember doing any writing at the ages of say, sixteen or seventeen. I rediscovered poetry at the age of eighteen.
INTERVIEWER: Do you know a lot of poetry by heart?
LEVINE: My memory has faded badly. I used to know dozens of poems by heart. I memorized them when I worked in factories and recited them to myself.
INTERVIEWER: Did you work in an auto factory?
LEVINE: Yes. I worked for Cadillac, in their transmission factory, and for Chevrolet. You could recite poems aloud in there. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.
INTERVIEWER: How long did you work in the factories?
LEVINE: I started doing factory work at about the age of fourteen. When I turned college age I had to make a decision about what I was going to do about my life. My high-school teachers encouraged me to go to college. I stood in line at Wayne State University to enroll, and when I got up to the head of the line, this woman said, “Can I help you?” I said, “I’d like to go to college.” She said, “Do you want a bachelor’s?” I said, “I already have a place to live.” Because to me a bachelor’s was a small apartment. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a bachelor’s degree. The people at Wayne were incredibly savvy. Instead of laughing at me, she explained what my options were and what bachelor’s meant. They were used to us shlumps out of the city of Detroit. There, at college, I encountered modern poetry. And I loved it. Loved it.
INTERVIEWER: Where does a poem begin for you? Do you take notes for poems? Do you get up in the middle of the night?
LEVINE: They begin in different ways, and over the course of my writing life the process has changed. When I was a kid speaking poetry I never wrote it down; those poems began with a phrase and then I would try to employ the vocabulary and the structure of the phrase to create a fabric of repetitions. When I started writing poetry at eighteen, the poems seemed to spring outward from a visual image. It was that precise visual image I was out to capture, that’s what excited me; the poem became the means for pushing forward the images I wanted the reader to devour. Then Yeats set me on fire. I mean the language is exalted, yet it sounds like somebody talking and singing at the same time. I thought, This is it. And I still kind of feel this is it. This is the perfection of form. It’s got speech, song, it’s high rhetoric and yet it doesn’t sound remote or false. A poem like [Yeats's] “Easter, 1916.” I said, Jesus Christ, this is so much what I want. It doesn’t matter about his stupid attitudes. He wrote one poem about his daughter, such a sexist poem. But it’s so beautifully done. I remember telling a woman friend of mine, “Isn’t this an incredible poem?” And she got very angry with me; “It’s so sexist,” she said, “look at this!” I said, sure, it’s like Eliot’s anti-Semitic stuff, “the Jew squats on the windowsill”; fuck you, Eliot, but the poem is exquisite. Then somewhere in my forties I hit a kind of phase of automatic writing. I would really be taken, sort of seized, and just write the stuff! It would just come pouring out, hundreds of lines. Then the process of making a poem became quite different: it became seeing what was inside this great blast of language and imagery, and finding the core.
INTERVIEWER
How did you then revise? What was your process of shaping?
LEVINE
The process was reducing this, say, 500 lines to 150, tailoring and shaping it, finding the central imagery and throwing away what seemed excess or what was just part of the road to getting there. Then putting it together in some kind of dramatic, coherent, or narrative structure. That was fun, too.
INTERVIEWER: You treat some of the great novelistic themes—war and peace, power and class struggle and oppression in society, the shifts of luck and fortune with time—in your poems, particularly in your long poems.
LEVINE: What I regard as novelistic about my work is the telling of tales, which is utterly natural to me, and so is the presentation of characters. The other day when I was testifying in court in a civil disobedience case, the district attorney objected to my presentation because, he said, it was narrative. The judge sustained the objection; I tried to ask him what was wrong with a narrative, but he wouldn’t answer. I was deeply wounded. How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can’t present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is: Stay out of court. One of the aspects of my own poetry I like best is the presence of people who don’t seem to make it into other people’s poems. Much of our recent poetry seems totally without people. Except for the speaker, no one is there. There’s a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. That’s one familiar poem. In others you get people you’d sooner not meet. They live in the suburbs of a large city, have two children, own a Volvo stationwagon; they love their psychiatrists but are having an affair with someone else. Their greatest terror is that they’ll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine. You read twenty of those poems and you’re yearning for snow fields and moose tracks.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel a split between your life as a political person and your life as a poet?
LEVINE: I’m cowardly. I should stop paying my taxes. I know that the government in Washington is full of terrible people with terrible plans. They will murder people here and abroad to gain more power. Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
INTERVIEWER: The location and the tone of “They Feed They Lion” indicates a shift in your versification and in the intensity of your voice. How did the poem come about?
LEVINE: I had been to Detroit after the riots in 1968 and I was struck by a number of things. One was how scared I was. The riots took place in exactly the same neighborhood I grew up in. I went back with a set of rather standard emotions, or standard for me anyway, about how wonderful it was that black people were letting white Americans know what this place was all about. But when I got there I was scared. People were looking at me like I was exactly what I was—middle class, middle-aged, white. There was a kind of boiling up of different emotions that I hadn’t expected, and it was that complexity of emotions that really produced the poem—my own rage toward America, my own anger. I mean, this was the America of the Vietnam War, and to me it was as though we were fighting two racist wars, one in Vietnam and one in the cities of America. We didn’t have Asians, we had blacks to persecute and kill and firebomb, or morally, mentally, and emotionally firebomb. So a lot of those emotions just boiled up. I wrote the poem very quickly. I went to a party, a wedding party, and I got very drunk, and smoked a lot of dope, which is something I rarely do (I find it bad for my memory), and I had a good time. There was a lot of dancing at this party, and I danced and danced. It was a time of crazy dance parties. I went home and in the middle of the night I woke up with the idea for the poem. But I was still a wreck. I didn’t try to write it, and in fact I waited perhaps two or three days with the notion that there was this poem, it was going to look this way, the line was going to be influenced by Christopher Smart’s line in “Jubilate Agno.” I waited about three days, and then I felt really quite sane, fit, smart, and I wrote the poem, probably in an hour, hour and a half.
INTERVIEWER: You’ve written a great deal about family life.
LEVINE: Yes, about both my families, the one I was born into and the one my wife and I have created. To me they truly feel like two different entities. One exists mainly in memory, for most of those people have died. I’m very powerfully tied to the one we’ve created, to my kids, and now to the families they’re creating.
INTERVIEWER: It’s very hard to have a clear sense of the family you come from because you seem to fictionalize it in your poems. It’s not consistent. For example, did your father leave your family when you were a small child?
LEVINE: My father died when I was very young. But often the speaker in my poems is not me; when it’s me, he died, and when the speaker is someone else the father could have done anything. As a child of five his dying was leaving; I didn’t understand death. You’re absolutely right, that family is often fictionalized, partly to protect the innocent or the guilty, however you see those people. I’ve invented relatives I never had so I could talk about the ones I did have without the fear of insulting people I love. I have one relative I love a great deal who did a variety of things the world might call awful. I don’t see his or her behavior that way at all; I’m deeply moved by his or her rebelliousness and audacity.
INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about the Tom Jefferson poem, your most recent.
LEVINE: I went back to Detroit last October. I discovered in some of the areas that had been burned out back in ’67 or torn down for an urban renewal that never took place, people had moved back in, leading what was almost a semi-rural life. Much of what’s in the city was absent; there were no stores around, very few houses, no large buildings. Lots of empty spaces, vacant lots, almost like the Detroit I knew during the war. And people were farming, too, gardening on a scale. They had truck gardens, kept animals, what have you. It was right near the ballpark, so at night when the Tigers were playing there would be thousands of people there. Then they would get in their cars and leave; the place would be almost empty. I met a guy who lived in one of these houses. He didn’t own it or rent it, and in fact he didn’t even know who owned it. He described his life there, and the poem rose out of the conversation we had. It also came out of the hope that the city might be reborn inside itself, out of its own ruins, phoenix-like, rising out of its own ashes. Except I don’t see it in heroic terms. The triumphs are small, personal, daily. Nothing grandly heroic is taking place; just animals and men and flowers and plants asserting their right to be, even in this most devastated of American cities.
INTERVIEWER: Nothing heroic is happening in Detroit.
LEVINE: Nothing epic. Just the small heroics of getting through the day when the day doesn’t give a shit, getting through the world with as much dignity as you can pull together from the tiny resources left to you. It’s the truly heroic. The poem is a tribute to all these people who survived in the face of so much discouragement. They’ve survived everything America can dish out. No, nothing grandly heroic is happening in Detroit. I guess nothing grandly heroic ever took place there; it was always automobiles, automobiles, hard work, and low pay."
Too often we take poets and poetry too seriously. Maybe this blog post about Levine will help us change our mind: "For the Poet Laureate the Joy of Tennis is in the Effort," that ran in The New York Times, September 10, 2011.
Levine, born January 10, 1928, died February 14, 2015. You can read his New York Times obituary here. The Times also ran an appreciation here.
A New York Times interview showed that "Philip Levine Still Knows How to Make Trouble". Philip "Trouble" Levine makes an appearance in this 2012 profile in the LA Weekly. David Kippen, owner of Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros, had this this to say about Levine being named U.S. Poet Laureate. Levine's inaugural reading as U.S. Poet Laureate was videotaped, and so was An Evening with Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate. It was part of the L.A. Public Library's ALOUDla. Here is a video of an interview Levine did with Bill Moyers:
When curious about the authors you are reading always check the Paris Review to see if they had ever taken questions from the magazine. Philip Levine did. Here's an excerpt from the interview that appeared in the Paris Review, Summer 1988:
INTERVIEWER: In Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass says that rhythm in poetry provides revolutionary ground through its direct access to the unconscious . . .
PHILIP LEVINE: We all agree with that. Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand. We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first in poetry . . . perhaps simply in speech, in prayer, preaching. That made me want to create it. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. I spoke them and I memorized them. I constantly changed them. I would go out and work on my rain poem and improve it.
INTERVIEWER: Rain was always a favorite theme?
LEVINE: Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense.
INTERVIEWER: When did you start writing?
LEVINE: Writing was something I did in school with some enjoyment because I did it well. And then, you know, I put it aside, the way you do—I guess I started getting interested in girls, what have you. I don’t remember doing any writing at the ages of say, sixteen or seventeen. I rediscovered poetry at the age of eighteen.
INTERVIEWER: Do you know a lot of poetry by heart?
LEVINE: My memory has faded badly. I used to know dozens of poems by heart. I memorized them when I worked in factories and recited them to myself.
INTERVIEWER: Did you work in an auto factory?
LEVINE: Yes. I worked for Cadillac, in their transmission factory, and for Chevrolet. You could recite poems aloud in there. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.
INTERVIEWER: How long did you work in the factories?
LEVINE: I started doing factory work at about the age of fourteen. When I turned college age I had to make a decision about what I was going to do about my life. My high-school teachers encouraged me to go to college. I stood in line at Wayne State University to enroll, and when I got up to the head of the line, this woman said, “Can I help you?” I said, “I’d like to go to college.” She said, “Do you want a bachelor’s?” I said, “I already have a place to live.” Because to me a bachelor’s was a small apartment. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a bachelor’s degree. The people at Wayne were incredibly savvy. Instead of laughing at me, she explained what my options were and what bachelor’s meant. They were used to us shlumps out of the city of Detroit. There, at college, I encountered modern poetry. And I loved it. Loved it.
 |
| Levine at Wayne State University, Detroit, in 1950, the year he graduated from the college. |
INTERVIEWER: Where does a poem begin for you? Do you take notes for poems? Do you get up in the middle of the night?
LEVINE: They begin in different ways, and over the course of my writing life the process has changed. When I was a kid speaking poetry I never wrote it down; those poems began with a phrase and then I would try to employ the vocabulary and the structure of the phrase to create a fabric of repetitions. When I started writing poetry at eighteen, the poems seemed to spring outward from a visual image. It was that precise visual image I was out to capture, that’s what excited me; the poem became the means for pushing forward the images I wanted the reader to devour. Then Yeats set me on fire. I mean the language is exalted, yet it sounds like somebody talking and singing at the same time. I thought, This is it. And I still kind of feel this is it. This is the perfection of form. It’s got speech, song, it’s high rhetoric and yet it doesn’t sound remote or false. A poem like [Yeats's] “Easter, 1916.” I said, Jesus Christ, this is so much what I want. It doesn’t matter about his stupid attitudes. He wrote one poem about his daughter, such a sexist poem. But it’s so beautifully done. I remember telling a woman friend of mine, “Isn’t this an incredible poem?” And she got very angry with me; “It’s so sexist,” she said, “look at this!” I said, sure, it’s like Eliot’s anti-Semitic stuff, “the Jew squats on the windowsill”; fuck you, Eliot, but the poem is exquisite. Then somewhere in my forties I hit a kind of phase of automatic writing. I would really be taken, sort of seized, and just write the stuff! It would just come pouring out, hundreds of lines. Then the process of making a poem became quite different: it became seeing what was inside this great blast of language and imagery, and finding the core.
INTERVIEWER
How did you then revise? What was your process of shaping?
LEVINE
The process was reducing this, say, 500 lines to 150, tailoring and shaping it, finding the central imagery and throwing away what seemed excess or what was just part of the road to getting there. Then putting it together in some kind of dramatic, coherent, or narrative structure. That was fun, too.
INTERVIEWER: You treat some of the great novelistic themes—war and peace, power and class struggle and oppression in society, the shifts of luck and fortune with time—in your poems, particularly in your long poems.
LEVINE: What I regard as novelistic about my work is the telling of tales, which is utterly natural to me, and so is the presentation of characters. The other day when I was testifying in court in a civil disobedience case, the district attorney objected to my presentation because, he said, it was narrative. The judge sustained the objection; I tried to ask him what was wrong with a narrative, but he wouldn’t answer. I was deeply wounded. How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can’t present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is: Stay out of court. One of the aspects of my own poetry I like best is the presence of people who don’t seem to make it into other people’s poems. Much of our recent poetry seems totally without people. Except for the speaker, no one is there. There’s a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. That’s one familiar poem. In others you get people you’d sooner not meet. They live in the suburbs of a large city, have two children, own a Volvo stationwagon; they love their psychiatrists but are having an affair with someone else. Their greatest terror is that they’ll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine. You read twenty of those poems and you’re yearning for snow fields and moose tracks.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel a split between your life as a political person and your life as a poet?
LEVINE: I’m cowardly. I should stop paying my taxes. I know that the government in Washington is full of terrible people with terrible plans. They will murder people here and abroad to gain more power. Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I’m not doing a thing about it. I’m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
INTERVIEWER: The location and the tone of “They Feed They Lion” indicates a shift in your versification and in the intensity of your voice. How did the poem come about?
LEVINE: I had been to Detroit after the riots in 1968 and I was struck by a number of things. One was how scared I was. The riots took place in exactly the same neighborhood I grew up in. I went back with a set of rather standard emotions, or standard for me anyway, about how wonderful it was that black people were letting white Americans know what this place was all about. But when I got there I was scared. People were looking at me like I was exactly what I was—middle class, middle-aged, white. There was a kind of boiling up of different emotions that I hadn’t expected, and it was that complexity of emotions that really produced the poem—my own rage toward America, my own anger. I mean, this was the America of the Vietnam War, and to me it was as though we were fighting two racist wars, one in Vietnam and one in the cities of America. We didn’t have Asians, we had blacks to persecute and kill and firebomb, or morally, mentally, and emotionally firebomb. So a lot of those emotions just boiled up. I wrote the poem very quickly. I went to a party, a wedding party, and I got very drunk, and smoked a lot of dope, which is something I rarely do (I find it bad for my memory), and I had a good time. There was a lot of dancing at this party, and I danced and danced. It was a time of crazy dance parties. I went home and in the middle of the night I woke up with the idea for the poem. But I was still a wreck. I didn’t try to write it, and in fact I waited perhaps two or three days with the notion that there was this poem, it was going to look this way, the line was going to be influenced by Christopher Smart’s line in “Jubilate Agno.” I waited about three days, and then I felt really quite sane, fit, smart, and I wrote the poem, probably in an hour, hour and a half.
 |
| Photograph of Levine for his poetry collection The Mercy (1999). The book was dedicated to his mother and the photo was taken by his wife. |
INTERVIEWER: You’ve written a great deal about family life.
LEVINE: Yes, about both my families, the one I was born into and the one my wife and I have created. To me they truly feel like two different entities. One exists mainly in memory, for most of those people have died. I’m very powerfully tied to the one we’ve created, to my kids, and now to the families they’re creating.
INTERVIEWER: It’s very hard to have a clear sense of the family you come from because you seem to fictionalize it in your poems. It’s not consistent. For example, did your father leave your family when you were a small child?
LEVINE: My father died when I was very young. But often the speaker in my poems is not me; when it’s me, he died, and when the speaker is someone else the father could have done anything. As a child of five his dying was leaving; I didn’t understand death. You’re absolutely right, that family is often fictionalized, partly to protect the innocent or the guilty, however you see those people. I’ve invented relatives I never had so I could talk about the ones I did have without the fear of insulting people I love. I have one relative I love a great deal who did a variety of things the world might call awful. I don’t see his or her behavior that way at all; I’m deeply moved by his or her rebelliousness and audacity.
INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about the Tom Jefferson poem, your most recent.
LEVINE: I went back to Detroit last October. I discovered in some of the areas that had been burned out back in ’67 or torn down for an urban renewal that never took place, people had moved back in, leading what was almost a semi-rural life. Much of what’s in the city was absent; there were no stores around, very few houses, no large buildings. Lots of empty spaces, vacant lots, almost like the Detroit I knew during the war. And people were farming, too, gardening on a scale. They had truck gardens, kept animals, what have you. It was right near the ballpark, so at night when the Tigers were playing there would be thousands of people there. Then they would get in their cars and leave; the place would be almost empty. I met a guy who lived in one of these houses. He didn’t own it or rent it, and in fact he didn’t even know who owned it. He described his life there, and the poem rose out of the conversation we had. It also came out of the hope that the city might be reborn inside itself, out of its own ruins, phoenix-like, rising out of its own ashes. Except I don’t see it in heroic terms. The triumphs are small, personal, daily. Nothing grandly heroic is taking place; just animals and men and flowers and plants asserting their right to be, even in this most devastated of American cities.
INTERVIEWER: Nothing heroic is happening in Detroit.
LEVINE: Nothing epic. Just the small heroics of getting through the day when the day doesn’t give a shit, getting through the world with as much dignity as you can pull together from the tiny resources left to you. It’s the truly heroic. The poem is a tribute to all these people who survived in the face of so much discouragement. They’ve survived everything America can dish out. No, nothing grandly heroic is happening in Detroit. I guess nothing grandly heroic ever took place there; it was always automobiles, automobiles, hard work, and low pay."
Too often we take poets and poetry too seriously. Maybe this blog post about Levine will help us change our mind: "For the Poet Laureate the Joy of Tennis is in the Effort," that ran in The New York Times, September 10, 2011.
 |
| Philip and Fran Levine at the U.S. Open tennis championship in New York in September 2011. |
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