Philip Levine
Philip Levine
Philip Levinewas a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 January 1928
CountryUnited States of America
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
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.
Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.
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.
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
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.
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.
Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.
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.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.