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
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.
How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
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.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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.
I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.