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
It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.
When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.
I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about.
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.
My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.
Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.
Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.
My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.
I don't know how much the music has influenced my writing; I know it's inspired me, and the young jazz musicians I went to school with in Detroit, Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, Bess Bonier, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, were the first people I knew who were living the creative lives of artists.
I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry.
In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.
You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.