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.
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.
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.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
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.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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.
My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.
Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.