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 earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
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.
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 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.
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 say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
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.
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 write what's given me to write.