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
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.
In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.
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.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
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.
When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.
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.
Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.
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.
Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.