Philip Levine's Extraordinary Poetry - death of former U.S. poet laureate

An Appraisal: The Poet Philip Levine, an Outsider Archiving the Forgotten

By DWIGHT GARNERFEB. 15, 2015 - The New York Times

Philip Levine, in 1999, held a lot of “stupid jobs,” he liked to say, and was a Pulitzer Prize winner. Credit Chris Felver/Getty Images

Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. Mr. Levine had toiled in auto plants as a young man. “I saw that the people that I was working with,” he told Detroit Magazine, “were voiceless in a way.”

Mr. Levine’s death is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn’t pull his poetry down into brackishness.

He was a shrewd and very funny man. I’m not sure another major American poet could give advice quite like the following, from a poem called “Facts,” collected in Mr. Levine’s classic 1991 book “What Work Is”:

If you take a ’37 Packard grill and split it down

the center and reduce the angle by 18° and reweld it,

you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce

just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.

Mr. Levine was among those poets, and there are not enough of these, whose words you followed even outside their poetry. His interviews, for example, were feasts for the mind. To get back to Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, and Ida and Cal for a moment, here is what he told The Paris Review in 1988 about the unpeopling of American poetry:

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And from Shelf Awareness:

Obituary: Philip Levine

Former U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine, "whose work was vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor," died Saturday, the New York Times reported. He was 87. Levine won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth, as well as two National Book Awards (Ashes: Poems New & Old in 1980 and What Work Is in 1991) and two National Book Critics Circle Awards (Ashes and, in 1979, for 7 Years From Somewhere).

In the Times, Dwight Garner observed that Levine's death "is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn't pull his poetry down into brackishness." He also noted that Levine "never shed his outsider sensibility, his awareness of class in American life. 'I am now a kind of archive of people, places and things that no longer exist,' he said. 'I carry them around with me, and if I get them on paper I give them at least some kind of existence.' "

From "Our Valley":

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.