Philip Levine (poet)
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For other persons of the same name, see Philip Levine.
Philip Levine (born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. He is a Professor of English at California State University in Fresno, California.
Growing up, his parents told him he was Spanish; "Why my parents, both born in a little shtetl in western Russia, would tell me this, I have no idea. But it may have had something to do with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492." As a youth, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin. He was educated at Wayne University, now Wayne State University, and held a series of industrial jobs before he left Detroit. He was an anarchist who claimed that "property is theft" until he bought his first house. He eventually settled in Fresno, California to teach and write. Levine's poetry frequently features animals, the factory workers of Detroit and the revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War. In 1995 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, one of his many awards.
Levine's best known poem is probably "They Feed They Lion" (1972). "They" may refer to the rich men who parasitically prey on the honest-working lower class and cynically claim to be helping the downtrodden. On the other hand, "they" may refer to workers who are getting "fed up" and are "lying in wait" for their opportunity to strike back.
Another one of his popular poems is "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives" (1968). Written from the point of view of an unperturbed pig facing slaughter, it mixes human and animal behavior to comical effect. In the swine's opinion, a human about to be butchered would lack his iron control, and would instead "squeal and shit like a new housewife discovering television." The pig may be a symbol for the exploited worker who is unafraid to die since he has nothing else to lose...or it may represent the false machismo espoused by the same worker who is too afraid to rebel.
Some of Levine's other poems include "Belle Isle, 1949," "The Horse," "Rain Downriver," "Saturday Sweeping," "Sweet Will," "What Work Is" and "You Can Have It."
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[edit] Early Life as a Poet
Levine began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne State University in Detroit and working days at one of that city's automobile manufacturing plants. The intersection of brutal factory work with an impulse to poetry formed the imaginative nexus out of which emanated not only Levine's first poems but also to a considerable degree his entire poetic output.
In that intersection of two different kinds of labor, he discovered that few of the fundamental experiences of working class life had rarely, if ever, found expression in the realms of contemporary American poetry. The epiphany that launched Levine was his sense that the clang of industrial labor--and all the human spirit that was swallowed up in it--could be a source of a poetry that probed the many forms of alienation found in and among those people he knew best, those who had to work hard for a living
Levine's working experience lent his poetry a profound skepticism in regard to conventional American ideals. He had seen too many victims of the crushing pressures felt in the lives of the poor, so he quite naturally found within himself an uncanny empathy with the outcast and the despised in general. In his first two books, On the Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968), the poetry dwells on those who suddenly become aware they are trapped in some murderous processes not of their own making. In "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives," for example, the pig trotting off to market intends to keep his dignity, no matter what the charnel house outcome is, as if that kept dignity marks a triumph.
[edit] Style
If, in his first two books, Levine was somewhat traditional in form and relatively constrained in expression, he discovers with his third book an expressive form that will serve him throughout his poetic career. Beginning with "They Feed They Lion", Levine's poems are typically free-verse monologues tending toward trimeter or tetrameter. Sometimes he experiments with syllabic verse, while other times even his loose versification gives way to an emotion that demands release. Above all, the music of Levine's poetry comes to depend on a tension between his line-breaks and his syntax. His sentences want to cascade down the page, passing through skeins of modifying clauses and phrases, through enjambment after enjambment until the energy of his sentence is exhausted. For the reader, there is a gathering, vertiginous momentum in the typical Levine poem, which leaves the reader feeling slightly out of control, not knowing what's going to happen next, but utterly in the grip of the emotion. The title poem of 1933 (1974), Levine's next book, is as good an example as any of the typical cascade of clauses and phrases one finds in his poetry.
[edit] Spain
With 1933, a significantly surreal element also emerges into the foreground of Levine's work. The surreal had always been implicit in his poetry, but a long stay in Spain in the late 1960s confirmed Levine in this direction. Studying Spanish, he also translated Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, among many others, and incorporated into his own work their unabashed combination of political concerns with the surprising, nonrational, nonrepresentational image or figure of speech. This served Levine in subsequent books such as The Names of the Lost (1976) and Ashes (1979), the primary subject matter of which are elegies for family members. The speakers of these elegies not only explore feelings of loss and vulnerability, but also maintain an imaginative defiance in the face of death. They speak as if time and mortality were the oppressors; and the imagination--with its capacity for the surreal--becomes a way to lessen the fear of death. The surrealism in Levine's poetry is thus an assertion of the vital realm of the spirit. This is especially clear in his poems about the Spanish Civil War in "7 Years from Somewhere" (1979), and most memorably in "To Cipriano, One for the Wind" in One for the Rose (1981).
[edit] Works
[edit] Poems
[edit] Selected Works
[edit] Volumes
- The Mercy (1999)
- Unselected Poems (1997)
- The Simple Truth (1994)
- What Work Is (1991)
- New Selected Poems (1991)
- A Walk With Tom Jefferson (1988)
- Sweet Will (1985)
- Selected Poems (1984)
- One for the Rose (1981)
- 7 Years From Somewhere (1979)
- Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979)
- The Names of the Lost (1976)
- 1933 (1974)
- They Feed They Lion (1972)
- Red Dust (1971)
- Pili's Wall (1971)
- Not This Pig (1968)
- On the Edge (1963)
[edit] Essays
- The Bread of Time (1994)
[edit] Translations
- Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes, edited and translated with Ada Long (1984)
- Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines, edited and translated With Ernesto Trejo (1979)
[edit] Interviews
- Don't Ask (1981)
[edit] Criticisms
[edit] On "The Simple Truth"
In the opening poem of The Simple Truth, Philip Levine tells the simple and presumably true story of how his cousin, Arthur Lieberman, arranged the 1929 meeting between Hart Crane and Garcia Lorca.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment's relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early night comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
What was Arthur Lieberman afraid of? The "double vision" of horror might be a premonition of Crane's and Lorca's deaths, but the lines immediately following the vision suggest that something else is on Levine's mind: "Let's not be frivolous, let's/not pretend the two poets gave/each other wisdom or love or/even a good time." Why would it be "frivolous" to imagine such interaction between Lorca and Crane? "Some things/you know all your life," says Levine in the title poem of The Simple Truth: "They are so simple and true/they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme"; he cautions in "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" that we must not even be "eloquent" in judging the significance of this meeting between two "poetic geniuses." In contrast to Levine, Crane wrote in a style that was anything but simple--a high poetic decorum that, at least since the time of Whitman, has been associated with insincerity, aestheticism, and femininity. Levine does not dwell on the sexuality of either Crane or Lorca, but the style of his own poem registers their sexuality by warding it away. In the world of American poetry, one cannot talk about "the simple truth" without raising the specter of a style that dare not speak its name.
[edit] On "They Feed They Lion
By: Fred Marchant
Levine has said that this poem is his response to the black "insurrection" in Detroit in 1967, calling it a "celebration of anger." But it is also an explanation of the causes and the legitimacy of a fury that has found its expression. . . .
Given "Animals," it is not surprising that pigs have nourished this lion, or that labor has hardened its muscles. What is surprising is the way that this lion of anger has swept up all before it, black and white alike. The last stanza suggests that the speaker is a white man. . . .
In fear and exhilaration, the speaker has imaginatively embraced "They," and done it in defiant black English grammatical constructions. And along with its African connotation, the lion suggests a literary antecedent: probably it is descended from Yeats's rough beast slouching toward another city to be born.
The white speaker and the black rage merge into a chant that implies a sense of oneness could exist at least in some hearts.
From Imagine (1984).
[edit] Awards
- 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry - The Simple Truth"
- 1991 National Book Award - What Work Is
- 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award Ashes: Poems New and Old
- 1979 American Book Award for Poetry - Ashes: Poems New and Old
- 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award - 7 Years from Somewhere
- 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize "The Names of the Lost"
- 1987 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
- Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry
- Frank O'Hara Prize
- Two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships
[edit] External links
- Biography of Philip Levine - looking in detail at his politics and his anarchism
- Blackbird Archive "Breakfasts with Joachim" by Philip Levine, published in Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts.
[edit] References
1. Modern American PoetryRetrieved on October 26, 2006
2. Marchant, Fred Modern American Poetry - About Philip Levine [Excerpted from a longer essay in Encyclopedia of American Literature. Copyright © 1999 by the Continuum Pub. Co.] Retrieved on October 26, 2006
3. Parini, Jay Modern American Poetry - About Philip Levine [From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press.] Retrieved on October 26, 2006
4. Modern American Poetry - BibliographyRetrieved on October 26, 2006
5. Modern American Poetry - Criticism for "They Feed They Lion" Retrieved on October 26, 2006
6. http://www.poets.orgRetrieved on October 26, 2006
7. SEX AND STYLE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY , By: Longenbach, James, Raritan, 0275-1607, March 1, 2000, Vol. 19, Issue 4
