Out of Detroit:
Philip Levine was born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Detroit, Michigan in 1928. His father died when he was only five, and his childhood spanned the darkest years of the Great Depression. He was educated in the public schools in Detroit, and after graduating from Wayne State University, he took a number of factory jobs in the Detroit auto manufacturing industry and began to write poems during the hours when he wasn’t at work. He explained his purpose to Detroit Magazine: “I saw that the people that I was working with... were voiceless in a way. In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard. Nobody was speaking for them. And as young people will, you know, I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be. And sure enough I’ve gone and done it. Or I’ve tried anyway...”
Levine’s Education as a Poet:
When Levine left Detroit it was to study poetry at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he worked with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. He was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University under Yvor Winters. He was in, but not really of, the Beat generation—he knew Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, but his voice is his own, drawn from his own experience. His poems address the daily concerns of the common man in apparently simple, colloquial language. Levine himself defined his “ideal poem” as one in which “no words are noticed. You look through them into a vision of... the people, the place.”
Speaking for Working Men and Women:
Philip Levine is known as the poet of the urban working class—many of his poems tell stories of his immigrant grandparents, the blue collar workers and his own workingman’s life in Detroit. He has called himself an anarchist, but he is not primarily a political poet. He is above all a storyteller. His allegiance is always to the narrative and the indelible characters in his poems—as he told Wen Stephenson in his 1999 interview with Atlantic Unbound, “For me, the politics never come in very directly. They usually enter in through the characters and the story.”
Teaching Poetry in California:
In an interview in The Cortland Review, Levine recounts how he came to Fresno State University, an out-of-the-way rural school in California’s Central Valley: he had no Ph.D. but needed to find a job in California for the sake of his son’s asthma, and had to choose between teaching literature in Fresno or technical writing in Los Angeles. It turned out he loved teaching and fostered generations of poets there—Lorna Dee Cervantes even called him “the father of Chicago poetry.” Another of his students was Dorianne Laux, who captured something of Levine’s essence as a teacher in her poem “Mine Own Phil Levine.”
Levine’s Poems:
Philip Levine is most often described as a plain-spoken narrative poet, and some of his best-known poems are of that sort—“What Work Is,” for example, a poem that slides from the first person (“We”) to second (“you”) in telling the story of two every-man brothers waiting in a long line for possible work. “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” is another of his most famous poems, also a narrative tale, but this time told in the voice of a pig being driven to market. But other Levine poems are explicitly literary in their references (“On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane”) or incantatory rather than narrative (“They Feed They Lion”).
Books by Philip Levine:
His best-known collection is called... what else could it be?... What Work Is, and it is of course the place to begin reading Levine.
- News of the World (poems, Knopf, 2009)
- Breath (poems, Knopf, 2004)
- So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry series, University of Michigan Press, 2002)
- They Feed They Lion & the Names of the Lost (reissue of two early collections in one volume, Knopf, 1999)
- The Mercy (poems, Knopf, 1999)
- The Simple Truth (poems, Knopf, 1994)
- The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (essays & memoirs, Knopf, 1994)
- What Work Is (poems, Knopf, 1991)
- New Selected Poems (poems, Knopf, 1991)
