Philip Levine
Excerpts copied from Poetry Fridays:
Philip Levine is one of those poets whose clarity of vision is so fierce his technique often goes unnoticed or uncommented upon. We assume the narratives and character portraits in Levine’s poems compel us forward because they are so vivid, and they are. But it is Levine’s complete mastery of the tightly controlled free-verse line that determines how these poems progress and takes them beyond storytelling.......
Levine is one of those poets whose work appears so effortless and natural that its effect reaches us before we notice how he achieves his effects. Levine is not one of those poets who writes to draw our admiration for his technique; his technique is at the service of a larger sense of purpose
Levine has Whitman’s yearning for the possibilities of the dream of American democracy, but it is tempered by the experience of having held down brutal, spirit-breaking jobs from the age of fourteen, and having lived first-hand through the experience of how such work can pound the hope out of people. He is our post-industrial, post-World War II, post-Vietnam Whitman. Although he’s witnessed the mistakes, messes and downright catastrophes that followed the optimistic dreams of the 19th century, he still hasn’t abandoned hope or passion. He’s just gotten so mad he has to weep.
This is not to suggest he’s lost tenderness toward the world. Quite the contrary. The Mercy isn’t just the title of one of his collections and the name of the ship his mother emigrated to America on; it is what he calls down to earth in each of his poems, not from any god or idea of god, but from our own capacity to feel compassion for one another.
Follow this link to PBS NewsHour: Poetry Series and find three poems by Levine. You can even listen to him read them. The three poems are:
Our Valley, Burial Rites, and What Work Is.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_cov ... evine.html
What Work Is
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.
