Philip Levine is to be US Poet Laureate

Detroit born and raised Philip Levine has been nominated to be the next poet laureate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/bo...e.html?_r=1&hp

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Mr. Levine grew up in Detroit, back when it was still a “vital city,” he said. His parents were emigrants from Russia, but for some reason they told him he was of Spanish ancestry ,and as a young man he became fascinated with Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, which still turn up in his poems. Mr. Levine’s father died when he was 5, leaving the family hard up, and before embracing poetry he held a succession of what he has called “stupid jobs.” He built transmissions for Cadillac, worked in the Chevrolet gear and axle factory, drove a truck for Railway Express. His early poems, often written in narrow, seven-syllable lines, were gritty, hard-nosed evocations of the lives of working people and their neighborhoods.

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Couldn't happen to better poet or a better person. Phil and his brother went to jr. high school and high school with my mother on the west side, and he was at Wayne with both of my parents. Mom has kept in touch with him a bit over the years and has always bought his books and greatly enjoyed his poetry.

I've been fortunate enough to meet him a few times, and the phrase 'self-effacing' pretty much describes him to a tee. His brother, a fine writer, artist, and singer in his own right, ran an auto parts business over by Warren and Grand River for many years.

Even though Phil's lived in Fresno California for a long time now, he still writes often about a set of Detroit experiences that I think most of us would recognize. Here is a the last part of a poem about an old friend that he published a couple of years ago in a book that contains many poems about his recent return trips to the city.

"Arrival & Departure" [[excerpt)

There was snow here, too,
Speckled with cinders, piss yellowed, tired,
And the smell of iron and ashes blowing
In from Canada, and you and I waiting
For a streetcar that finally arrived,
Jammed with the refuse of the nightshift
At Plymouth Assembly.

I should have seen
Where we were headed; even at twenty
It was mine to know.

Like you I thought
2.35 an hour was money,
I thought we’d sign on for afternoons and harden
Into men. Wasn’t that the way it worked,
Men sold themselves to redeem their lives?
If there was an answer I didn’t get it.

Korea broke,
I took off for anywhere
Living where I could, one perfect season
In your mountains. The years passed,
Suddenly I was old and full of new needs.

When I went back to find you I found
Instead no one in the old neighborhood
Who knew who I was asking for, the Sure Shot
Had become a porno shop; the plating plant
On Trumbull had moved to Mexico
Or heaven.

In its space someone planted
Oiled grass, stripped-down cars, milkweeds
Shuddering in the traffic.

The river was here,
Still riding low and wrinkled toward a world
We never guessed was there, but still the same,
Like you, faithful to the end.

If your sister,
Widowed now, should call today and ask
One more time, “Where is he at?
I need him, He needs me,” what should I tell her?

He’s in the wind, he’s under someone’s
Boot-soles, he’s in the spring grass, he lives
In us as long as we live.

She won’t buy it,
Neither would you.
You’d light a cigarette,

Settle your great right hand behind my neck,
Bow down forehead to forehead, your black hair
Fallen across your eyes, and mutter something
Consequential, “bullshit” or “god a-mighty”
Or “the worst is still to come.”

You came north
To Detroit in winter.

What were you thinking?

I had never heard of Mr. Levine until the other day...i have fallen in love with his poetry!
great stuff

perhaps this could be called ruin poetry :)


An Abandoned Factory, Detroit
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.

Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,

And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy

I am so excited about this! Thanks for posting some of your favorites, folks -- I hope he does a reading here soon.

Here's one of my favorites;

BELLE ISLE. 1949

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low ahead
to brings us back home, ore boats maybe. or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

Sometimes it takes a government to bring out treasures like this. I never heard of him, but yet immediately recognized the scene he painted in those three examples.

I will be seeking out his work now, and happily. Thanks for the post Mike M.:D

The New World

A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."
My grandfather in his prime could outshout
the Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles
along the river. Hamtramck hungered
for yellow freestone peaches, downriver
wakened from a dream of work, Zug Island danced
into the bright day glad to be alive.
Full-figured women in their negligees
streamed into the streets from the dark doorways
to demand in Polish or Armenian
the ripened offerings of this new world.
Josef Prisckulnick out of Dubrovitsa
to Detroit by way of Ellis Island
raised himself regally to his full height
of five feet two and transacted until
the fruit was gone into those eager hands.
Thus would there be a letter sent across
an ocean and a continent, and thus
would Sadie waken to the news of wealth
without limit in the bright and distant land,
and thus bags were packed and she set sail
for America. Some of this is true.
The women were gaunt. All day the kids dug
in the back lots searching for anything.
The place was Russia with another name.
Joe was five feet two. Dubrovitsa burned
to gray ashes the west wind carried off,
then Rovno went, then the Dnieper turned to dust.
We sat around the table telling lies
while the late light filled an empty glass.
Bread, onions, the smell of burning butter,
small white potatoes we shared with no one
because the hour was wrong, the guest was late,
and this was Michigan in 1928.

Same here... never heard of him but have spent the last hour reading his poems online.

Any suggestions on which of his works one should start with?

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Originally Posted by detroiter79

Same here... never heard of him but have spent the last hour reading his poems online.

Any suggestions on which of his works one should start with?

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There's a book, called 5 Detroits, that may be interesting. It's at the library, so maybe while I am there for a meeting I will pick it up Monday.

detroiter79 - Try to get hold of a copy of Levine's New Selected Poems 1st ed. 1991. The one I have is a 1997 7th ed. There are selections from 12 of his books starting in 1963 with On The Edge on up to 1988 A Walk With Tom Jefferson. A couple that are cited a lot are What Work Is and The Simple Truth. Latest are The Mercy and News Of The World.

Here's one from They Feed They Lion;

COMING HOME, Detroit, 1968

A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,
Ford Rouge sulfers the sun,Cadillac, Lincoln,
Chevy gray. The fat stacks
of breweries hold their tongues. Rags
papers, hands, the stems of birches
dirtied with words.

Near the freeway
you stop and wonder what came off,
recall the snowstorm where you lost it all,
the wolverine, the northern bear, the wolf
caught out, ice and steel raining
from the foundries in a shower
of human breath. On sleds in the false sun
the new material rests. One brown child
stares and stares into your frozen eyes
until the lights change and you go
forward to work. The charred faces, the eyes
boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry
of wet smoke hanging in your throat,
the twisted river stopped at the color of iron.
We burn this city every day.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/14/139576...absolute-truth

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Levine's work is most famous for its urban perspective, and its depiction of blue-collar life in Detroit. But while he was working in the factories, he found nothing poetic about them.

"I found the places hateful." His job at Chevrolet Gear and Axle was hard, he says, "and the work was exhausting."
Even though he was writing poetry at the time, he couldn't bring himself to write about his day job.

"Even in my imagination I didn't want to spend time where I was working," he says. "I didn't want to talk shop. So no, even after I left — because I left Detroit at age 26 — I was unable to write anything worth keeping about Detroit for years. I wrote things and I threw them away."

Why was it so hard? Levine quotes another poet laureate, William Wordsworth: "'Poetry is made up of emotion recollected in tranquility.' I didn't have any tranquility," Levine says. "I was full of anger. I was very aware of the fact that I was being exploited and the people around me were being exploited. There was a mythology about us: We were stupid and lazy and we deserved what we were doing, our dumb work."

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Brazzman,

Thanks for the suggestions. I was able to find a copy of Levine's New Selected Poems on Amazon. For those like myself yearning to not only know, but feel, what it must have been like to have lived in Detroit at that time, his work from what I've briefly read is truly moving - it's been a long time since I've felt this way reading poetry - his poems are really haunting me to be honest with you - but in an exciting way that makes me look forward to getting the book so I can delve deeper into his words and thoughts.

Amazon also suggested I purchase "Made in Detroit" by Paul Clemens... wondering if anyone's read it? The reviews of the book are very interesting.

I contacted/email John King Used & Rare Books in Detroit a year ago about Philip Levin's books. They sent back a list of several copies that are out of print and on hand in his store. Many 1st and subsequent editions @ $35 +. One is a copy of 5 Detroits, numbered & signed for $395.

http://www.rarebooklink.com/cgi-bin/...oks/about.html