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Changed Utterly b. h. boston Poetry builds the blood and transforms us. It can save lives. At least that’s been my experience. I would never have had anything approaching a full life, would never have taught literature and writing or edited magazines or presumed to write poems, probably would never have survived into my sixties without Philip Levine’s poetry, friendship, and tutelage over the past forty-six years. I first heard Phil read at the Fresno Public Library during what must have been the end of my senior year of high school in 1964. I’d recently purchased On the Edge at Dodgson’s bookstore, a godsend on Van Ness Avenue downtown that—along with Stanley’s Armenian Deli on the one side and Anastasia’s Tobacco Shop on the other—was paramount among my favorite haunts during my first two years in the Central Valley, a place distressingly immune to the life of the imagination. Or so it seemed to me until I met Philip Levine. As he leaned over the lectern that afternoon, squinting his left eye at the twenty or thirty of us scattered among numerous empty chairs, he remarked that in fact he had read to a smaller group before, “in the back of a station wagon once.” He then proceeded to read with such ferocity and wit that the molecules of the air began to pulse at a quickened rate. A year earlier, while doing chin-ups on a mulberry branch in our Sanger backyard, I announced, in response to my mother’s question regarding my 19 future—my parents were fans of Dr. Kildare and envisioned me in white coat with stethoscope—that more than anything else I wanted to be a poet. (I’d been writing sonnets to Marsha, who would soon become my wife, for months.) Phil’s performance that Sunday afternoon at the library pretty much sealed the deal. The next year as a freshman at Fresno State, I met a funny guy named Gene Winder. An ex-Marine already into his thirties, Gene was also an enormously talented and somewhat eccentric student poet. We soon became close friends. A senior, Gene was student teaching Latin and translating Catullus. Most notably for our purposes here, he had already studied poetry writing with Philip Levine. One late summer morning after meteorology class, I stopped by Gene’s house with two quarts of beer to find him out near the uncovered slab of the patio, a lit cigar between his teeth, his bare belly swelling above his Bermuda shorts, and a white Stetson with a rounded crown precariously balanced on his head—one of two we’d bought at a West Side used-hat shop, in lieu of actual bowlers, in homage to Waiting for Godot. Apparently, Gene had donned his writing hat that day to set his entire overgrown backyard on fire—he refused to plant or mow a lawn—and stood up to his waist in weeds, garden hose in hand, surrounded by thick umber smoke and flames, attempting some semblance of control by dousing the fence line and dampening the edges of the conflagration as it advanced toward his oxfords. “Hey, Buddy-buddy!” he shouted. “Time for Andy Griffith yet?” Along with our devotion to Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, and Dylan Thomas, to J. P. Donleavy, cheap beer, and noontime reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, Winder and I shared an enthusiasm for Phil. Gene raved about his poetry and teaching, often quoting him verbatim, and recommended I take one of his classes as soon as he returned from his first year abroad in Spain. As I remember it, enrollment in Phil’s undergraduate creative writing seminar would be limited to twelve students, no more. Imagine that. When September arrived with its copper haze and glare, I tentatively approached Phil’s office in the humanities building—erected from previously existing architectural drawings intended for California State penitentiaries—to find him standing in the hallway smoking a cigarette. 20 Dressed in a plaid button-down sport shirt, burgundy sweater vest, white tennis shoes, and Levi’s, Phil might have been a student himself. As if on cue, a rather patrician gentleman (who I later discovered was Wesley Byrd, chair of the Foreign Language Department) marched out of another office down the hall and addressed Phil as if he were a recalcitrant stable boy, informing everyone within a five-mile radius that smoking was not permitted in the halls...

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