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A Real Fact michael collier In a 1974 interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly, Philip Levine refers to Yvor Winters as “my teacher,” and then, responding to a confirming follow-up question, “Winters was a teacher of yours?,” he has a second thought: “That’s an odd word. He was an acquaintance.” Acquaintance seems an equally odd word given the careful and detailed description of Winters and his teaching methods in Levine’s warm but uncompromising essay about his time with Winters at Stanford, “The Shadow of the Big Madrone,” although reading the essay, you can see Levine’s point. In the interview, Levine describes Winters as “a brilliant reader of poetry. Even when you didn’t agree with his evaluation of a poem, it was clear he could read it very carefully.” But “he was terribly clumsy. He wanted to be kind and he didn’t quite know how” . . . and “he was very unperceptive on the level of relationships with people.” By temperament, Levine found Winters’s model as a teacher alien and vexing. Even so, Levine learned essential things from Winters, not only about poetry, but perhaps more important and necessary, about himself. Reading “The Shadow of the Big Madrone” and another essay about mentors, “Mine Own John Berryman ,” in which Levine compares Berryman’s teaching with Robert Lowell’s, both of whom he worked with at Iowa, you get a clear sense that what Levine values in teachers is their humanity and their ability to relate to the human- 40 ity of those they are charged to teach. Related to this, I think, is the ability to be honest and truthful in appraising others and yourself. Perhaps the most telling thing Levine says about Winters in this regard is how Winters, who was almost thirty years older than Levine, wanted to show him how he used to box. “He was a frustrated prizefighter,” Levine tells his interviewers, “and he hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to box . . . under all this mind business was a man with an unhappy body.” At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1986 (the closest I ever got to being a workshop student of his), Levine gave a lecture in which, among other things, he talked about the difference between teaching at Princeton and his alma mater, Wayne State. Princeton students were apt to become emotionally undone when he critiqued their poems, whereas Wayne State students responded with, “Fuck you Levine.” The comparison here of Detroit working-class students with privileged Ivy Leaguers is similar to his comparison of Berryman, a university fellowship student, albeit Ivy League, and underrecognized poet, with Lowell, a Boston Brahmin and Pulitzer Prize winner. Levine’s comparisons weren’t merely intended to make digs at the privileged, although you might guess where his sympathies lay. Both stories offered a parable about the importance of character and temperament. There was really nothing in Levine’s illustrations to say the parable couldn’t have worked the other way around, that is, with Lowell as the magnanimous, passionate, fair-minded, and interested teacher or the Princeton students stubbornly standing up for their own work. The waiters at Bread Loaf that summer—the cohort of young writers who serve food in the conference dining hall to more than two hundred people and whose esprit de corps sets them apart from most of the participants while simultaneously making them subservient to everyone—took Levine’s talk to heart. During dinner, a few days later, a group of waiters approached his table, and once they had his attention, they peeled off their aprons to reveal red T-shirts with big black block lettering—FUCK YOU LEVINE. They had made one for him to wear and he put it on without hesitation. I’m not sure whether it was one of the waiters who took the photograph afterward, nor do I remember how a copy of it came into my possession, but it is one of my most revered icons, and for years I had it thumb-tacked on the wall above my writing desk. I kept it there as a reminder that writing is not primarily about receiving praise and affirmation from others. We do it to please ourselves, primarily, and as such, we must be the final critics and editors of our poems. 41 This is one of the attributes of Levine and his work that has always inspired me: a belief in self-reliance, an ultimate existential stance in relationship...

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