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Birth in a Poetry Position On Philip Levine kate daniels The first time I heard Philip Levine read his poetry was at the University of Virginia, my alma mater, in the early 1980s, where I had recently been hired as a lecturer in creative writing. Levine’s national literary reputation was just beginning to rise, and he read to an overcrowded group in the auditorium of the biology building. The only previous event I had attended there had been a screening of a (horrifyingly realistic) film called “Birth in a Squatting Position.” That fact seemed only random and irrelevant as I entered the auditorium that evening and snagged a last seat. At the time of Levine’s reading, I was a year out of my MFA studies in poetry at Columbia University where I had worked with Stanley Kunitz, Amiri Baraka, Joseph Brodsky, Donald Justice, and others. Levine himself had taught at Columbia the spring before I entered, and a terrible rumor was circulating when I first arrived. In his poetry workshop, so it was said, Levine had been a ruthless craft master who had made every single student in the workshop cry. “Even the men,” we were told with emphasis. Then we would look around furtively, searching for a certain second-year student who had just had poems accepted by The New Yorker and Poetry. He was a large, bearded, beefy man with insolent posture and angry eyes who stalked through the corridors of Dodge Hall as if it were the OK Corral. We were 48 both dazzled by and terrified of him. “Him? Even him?” we would query each other. What kind of a writer was capable of reducing a young poet god-inthe -making like him to tears? Another rumor was snail-mailing about during that pre-Internet era that concerned a truly fearsome writer at the University of Alabama who sometimes taught his workshop with a handgun laid casually on the tabletop right beside his students’ manuscripts. Him we could imagine bringing someone to tears, but not Philip Levine, who had recently published a charmingly marvelous essay called “Letters from a Young Poet” and who (as far as I could tell from the few poems of his I had read at that point) was a straight-shooting, unpretentious , un-macho type of writer, secure in his identity as a left-wing family man and advocate for the economically, socially, and politically oppressed. Levine seemed absolutely not a member of what my poet (girl)friends and I came to call the “Narcissistic American Male Poet–Dominated Crash-andBurn School of Workshop Criticism.” Still, the story about making my fellow students cry made me wary. I was sure of very little in those days, but I was certain that I did not want to meet the man who made serious young poets cry in front of each other. At great personal cost, I had schooled myself not to cry from an undergraduate poetry workshop with the shockingly direct Louise Glück. I think I was probably always more or less about to cry in those days. Not about poetry, though. I was avid for criticism and could dish it out and take it alike. Whenever the knives cut too close, I sucked it up and made sure I was alone before starting to sob. Poetry—reading it, trying to write it, loving it—was really the only place I felt at all strong and authentic. I felt most real when I was reading and writing poetry. Perhaps it was the unconscious desire not to threaten that internal respite that held me back from reading Levine’s poetry while at Columbia, or in that first year after graduate school. At UVA a man named E. D. Hirsch was chairman of the English Department when Levine came to Charlottesville for his reading that year. At the time, Hirsch was just beginning to articulate the idea that would make him famous in academia. He called it “cultural literacy,” a pedagogical plan designed to forestall emerging theories of cultural diversity that argued for core knowledge to be transmitted through identical curricula taught to all schoolchildren everywhere. There was a rumor about him, too: having been assailed as a kind of Nazi because of some aspect of his always controversial work, Hirsch was said to have actually laughed off the insult, and had even 49 repeated it to others. What kind of man did that, those of us in the nontenure nether regions...

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