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Terrific andrew feld In my private, Sei Sho _ nagon–like list of “Things That Make You Pleased To Be Alive” you’ll find, somewhere near the top, “Phil Levine saying the word terrific.” “Clare’s just terrific!” “Isn’t that a terrific poem?” In a quick conversation under the deadening fluorescence of the AWP Bookfair, over the phone at a faculty prereading dinner (and how many of these, with strangers, semistrangers , almost-friends, and the occasional true friend and fellow poet has Philip Levine had to endure in the course of his public career?), suddenly and gratifyingly bringing to a halt the menu and/or travel discussion: the mention of a poem, a book, a particular poet, and suddenly Phil swings forward, alive, alight. “Oh, she’s a terrific poet!” “Terrific” covers a lot of ground with Phil. When he says it, you still can see, just underneath the adult mask he wears with the prop moustache, the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy he once was, amazed with the music of poetic speech, or the slightly older boy in Mrs. Paperno’s class, reading Wilfred Owen and realizing how poetry can serve “as an amulet against the lies that could deceive and undo me.” This serious belief in the purpose and importance of poetry, along with a constant astonishment that such a thing can and does exist—the genuine—that poem, that poet, that book—what a pleasure! Isn’t 62 it just terrific?—this seems to me an intrinsic part of Phil Levine’s particular brilliance, a vital aspect of his being-in-the-world. Under and along with all his serious scholarship and intellect, the deep study of the art and its history, the lifetime’s work and the lifetime’s accomplishment—which places him as one of the best poets of his generation (that astonishing generation of A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsburg, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and so many others)—the thrill, the energy that first drew him to poetry has in no way diminished. Mention a poem by Federico García Lorca, Rich, Michael Palmer, or the most recent book by one of the many poets drawn into his orbit, and there it is: the sheer pleasure in the art, the thrill: “Gee, what a terrific book that is!” I have in my files a letter from Phil that I’ve thought about framing, because in it he says that a poem I had recently written is “a terrific poem.” (I know: private correspondence/public usage—I’m sorry, Phil.) Every time I open the yellow, blue-lined piece of paper with his neat, semicursive/semiscript handwriting, I feel again the pleasure of receiving his praise. Especially because when I was actually in his workshop, at the University of Houston a few years before the letter, in the fall of 1997, Phil didn’t seem to regard me as particularly terrific, although I think he did gradually warm to me. The word he first used—twice—to describe me (for the record: Phil has denied this, but I remember. I remember. And besides, I have witnesses) was snob. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have come to class in a velvet smoking jacket and ascot. At least that’s how I felt I was attired under the weight of his rebuke. The occasion was a poem I’d written about finding a page torn out of a porn magazine in the street—or that was the surface subject of the poem. The real subject was a virulent break-up I was going through at the time, and a certain amount of rage about that experience. None of which mattered at all to Phil—not the elaborate description of the woman, not my neat, rhymed and metered stanzas, not even all my Beckett quotes. My anger, he said, was misplaced. The woman in the pictures was the victim: she was being exploited. My anger should be directed at the man holding the camera—and even he was probably just some poor schmo toiling in the industry. Really, my anger should be directed at the real pimps who were profiting from this sorry business, the publishers, the guys in the higher offices, not the girl stripping naked for a few bucks. This may seem like an obvious lesson in Phil Levine’s view of the world (sympathy/empathy for the worker, rage against the system, etc...

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