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A Light Inside nick flynn I think about Phil Levine nearly every day, whenever I sit down to write. He said something to me once—I assume he wouldn’t remember, and if he did he wouldn’t know the long-lasting effects his words had on me—but these few words set me—my life, my writing—off in another direction than the one in which I was headed. I’d handed in a poem for our one workshop together (at New York University)—I don’t recall which poem, or whether it ever even became a poem—and after Phil read it he turned to me and said, You’ve got more light inside you than this. By the time I made it to NYU I’d been out of school for a long time (ten years or so), working at various jobs (lousy jobs as Phil would say about his own jobs in his twenties, though I suspect neither of us found them completely, or merely, lousy). I’d been an electrician, an okay carpenter, a ship’s captain (with a bona fide marine merchant’s license), a caseworker with homeless adults. I liked the jobs, and if I didn’t I made it clear and was fired—every restaurant I ever worked in fired me. My mother had worked in restaurants my entire life, after working at her truly lousy bank job all day. She worked nights at bars or restaurants for the tips, and we lived off her tips—she drilled it into my brother and me that if we didn’t have enough to tip well, we didn’t have enough to go out (which meant I almost never went out, except to bars, 66 until I was thirty). During my ill-fated attempts at restaurant work, if customers were surly or rude to me I’d go into a silent rage, or if they tipped poorly I’d chase them into the parking lot and throw the money at them—clearly sublimated and misdirected defenses of my mother and what she must have endured, all those years. That I can write about this now is thanks to Phil Levine—his poems gave all of us permission to write about the actual, day-in-day-out circumstances of our lives. That I can actually look someone in the eye and call myself a poet is thanks to Phil Levine. He made what seemed an unlikely path seem noble. His definition of a poet, I once heard him say (on the radio? in an essay ? from a stage? to my face?) was someone who can look you in the eye—I took this to mean something about integrity, something about doing the best you could do. It was not simply a calling, which might suggest a lack of agency—it was something you had to become, to rise to, to embody. It would require everything. He once said (in an interview? in our workshop?) that being a poet is the one job in the world where you wake up every morning and nothing you know will help you to approach the task at hand, which is to write a poem. If you had remained an electrician, you would know how to get the lights to come on, but you are now a poet, and each day you must invent the world. Not the world, but your place in it. In this Phil is similar to another poet whom I also think about nearly every day, each time I find myself in another poem: Stanley Kunitz said that if you read a poem you like, you must become the person who can write that poem. It is a life’s work. How one lives one’s life is important. These are things Phil Levine has said to me, over the years, or that he has written in essays, or that I culled from his poems—it all blurs together now. In 1992—twenty years ago now—I met Phil Levine in that workshop. It was my second year at NYU. When I first got there I was hungry to sit around a table and listen to real poets talk about poems. I saw it as another apprenticeship , not much different from the one I’d gone through to become an electrician . I was writing like a fiend, in a glorious fever—grateful that I’d escaped the burning house of my twenties (or so I believed...

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