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Philip Levine A Resonant Presence mari l’esperance Phil Levine was my teacher on the page long before we met in person. When I came to writing poetry, I was nearly thirty—late by some standards—and discovering Phil’s poems for the first time (in adult continuing education classes, following dull days at office jobs in downtown San Francisco) was akin to opening a door onto a forgotten part of myself. Phil’s poems of empathy, witness, and emotional truth connected me to the working-class world of my father’s New England childhood during the Great Depression—a world where internal and external resources were scarce, anger flared quickly and too often, and a different kind of life seemed remote and unattainable. In those early years of familiarizing myself with poetry and stumbling toward my own poems, Phil’s poems were not only models for what art could be made of, but for how a life in poetry could be fed, shaped, and made real. For a young poet writing her first poems in the dark, this was a tremendous revelation. Sometime later, when I was a second-year graduate student at New York University, Phil came to teach in the fall of 1995. I was reeling from the unexplained disappearance of my mother the previous semester and felt numb and disoriented in my grief; for some months it had taken everything in me simply to function, let alone write poems. I can well recall the charged atmosphere as we anticipated Phil’s arrival. It will not surprise anyone who 90 is familiar with Phil as a teacher that his visit was preceded by his reputation (now its own mythology) as a tough critic who did not suffer fools and disdained wealth, privilege, and sloth. I once heard him say during a radio interview that in a poetry workshop there are a dozen people in a room and one of them is getting paid to tell the truth. For these reasons and more, some of my peers opted to study with other poets. I, on the other hand, was intrigued; this, after all, was the one and only Philip Levine! I signed on for the challenge. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. My weekly classes with Phil provided me with a much-needed refuge of shared meaning and purpose at a time when I felt especially unmoored and vulnerable. I have no doubt the poems I wrote that semester, some of them keepers, were made possible by Phil’s presence. For those of us with apprehensions, Phil did not disappoint. On the first day of class, after the customary introductions and small talk, Phil asked who would like to share a poem. When no one jumped at the chance, I volunteered to be the first lamb sent to slaughter. I read my poem aloud to the group, then waited in the silence that fell over us, expecting the worst. After what felt like an eternity, although it was likely only a minute, Phil ventured, slowly and dryly, “Well . . . this poem has no future,” glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he uttered these words of doom. I sat quietly, swimming in my discomfort, yet determined not to flinch under Phil’s gaze—determined to show him that I could take his heat, that I was big enough. I remained calm, my eyes fixed on the page in front of me as I waited for more. In time, Phil continued by telling us why my poem didn’t have a future as it was written and gave me some suggestions for revision to consider, none of which I now remember. In fact, I remember very little else about that night. But by the end of it I was aware I had survived a kind of initiation, and felt secretly proud. Phil was tough on us and on our poems because he believed we could do better, be better, and that if we applied ourselves and learned everything we could about poetry, as he had, our work would steadily improve. But I never experienced him as cruel, and he often tempered his feedback with sly humor and wisecracks, yet he always spoke his truth in service of the poem, bitter as that truth may have been to swallow. Phil’s tough-love approach was not for everyone, and there were wounded feelings and disappointments. It’s no secret that...

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