Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine

Philip Levine

Philip Levine larry levis 1 To attempt to be at all objective about my friend and my first teacher Philip Levine is impossible for me. For to have been a student in Levine’s classes from the mid to late 1960s was to have a life, or what has turned out to be my life, given to me by another. And certainly then, at the age of seventeen, I had no life, or no passionate life animated by a purpose, and I was unaware that one might be possible. Let me explain: by the age of sixteen I was already a kind of teenage failure, an unathletic, acne-riddled virgin who owned the slowest car in town, a 1959 Plymouth sedan that had fins like irrelevant twin sharks rising above the taillights . Beige, slow as driftwood, the car became interesting only when I cut the engine and lights to coast down a hill in full moonlight outside town as I drove home to the ranch, listening to the wind go over the dead metal and sitting there in the self-pity of adolescence, a self-pity so profound that it made me feel, for a moment anyway, at once posthumous and deliciously alive. Had I been good at something, had my times in the 400-yard freestyle and 100-yard breaststroke actually not grown worse over four years, had I had a girlfriend or a chopped and channeled Merc with a V-8, I would not have read poetry. But I did read it, because a teacher named Maranda showed me Frost’s poems, and I couldn’t shake them or rid my mind of them. 102 One night I wrote a poem. I think I actually composed it while listening to music, to some sticky orchestrated sound track from a movie. The poem was awful of course; even I knew that. It was awful except for one thing. It had one good line in it. I was sixteen then, almost seventeen, almost a senior, and about important things I did not deceive myself. One good line at the age of sixteen was a lot. I decided then that I would go to sleep, and if the line was still good in the morning, then I would become a poet. I remember thinking that I might qualify the decision by saying that I would try to become a poet. The word try seemed dead of exhaustion. No, that was no good, I thought immediately. One either did this or did not do it. When I got up, I looked at the line. It was still good. Everything crucial in my life had been decided in less than thirty seconds, and in complete silence. My great good fortune came a few months later disguised as a grade of D in my photography class. That dark mark meant I could not go to Berkeley or to any University of California campus. I tried to persuade my teacher, Mr. Ferguson, that most students thought the course was a kind of joke. This turned out to be the wrong argument. And in fact I deserved the grade, for I had hardly attended the class. I hated the smells of developing fluids and fixers and would hang back with my friend Zamora while the other students filed into the darkroom, then slip out the door and sit smoking cigarettes with him in the empty stadium bleachers. We spoke exclusively of girls, of what wonders must be concealed beneath Colleen Mulligan’s cashmeres or within Kathy Powell’s white dress. I sat there smoking and earning my D. The D meant I would have to go to Fresno to attend college. Yes, Fresno. Dust and Wind State. How lucky I was, though my little destiny was completely disguised as failure, for at Fresno State I would spend the next four years in Levine’s poetry workshops, although I could not have known that then, smoking with Zamora. No one knew anything then. It was 1964. A few years later Zamora would for some reason wander away from the others on his patrol somewhere in Vietnam and come home in a body bag. I don’t know what happened to Colleen Mulligan, but I saw Kathy Powell years later at a reunion. She had moved to Ketchum, Idaho, and was still beautiful. She had been reading a book of poems by Sharon Olds and asked me about them. At seventeen I would never have imagined that she...