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Worth Fighting For: An Essay for Philip Levine
- University of Iowa Press
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Worth Fighting For An Essay for Philip Levine ada limón The reason I wanted to go to New York University to get my Master of Fine Arts in Poetry was so that I might get the chance to study with Sharon Olds and Philip Levine. Sharon Olds’s poems came to me in high school and nearly gutted me without warning. Levine’s poems came to me two years later when I worked at my local bookstore, Readers’ Books in Sonoma, during the summer of 1995. A nationwide contest centered around the PBS series “The Power of the Word” would bring the television journalist Bill Moyers to the winning town’s poetry festival. Beating out places like New York City, Sonoma’s Poetry Festival won. Bill Moyers came to our small town and even shook my hand. I was nineteen. Everything was amazing. Along with Moyers came a slew of wonderful poets including Levine. When Levine read I was wonderstruck. He was a smaller man than I expected, but he was serious and powerful, and his voice was a pounding power tool and was beautifully muscled. I was completely enthralled by his poems and the sheer force of him. Later, during my junior year of college, I took a poetry class and rediscovered Levine, first with “They Feed They Lion” (I walked around saying “Earth is eating trees” over and over for a month), and then with all his books, which I inhaled one by one. In my second poetry class, we watched a video of an 109 interview with Levine. He terrified me. And also, I liked him very much. Somehow, he reminded me of the men I knew growing up: hard, quickwitted , smart, and honest. Needless to say, my very first graduate class at NYU, in the old building that was all yellow with dim lights and dim walls and dim rooms, was led by the great Philip Levine himself. I remember seeing his name on my class schedule and not quite believing it. I was so nervous that I showed up an hour early. I tried not to act as nervous as I was. I sat on my hands and I leaned forward. I was twenty-three years old. I hadn’t been an English major in college. Most of what I knew about poetry was from the Bill Moyers series, the few beginning courses at the University of Washington, the books I read while I worked at the bookstore during summers, and instinct. I felt highly unprepared. Levine began the class by asking whether anyone smoked. No one raised a hand, either out of fear or out of shock at the question. He then said, “Well, if no one smokes, we won’t need to take breaks!” Then, he started the class. I was sitting in the seat directly to his left and I couldn’t help staring at him. He began with general advice. He even talked about learning to live in New York, which was helpful for me since I had come from the West Coast and this class was occurring approximately three days after my arrival. But mostly, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I was sitting a foot a way from Philip Levine and I was so overwhelmed by his presence and the pressure I felt to remember the moment as clearly as possible, I don’t think I heard a word. When it came to workshopping poems, he was surprisingly generous with mine in the beginning. I wrote pretty straightforward narrative poems that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I had no idea what I was doing, but I tried to mimic famous poets as much as I could. I would read a poem, and then I would write a poem in a similar vein. They weren’t great poems, but they were starter-poems, poems that were teaching me how to write a poem. Levine seemed to understand that and thought, perhaps, I was on the right track. Nothing in my life up until that moment could compare with the feeling of sitting next to Philip Levine while he held one of my new poems in his not-new hands. He read. I studied the tiny movements of his face, looking for any sign of approval. It was agonizing. It was exhilarating. Sometimes, however, it was devastating. I’m not being dramatic, though it sounds like 110 I am. I was just barely an adult...