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The Simple Voice of Philip Levine tomás q. morín In the fall of 1998, with an undergraduate Spanish degree in my pocket, I began my first semester in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins University. If everything went according to plan, five years of studying and dissecting the writers I revered would have me walking in a polyester robe to “Pomp and Circumstance,” a new soldier in the ranks of critics. Everything, however, didn’t go according to plan. While my teachers and classmates were kind and welcoming, I was a twenty-two-year-old kid who, before that year, had never left Texas. I was miserable. Baltimore offered little solace; the city was withdrawn and surly. Wallace Stevens could’ve been describing it when he famously wrote “The world is ugly / and the people are sad.” What I didn’t yet know that summer, as my future wife and I loaded a U-Haul and began the long drive to Maryland, was that most of my life I’d lived with dysthymia, a constant, low-level depression. In Baltimore, homesick and lonely, I found myself desperately seeking things to make me happy. Movies, exercising, and socializing had failed to cheer me up, but reading and writing poetry became a balm. In the lower levels of the university’s Eisenhower Library, I encountered the poets who would sustain me. The nights I should’ve been repairing the glaring gaps in my knowledge of French Deconstructionism, I instead spent 125 catching up on American poetry written during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. I devoured books like Donald Justice’s The Summer Anniversaries, Anthony Hecht’s The Hard Hours, Charles Wright’s China Trace, and W. S. Merwin’s The Drunk in the Furnace as if they were medicine. Whenever my department offered a seminar on Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda, I found a small haven where I could talk freely about American poetry without fear of betraying my new passion. One of the other programs that shared the building with my department was the famed Writing Seminars. On more than one occasion, I found myself wandering on their floor looking for God knows what. If a poetry teacher or a student had engaged me in conversation, I don’t know what I would have said. My guess is, nothing. If at that moment I had possessed the vision to see that writing would one day become my vocation, I would have lacked the courage to share that with anyone. During one of my clandestine visits to the poetry stacks, the chocolate spine and bright lettering of a tall, thin volume caught my eye. The book was 1933 by Philip Levine. Standing there, I read one poem, and then another and another. The strong, intimate voice, the spare images of family and loss, and the movement of the poems down and across the page entranced me. I didn’t need to know iambs or syllabics to appreciate the rhythms, to feel them in my pulse. The music of Phil’s poems was the first revelation; the second was his people. As I flipped through more of his books, I encountered barbers, children , factory workers, musicians, and anarchists. These people were never abstractions; they were characters whose joys and pains, triumphs and defeats were chronicled with a crystalline vision. In poem after poem, he cast the lives from his working-class roots with dignity and affection. This isn’t to say that the characters in his poems were completely autobiographical . All one had to do was read the poems about his sisters who didn’t exist or the one about his birth in Lucerne to realize that, in his hands, poems were more than just personal confessions. The next few happy months of reading and writing were electrifying. My imagination popped and sparked. The only interruption came the week I hung over my bed a dream catcher that my mother had sent me. Instead of catching my nightmares, it seemed to cause me to dream constantly—something I rarely do. During the day, however, my imagination was dead. I was 126 miserable. The first morning after I’d tossed it in the trash, I wrote a poem. The sense of relief and joy I felt forced me to recognize the obvious: poetry had replaced my passion for scholarship. My problem was that I didn’t know whether I had any potential, at least not enough to warrant abandoning my doctoral program...

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