Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine

An Apprentice's Tale

An Apprentice’s Tale daniel nester When was the first time I saw Philip Levine? I’m pretty sure it was the first day of classes at New York University in the fall of 1995, out in the lounge with ratty couches, on the second floor of 19 University Place. He sat next to Gerald Stern. They talked about the food in New York and the great poets of Cleveland. Who? Hart Crane and . . . where in Ohio is Rita Dove from? Some of us joined naming names. Who else? d. a. levy? Yes, d. a. levy, I threw in his name. The desire to impress fogs my memory. Later, Levine, dressed in a sweater and collared shirt, nice jacket, sat at the end of the seminar table as we walked in. I had been in the city for a year, had committed to making something of myself as a poet, and assumed Levine and I would be simpatico, fellow bluecollar travelers. I even might have thought that I had “outgrown” Levine’s poems, fancying myself a more experimental type. The sequence of different disguises I wore in those days is still unclear. What is clear is that I was at once worshipful and ambivalent about being in the same room as the poet who redefined, for me, what was acceptable subject matter in a contemporary poem and how to go about writing about work. Here I was, twenty-six, old by grad student standards, with this sixty-sevenyear -old poet, in the flesh, about to read our poems for the next fifteen weeks. 139 I do remember the first time I read Levine’s poems. It was the fall of 1991, my first poetry workshop, led by Michael S. Weaver (now Afaa M. Weaver) at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. I was a nonmatriculated student who had limped through undergrad. We’re talking figuratively, but I also wore a polio brace on my right leg from a landscaping job accident. The figure I struck then was Dickensian. My leg clacked as I walked. Weaver assigned several poets who remain favorites—Li-Young Lee, Sharon Olds—but the one who stood out for me was Philip Levine. You know the poem: You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. His poems woke me up because I knew what work was. My grandfather, Curt Little, worked twenty years at a printer where he cut holes through green Turnpike tickets. When the owner went out of business, my grandfather lost his pension. I never heard him complain. My father, Mike Nester, worked nights as a truck driver, dead-lifted forty-pound boxes off the docks, rolled metal drums onto forklifts. My sister walked on his back, cracking vertebrae into place. Through high school, I worked at a car wash, where I scrubbed whitewalls with wire brushes and dried off bumpers. I didn’t have proper work boots or gloves. I put plastic bags over my sneakers with rubber bands. Philip Levine introduced the idea to me that blue-collar work is worthy of being made into a poem, of being poetic. Poetry was no longer just a rich person’s game. And so when Afaa Weaver, who worked in a factory for fifteen years before entering the world of poetry, asked me, “What are you going to do with all these poems?,” it changed my world. I sat up straight. He suggested this absurd thing called creative writing school. As long as I can remember, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with the word mentor. It suggests to me a patrilineal passing of the torch or priestly rite of worship. I’m sure this started for me when poetry took the place of faith in God. I was about nineteen, and it was a welcome change. Still, I was skeptical of poetry. I wasn’t ready, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, to “surrender wholly to the work.” Back then I was a nervous wretch, in most ways unmentorable; I was outgoing and social, but also insecure and rude and still hurting from a father who left the family. If I wasn’t writing poems about empty driveways and union 140 jackets left on the hanger, I was writing about nosehair-picking. There was no time to be genteel; a poem had to reflect the brute significance of the oppressed reality of the human spirit, what William...