Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine

A Walk with Philip Levine

A Walk with Philip Levine robert wrigley My first thought, on being invited to contribute to a collection of essays in celebration of Philip Levine, was a kind of delighted surprise. Delighted because there’s no poet alive I’d rather celebrate, and surprised because I was never one of Phil’s students. Not formally. I was never matriculated and enrolled at any institution or writers conference at which he taught. I was never in a classroom he was in charge of. He has never once sat down with me and showed me what’s wrong or right or possible about a poem of mine. I met Phil in the summer of 1988, at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I was a fellow; he was . . . well, he was Philip Levine. I’d published my second book about a year and a half earlier. I was thirty-seven; he was sixty, the age I am now. It was the year he published A Walk with Tom Jefferson. I’d heard him read the title poem at the AWP Conference and Bookfair, earlier that spring, in San Francisco. I heard him read it again at Bread Loaf. And the next winter, 1989, I drove eighty-five miles through shitty winter weather, to Gonzaga University in Spokane, and heard him read it yet again. It’s been twenty-three years since I heard him read that poem, though I’ve read it many times since. To myself, of course, but also three or four times to classes. The whole thing. Just listen, I tell them. Sometimes I tell them about what it was like, hearing Phil read the poem that first time, in San Francisco. It was a 179 huge hall, hundreds of people. Gerald Stern read, too. Stern was wonderful. But Levine read a poem that was, and is, transcendent. And I’ve never gotten over that reading, really. And I’ve never gotten over the poem. What I mean to say is that Phil Levine, though he’s never been my teacher, has been teaching me for a long time, teaching me what might be possible in this art of ours. “Tom Jefferson” is about a Levine-like speaker and about a black man in Detroit with the same name (sort of) as the republic’s third president and principal national architect. It’s about Detroit, about the riots of 1967; it’s about capitalism, an economic system with the ideology of a cancer cell. It’s about the United States of America and work and courage and outrage and heroic being. “It’s Biblical,” a repeated phrase from the poem, has come to be a kind of mantra of mine. Very often I say it at bleak political moments (as I did last night, in response to the latest lunatic assertion from Rick Santorum on the radio); the saying of it allows me to continue, to keep on, as Tom Jefferson kept on. I bought my first book by Philip Levine in October 1975. I was in between my first and second years in graduate school at the University of Montana. Dick Hugo had come in to workshop that week, told us to quiet down and listen up. Then he read “They Feed They Lion.” I wasn’t quite sure what I’d heard when Dick finished reading. Which is to say, I’d never heard anything like it. Relentless and rhythmical and immensely powerful. I remember Dick looked around the seminar table at us, lit a cigarette, slid his glasses up on his forehead, and said: “Jesus Christ, people. That’s a poem. That is a hell of a poem.” The book I bought later that day was Red Dust. I also ordered They Feed They Lion and 1933, and I’ve been buying Phil’s books ever since. According to Randall Jarrell’s formulation, a good poet is someone who, “after a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, [has] managed to be struck by lightning five or six times,” and that a great poet is someone who’s struck “a dozen or two-dozen times.” Most people who’ve read all or most of the body of Philip Levine’s work already know he’s a great poet. Get three or four such people in a room making up the list of such lightning strike poems, and the process gets out of hand in a hurry. My own list is ridiculously long. But something about these two poems—“They...