RATTLE Conversations

Philip Levine

168 rattle conversations Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Levine has also published a collection of essays, The Bread ofTime:Toward an Autobiography (1994), edited The Essential Keats (1987), and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, 1984) and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979). Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University. Philip Levine June 20, 1998 Fox: What factor has been most influential on your writing? Levine: I think that the thing that influenced me most was, curiously enough, the work I did as a young guy in Detroit. I started doing industrial work when I was very young. It was wartime Detroit; anybody could get a job. And at the time I didn’t know that this was not what I was going to be doing with my life. I hoped it wasn’t going to be because I didn’t like it. But I met a lot of extraordinary people doing that kind of work, the kind of people I don’t meet when I teach at the University of North Carolina or Vanderbilt or Princeton or Brown or Columbia. And one of the things that struck me then was that they were not in our literature. I couldn’t even find them in the movies. We didn’t have television back then.Their lives just seemed ignored. And yet they were the people who really were building America, or tearing it down, however you look at it. And I thought, what an opportunity to transform these people or some aspect of them, to memorialize them, to grab them before they faded into their mediocrity, which some of them did, but I knew some of them when they were young. I also knew their sadness and the sense of isolation and alienation. A lot of them were southerners, Black and white, and a lot of them couldn’t make much sense of Detroit, which was then not the city it is now. It was a very thriving, busy, rich city during the war with so much industry going on. I loved it, I loved the city. It was a kind of carnival to me. Fox: Do you regard your work as political in any way? Levine: Yeah, in the way that Orwell would probably, if he read it and liked it, that it is a record of lives that a lot of people would just as soon weren’t looked very carefully at, because they represent a critique of capitalism.To see people of promise going under year after year is a very painful thing and to talk about it is, in a way, a political act. Also to rescue these people, which is my hope, to rescue them from anonymity and make them appear as human as they were. I have some sort of faith that if readers see that this guy doing 169 170 rattle conversations this sort of work is actually quite an extraordinary person, that he or she, the reader, might say he or she deserves more, she deserves better, her kids deserve better. So, yeah, in that sense, I feel an obligation to break down stereotypes and to present actual occurrences and move people about these lives that they’d just as soon not be moved about. Fox: Some readers find a significant difference between academic poetry as compared with the...