Philip Levine

Poet

• Born: January 10, 1928
• Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
• Died: February 14, 2015
• Place of death:Fresno, California

In his poetry, Levine champions a segment of the American population that has little voice: the working poor.

Early Life

Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, at a time when anti-Semitism was a growing force in American society. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was educated in the public schools of Detroit and perhaps even more so on Detroit's streets, where he was subjected to bullying from those who were prejudiced against Jews.

Levine developed a left-wing political orientation at a young age and became fascinated by those who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In the 1950s, he worked in the automobile factories of Detroit and at a bottling company while attending night school at Wayne University (later Wayne State University), where he began to write poetry. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1950 and his master’s degree in 1955. Levine understood the factory workers with whom he worked and resolved early to find meaning in their lives and to give expression to those caught in the industrial machine with no one to speak for them. While still at Wayne University, he became intrigued with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

When he was in his twenties, Levine left Detroit to teach part time at the University of Iowa. While there, he attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had the opportunity to study with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman. His students included Gary Soto, whose work is often thought influenced by Levine.

Levine received a master’s degree from Iowa in 1957. The poems he had written there and the connections he had made led to his receiving a Stegner Fellowship for Stanford University, after which he joined the faculty of Fresno State College (later California State University, Fresno) in 1958. He remained active at Fresno for more than thirty years, during which time he taught literature and writing and continued to publish collections of his poetry.

During the 1960s, Levine’s fascination with Spanish literature and culture led him to move to Spain with his family for a period of time. This had a profound influence on his poetry; subsequently, the history and culture of Spain became the subjects of some of his work.

Although Levine was born in the same generation as the beat poets and read his poetry publicly alongside such beat icons as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, he was not considered part of the movement. The beat poets were influenced by many strains of poetic tradition, including proletarian protest in the style of the Marxist poetry of the 1930s, which Levine did share. However, he did not share the exaltation of cerebral and emotional ecstasy in the style of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud that was common in the beat movement.

Life’s Work

Levine was a prolific poet, publishing regularly since his first book, On the Edge, came out in 1963. He was one of the few poets closely tied to a city—Detroit, where he grew up—and one of the few to identify strongly with ethnic and working-class issues. His most explicitly autobiographical work is 1933 (1974), which contains many portraits of family members and describes the physical geography of Detroit. It is noted for being sentimental and nostalgic and includes portraits of remarkable people involved in the Spanish Civil War. This was followed by The Names of the Lost (1976), which is dedicated to Buenaventura Durruti, a leader of the anarchist movement during the war, and contains the elegy “For the Fallen,” written in Durruti’s honor. Like many Latin American and Spanish poets, Levine has a social conscience, moral indignation, and the ability to identify with those trapped for life in relentless, unfulfilling labor.

Ashes (1979) earned Levine both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Prize. This collection contains many of his explicitly religious poems, many of which explore his Jewish roots. It includes thirteen poems from an earlier book and thirteen new ones that invoke industrial images of his Detroit childhood, working-class family tensions, and travels in Spain. Ashes opens with the poem “Father,” in which the speaker finds his dead parent in the speaker’s own tears of mourning and dismisses his father. By the end of the book, however, Levine is much more positive. The concluding poem, “Lost and Found,” reunites father with son and the middle-aged poet with the child he once was, recognizing an enduring human bond.

Levine wrote with an informal clarity that mimics the cadences of natural conversation with a certain tautness; not a word is superfluous. He often followed a pattern: primarily long poems with short lines and few stanza breaks, usually summed up in the last few lines.

Levine twice won the National Book Award for poetry, in 1980 for Ashes and in 1991 for What Work Is, published earlier that year. He also won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection The Simple Truth (1994). Later collections include Breath (2004) and News of the World (2009). In August 2011, Levine was appointed the US poet laureate for 2011–12.

After retiring from teaching in 1992, Levine continued to serve as a professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, for the rest of his life. Levine died in Fresno, California, on February 14, 2015, after battling pancreatic cancer. He was eighty-seven years old, and was survived by his wife Frances Artley (the couple had married in 1954, the year after Levine's first marriage ended) and his three sons.

Significance

At a time when poetry increasingly was influenced by academic trends and criticism, Levine freed his poems from dogma. His work has been both praised and criticized for its simple diction and the natural rhythms of his narratives. His themes deal with issues of consequence: death, courage, loyalty, and love. He finds the great mysteries of life hidden in ordinary events and in objects of daily routine.

Bibliography

Levine, Philip. The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

Levine, Philip. "A Conversation with Philip Levine." Interview by Tomás Q. Morín. American Poetry Review Nov.–Dec. 2013: 47–49. Print.

Levine, Philip. So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Print.

McGrath, Charles. "Voice of the Workingman to Be Poet Laureate." New York Times. New York Times, 9 Aug. 2011. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. Cry of the Human: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1975. Print.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1979. Print.

Reyes, David A. "US Poet Laureate Philip Levine: A Lifetime of Giving a Thundering Voice to the Voiceless." Borderzine. Borderzine, 29 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.