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Home
Authors
Philip Levine
American
Poet
About the author
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Work
#Poetry
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Love
#Day
#Jazz
I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Sense
#Parents
#Americans
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Thought
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Work
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#People
#Work
#Poetry
#Care
#Advice
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Home
#Music
#Listening
#Sons
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Old
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#State
#Sense
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#People
#Memory
#Poems
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Work
#Day
#Poetry
#Irony
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Now
#Will
#Nothing
#Home
#Writing
#Poetry
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Voice
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Temperament
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Mother
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Songs
#Mother
#Poetry
#Ambition
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Family
#Father
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Work
#Being
#Sense
#Fact
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Now
#Change
I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Time
#Saying
#Eyes
#Attention
#Eternity
I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#God
#Power
#Mercy
I write what's given me to write.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
Philip Levine,
American
Poet
#Sound
#Fraud