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 Poet
ACT Theatre, February
28 , 2000
Biography
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Philip Levine is one of America’s most celebrated and renowned poets,
having been honored with a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He
was born in 1928 and raised in Detroit, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants.
He was educated in the public schools of Detroit and also attended Wayne
State University. After a succession of industrial jobs, including punching
in at Chevy Gear & Axle, running jack hammer at Detroit Transmission,
and muscling cases of soda pop at Mavis Nu Icy Bottling Company, Levine
left Detroit to teach part-time at the University of Iowa, which enabled
him to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Levine, a writer who knows
in his bones the corrosive effects of heat, foul air, long hours, low
pay, and heavy work, believes his industrial jobs were an unlikely seedbed
for his poetry. "Detroit is perfect for me. It’s not dinky.
It’s just big enough. I know it. I’m a Detroit-sized poet,"
said Levine. "It took me a long time to be able to write about it
without snarling or snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward
those who maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had
touched and blessed me." The poems and connections he forged in Iowa
earned him a fellowship at Stanford University, which led, in turn, to
a job at Fresno State in 1958, where he taught literature and writing
for over thirty years.
Most of Levine’s poetry addresses the joys and sufferings of industrial
life, poems marked by keen observation, rage and painful irony. His poetry
is about the common people, but it is also for the common people. While
his poems are carefully crafted and complex, they read like colloquial
speech. Levine splits his time between New York City and Fresno.
Selected
Works
On The Edge (1963)
Not this Pig (1968)
They Feed They Lion (1972)
The Names of the Lost (1976)
One for the Rose (1981)
Sweet Will (1985)
A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988)
New Selected Poems (1991)
What Work Is: Poems (1991)
The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994)
The Simple Truth : Poems (1994)
Smoke (1997)
Mercy (1999)
Web
Site Links
Atlantic Monthly interview
with Levine
Academy of American Poets page
about Levine
Featured author
in Ploughshares
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