{"id":82937,"date":"2015-02-23T14:13:53","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T19:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82937"},"modified":"2015-02-28T15:05:42","modified_gmt":"2015-02-28T20:05:42","slug":"my-lost-poet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/23\/my-lost-poet\/","title":{"rendered":"My Lost Poet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anger and tenderness in Philip Levine.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Frances Levine<\/p><\/div>\n

In the spring of 2012, Philip Levine delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress called \u201cMy Lost Poets,\u201d marking the end of his tenure as the eighteenth U.S. poet laureate. In the talk, which was later published in Five Points<\/a><\/em>, Georgia State University\u2019s literary journal, Levine takes us to Wayne University\u2019s Miles Poetry Room in 1948, where, once a month, he and other aspiring poets gathered to talk shop and critique one another\u2019s work. The group comprised four World War II vets and a number of Wayne University students, including a young man who would eventually be drafted to the Korean War, a narcissistic Hart Crane wannabe, a rural Southern Baptist woman from Kentucky, and a young black man obsessed with Walt Whitman. In the wake of the war, Levine explained, the group found urgency and vitality in poetry, regardless of their respective talents. This poetic camaraderie was short-lived, though. The Hart Crane fanboy died in a car wreck at an early age; the Southern Baptist disappeared into the jungles of Latin America; the Whitman worshiper saw his idealism dissolve in the face of fifties-era politics and Jim Crow laws. Still, it was these people, along with the war poets he discovered during that time, who helped shape Levine\u2019s own poetic voice.<\/p>\n

That voice, when he finally found it, decried the injustices of our society, of working-class life in particular, lending Levine\u2019s experience a \u201cvalue and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own.\u201d Unlike his great hero, Walt Whitman, Levine doesn\u2019t seem to stand over us, exalting and exalted. Instead, he\u2019s always among the multitude bearing witness to the historical moment. He looks out every so often to address his reader with a plural or a singular you<\/em> that invites us to share his vision, expanding our own. His poems are full of unrealized dreams, with auxiliary verbs\u2014would<\/em>, could<\/em>, should<\/em>\u2014signaling inevitable disappointments or a foreboding sense of what\u2019s to come. This dissonance between one\u2019s idealistic fantasies and reality conjure a tremendous anger in his work, evident especially in his earlier poems about factory life in Detroit. <\/p>\n

Levine said he\u2019d learned to harness his emotions from another lost poet, Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, who provided an antidote to Whitman\u2019s pervasive, sometimes unrealistic optimism. In Lorca\u2019s Poet in New York<\/em>, Levine found the key to his own poetry: \u201cNever in poetry written in English had I found such a direct confrontation of one image with another nor heard such violence held in abeyance and enclosed in so perfect a musical form.\u201d It was Lorca who taught him to use poetry as a weapon\u2014who validated his rage.<\/p>\n

I first met Philip Levine thanks to Lorca. In June 2013, I was helping organize an event to celebrate the exhibition of the original manuscript of Poet in New York<\/em> at the New York Public Library, and I\u2019d invited Levine to participate. It wasn\u2019t easy getting him to join us. You might even say he was cantankerous. He had a lot of questions about the evening: How many readers were there going to be? How long would the event last? Which specific texts were going to be read? He was particularly annoyed when he\u2019d heard that an actor would be performing Lorca\u2019s lecture \u201cA Poet in New York,\u201d insisting that the lecture, much less a dramatic reading of it, did no service to the poet. But after numerous phone calls and e-mails, Levine reluctantly agreed to take part in the event, though he made clear it would only be \u201cin his own way.\u201d He insisted, in the meantime, that I read his essay \u201cThe Poet in New York in Detroit<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

After that, we had no further communication until the night of the event. I wasn\u2019t entirely sure he\u2019d show up, and even when he did\u2014a wiry man with a sly smile, slowly making his way to the stage\u2014I had no idea what to expect.<\/p>\n

He told the audience he\u2019d asked me if he should be a little comic or a little heavy, and that I\u2019d told him, simply, Be grim. The audience laughed. I laughed, especially because he\u2019d fabricated the whole exchange. Even as he promised us he was going to do his best to be grim, he had the audience laughing between poems. He read a poem by Rafael Alberti, Lorca\u2019s friend and rival, called \u201cThe Coming Back of an Assassinated Poet,\u201d followed by Lorca\u2019s poem \u201cNew York: Office and Denunciation,\u201d to which he brought a startling, steady intensity:<\/p>\n

\n

A river that sings and flows
past bedrooms in the boroughs\u2014
and it\u2019s money, cement, or wind
in New York\u2019s counterfeit dawn<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the time he got to the poem\u2019s famous accusation\u2014<\/p>\n

\n

I denounce everyone
who ignores the other half,
the half that can\u2019t be redeemed,
who lift their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat \/ inside forgotten little animals [\u2026]
I spit in all your faces<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2014his voice, though slightly hoarse, was loud and audibly shaking with anger. After he finished, I tried to catch his eye, but he didn\u2019t see me. He ended up walking out during the actor\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t speak until six months later, when I called him to see if he\u2019d be willing to participate in an interview series for The Paris Review<\/em>. He was surprised to hear from me\u2014about as surprised as I was that he even took my call\u2014but said he\u2019d loved to \u201cconverse on a theme of poetry.\u201d I arrived at his home on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights just as he and his wife, Franny, were finishing lunch. We sat in his study, where he told me about his eleventh-grade English teacher, who\u2019d changed his life by lending him a book of poems by the British war poet Wilfred Owen. He used to tell people he wrote long poems comprised of short lines, he said, because The New Yorker<\/em> paid by the line. He described his earliest explorations with poetic voice, explorations he kept private for fear of being mocked by his peers. In \u201cMy Lost Poets,\u201d Levine further describes what that voice felt like: \u201ca voice that tried to consider the value of being alive, the sense of what it was to be alive, not so much as Philip Levine or any other Levine or any other Philip, just to be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told me a story about his poem \u201cFixing the Foot: On Rhythm,\u201d which describes a doctor who visited a woman at a house where Levine was staying. The doctor was Dutch, and though Levine couldn\u2019t understand what he was saying, he was struck by the fact that the doctor never stopped speaking to his patient. The rhythm of his voice seemed to calm her, to ease her pain. With wonder, Levine recalled, \u201cHe was incanting a kind of curative message and I thought, He should be a poet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toward the end of our interview, I asked him about a line from one of his essays in which he wrote, \u201cKeats knew that beauty mattered, that it could transform our experience into something worthy, that like love it could redeem our lives.\u201d Did he still believe that, that poetry could redeem our lives? He said he thought poetry could do a number of things, and that he didn\u2019t think our lives needed that much redemption anymore. On the contrary, he said, \u201cI have always believed that there is an essential goodness in all of us. One of the most significant things I\u2019ve always felt about poetry is that it\u2019s a vehicle for touching each other, and my life has made it clear that that\u2019s true.\u201d Levine maintained that persistent faith in poetry. When he was asked, in his 1988 Art of Poetry interview, where contemporary American poetry had gone wrong, he said, \u201cmaybe it stopped believing in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking of his legacy now, I think of his rage\u2014the catharsis that can be found in his poetry, but also the tenderness. In a 2006 interview with Alice Quinn, then the poetry editor of The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>, and Galway Kinnell\u2014Levine\u2019s longtime friend, who died last year\u2014Levine remarked that Kinnell had once mentioned \u201ctenderness\u201d as an aspect of poetry that meant the most to him. At the time, midway through Levine\u2019s career, this made him realize how absent that sentiment was from his own poetry, and it transformed his vision of humans \u201cwith their grace and their courage and their independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Kinnell wasn\u2019t the first person to make Levine consider the importance of tenderness in poetry. In one of the intimate scenes Levine recalled from the Miles Poetry Room, his Hart Crane\u2013wannabe mentor read aloud a poem by an obscure British World War II poet. \u201cThere should be more of this in our poetry,\u201d the man said, \u201cespecially in war poetry.\u201d Levine asked what he meant by \u201cthis,\u201d to which the former responded, \u201cTenderness.\u201d \u201cI had never in my life known or even guessed there would be room for tenderness in great poetry,\u201d Levine said, \u201cbut the moment he used the word my mind began roaming over the poems I knew best, and of course he was right: there wasn\u2019t nearly enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I listen back to the recordings from our interview, I\u2019m struck by Levine\u2019s voice, which has the incantatory quality he ascribed to the doctor. I think of an older poem of his, \u201cA Last Answer,\u201d in which the speaker describes a walk in a desolate forest somewhere in Holland. It\u2019s cold and his companion takes his hand for warmth from the rain. She asks what he\u2019s thinking and just at that moment, a sudden blinding stream of light forces the speaker to squint his eyes shut. He sees a vision of the end of his life, trees like flames and sword-bearing angels. He says nothing of the fiery image to his companion and simply holds on to her hand as they walk on. The poem ends in that prophetic voice that emanates from so many of Levine\u2019s poems:<\/p>\n

\n

Somewhere
the sea saves its tears
for the rising tide, somewhere
we\u2019ll leave the world weighing
no more than when we came,
and the answer will be
the same, your hand in mine,
mine in yours, in that clearing
where the angels come toward us
without laughter, without tears.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Elianna Kan is a writer and editor<\/em>. She lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anger and tenderness in Philip Levine. In the spring of 2012, Philip Levine delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress called \u201cMy Lost Poets,\u201d marking the end of his tenure as the eighteenth U.S. poet laureate. In the talk, which was later published in Five Points, Georgia State University\u2019s literary journal, Levine takes us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":801,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[17140,13861,11685,7510,7432,1132,17141,3199,7221,165,605,13136,17139,40],"class_list":["post-82937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-alice-quinn","tag-anger","tag-detroit","tag-federico-garcia-lorca","tag-galway-kinnell","tag-interviews","tag-lectures","tag-philip-levine","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-readings","tag-remembrances","tag-tenderness","tag-the-new-yorker"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nInterviewing Philip Levine: A Remembrance<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Elianna Kan on her inspiring encounters with Philip Levine, the former poet laureate, who died earlier this month.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/23\/my-lost-poet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Lost Poet by Elianna Kan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 23, 2015 \u2013 Anger and tenderness in Philip Levine. 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