undefinedPhotograph by Frances Levine

 

I was first introduced to Philip Levine through the mail in the summer of 1976. I was studying literature at Berkeley, and my friends and I, all college freshmen and sophomores, were ardent readers of Levine, W. S. Merwin, Donald Justice, Gary Snyder, and Hart Crane. A friend from the college literary magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, introduced me to Ernest Benck, a California poet, who kindly sent some of both of our poems to Levine.

Levine wrote back to us, marking our poems assiduously. Since then I have received many letters from him, always on yellow legal paper with comments like, “I’m not sure my remarks, which are fairly nasty at times, really indicate . . .” His comments, though never nasty, were always serious, as if he took the business of correspondence to be part of the education of a poet. I had the feeling he wrote many such letters to young poets around the country: poets driving trucks, picking oranges, poets who were waiters and acupuncturists’ assistants and college students. Levine takes his role as mentor with the responsibility of a sacred vocation. He has sometimes had trouble from the administrations of high-tuitioned writing programs for allowing auditors—poets who were a little older, talented and too broke to pay—into his classes.

Levine was born in Detroit in 1928, and left that city, as he puts it, after a succession of stupid jobs. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including 7 Years from Somewhere (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award), Ashes (the NBCC and National Book Awards), They Feed They Lion (inevitably mistitled in reference books), and, most recently, A Walk with Tom Jefferson.

The interview took place in my Upper West Side apartment. Levine arrived looking very much the same as he had when I met him ten years earlier in Berkeley: wiry, agile, with a mobile face, curly hair, a boyish habit of movement. He wore enormous running shoes, which seemed to emphasize his small frame, and he walked with a slight bounce, which made him seem an inch or two taller.

I told him that Paris Review interviews usually take place in the writer’s home and so I asked him to describe the place he lives and writes. He told me that in Fresno he lives in a small farmhouse in a district called The Fig Garden. Built in 1919, the house (“the oldest around here”) stands on an acre of land, fronted by a huge eucalyptus tree, fruit trees and cedars. In the backyard, amidst twenty orange trees, alders, Modesto ash, and more eucalyptus, his wife Franny plants a legendary garden of vegetables, fruits, and flowers.

“Our payments are 165 bucks,” he said. “We bought it fifteen years ago when anybody could buy a house. And people ask me why I live in Fresno!”

Levine works in a small study overlooking the back garden. The room is filled with bookshelves (“of course it’s cluttered because I’m something of a slob”) and a number of keepsakes, among them a black-and-white photograph of a drawing by the Italian anarchist painter Flavio Costantini, which in a smaller form is the cover of Levine’s volume Ashes; a Robert Capa photograph of Spanish Republican soldiers at a campfire cooking soup; a picture of Lemon Still Jr., a fellow grease shop worker and the subject of a poem in They Feed They Lion; and a poster of airplane drawings by Arshile Gorky.

“And there hangs from the ceiling a kind of mobile a friend gave me years and years ago. It’s made of thistles, thorns, dry weeds. I don’t know why it’s lasted but it just hangs there and turns around in the wind, hitting me in the eye . . .”

 

INTERVIEWER

In Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass says that rhythm in poetry provides revolutionary ground through its direct access to the unconscious . . .

 PHILIP LEVINE

We all agree with that. Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand. We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first in poetry . . . perhaps simply in speech, in prayer, preaching. That made me want to create it. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. I spoke them and I memorized them. I constantly changed them. I would go out and work on my rain poem and improve it.

INTERVIEWER

Rain was always a favorite theme?

LEVINE

Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start writing?

LEVINE

Writing was something I did in school with some enjoyment because I did it well. And then, you know, I put it aside, the way you do—I guess I started getting interested in girls, what have you. I don’t remember doing any writing at the ages of say, sixteen or seventeen. I rediscovered poetry at the age of eighteen.

INTERVIEWER

How did that happen?

LEVINE

I read Stephen Crane. He really thrilled me. I read him and I imitated him. I really think my poems were as good as his. His poems are terrible, they’re very obvious—you know: I saw a man running towards the horizon. I said, why are you running toward the horizon? He said to me, because blah, blah, blah.

INTERVIEWER

Do you know a lot of poetry by heart?

LEVINE

My memory has faded badly. I used to know dozens of poems by heart. I memorized them when I worked in factories and recited them to myself.

INTERVIEWER

Did you work in an auto factory?

LEVINE

Yes. I worked for Cadillac, in their transmission factory, and for Chevrolet. You could recite poems aloud in there. The noise was so stupendous. Some people singing, some people talking to themselves, a lot of communication going on with nothing, no one to hear.

INTERVIEWER

How long did you work in the factories?

LEVINE

I started doing factory work at about the age of fourteen. When I turned college age I had to make a decision about what I was going to do about my life. My high-school teachers encouraged me to go to college. I stood in line at Wayne State University to enroll, and when I got up to the head of the line, this woman said, “Can I help you?” I said, “I’d like to go to college.” She said, “Do you want a bachelor’s?” I said, “I already have a place to live.” Because to me a bachelor’s was a small apartment. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a bachelor’s degree. The people at Wayne were incredibly savvy. Instead of laughing at me, she explained what my options were and what bachelor’s meant. They were used to us shlumps out of the city of Detroit. There, at college, I encountered modern poetry. And I loved it. Loved it.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start showing your poetry to other people? Were you sending out poems when you were on the assembly line?

LEVINE

When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down the name of the editor and said, “Send the poems to him. I met him once at a party, he may remember me. It doesn’t matter, the poems are so good. Just send them.” So I sent them. A month later they came back with a little printed note telling me they didn’t suit their present editorial needs. I was just shocked. I took it to the teacher and said, “Why, you assured me.” He said, “I don’t understand it.” He was a very sweet man, but he didn’t know the first thing about publishing. So I took the whole thing to another teacher who actually wrote poetry. I wanted an explanation. He looked at the note, then the poems. He asked, “Why did you think they would take your work?” I told him that I had been assured they were wonderful poems. “Well,” he said, “they’re talented but they are not that good. They probably weren’t even read at Harper’s; they looked at your name, they never heard of you, forget it.” I suddenly realized, of course, it’s like everything else in the world. It is a business. I didn’t try to publish again for a long time, until I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. I just forgot about trying to publish. It didn’t seem all that important. I didn’t know many people who published. I knew my work was going to get better. I had gone on supporting myself in other ways, so what was the difference. I went to Iowa for a year as a student. I thought I had a fellowship, but they didn’t give it to me. I was supposed to come the year before, but financial things kept me away. So I wrote them a letter and said please put if off until next year. They gave the fellowship to somebody else. I went there anyway and went to the classes without registering. There I met Don Justice, William Dickey, a poet named Henri Coulette, Robert Dana, W. D. Snodgrass. One semester, Robert Lowell was the teacher; the second semester, John Berryman. It was a fantastic year.