Philip Levine

[Mark Stryker]

http://www.freep.com/article/20110811/ENT05/108110516/New-poet-laureate-brings-memories-Detroit-factories-life-his-writing?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p

Born and raised in Detroit, Philip Levine, America's newly appointed Poet Laureate, told me some nice stories about the impact of jazz and jazz musicians on his artistic life. There was only room for a taste of that part of the conversation in our Free Press story today, but I hope to revisit the topic with him later.

[alankin]

Nice article, Mark. It's nice that there isn't an age limit for getting the appointment.

[Chalupa]

Thanks for the article.

[brownie]

Interesting man. Good article

[Face of the Bass]

Sorry, I can't help myself...I took a class with Levine at NYU in 1999, as part of the MFA program there, and I really didn't like him at all. He was always putting people down, whether it be students or other famous poets, while projecting this image of himself as the tough everyman of American poetry. I was not a great poet, but he convinced me to give up on it altogether, and to pursue something else with my life (which I'm very glad I did, so I guess I can be thankful for that.) To me he was just an arrogant s.o.b., and I see that in an interview with the Times he talks about how he thinks the Library of Congress has named a number of really mediocre poets as the Poets Laureate. Well, as far as I'm concerned he can add his name to his own list of poets undeserving of the honor.

Really didn't want to crap on this thread, but my experiences working with this man were so negative that I just have to take the opportunity to rag on him at least a little bit.

[brownie]

Spoil sport

Interesting remarks

If we can't even trust poet laureates to be kind and understanding...

[Big Wheel]

Spoil sport

Interesting remarks

If we can't even trust poet laureates to be kind and understanding...

In my admittedly limited experience, most professional academic creative writers (especially poets) tend to be a little insane. You get characters in all the arts, but it's with poetry and theater that the eccentricity is often dialed up to 11.

[ejp626]

It's harder than ever to make a living as a poet or a playwright, and most of these creative types can only survive by teaching in MFA programs. Thus, in many cases you end up with the character flaws of typical artists married to the navel-gazing so common in academia. And then another bunch are there primarily to try to screw the co-eds.

One thing you don't normally find is poets that are naturally encouraging of their rivals or potential rivals -- which certainly begs the question of whether they should be teaching in MFA programs. The only teacher I ever encountered who was genuinely encouraging of students knew he was a minor poet and wasn't so competitive.

I've certainly enjoyed Levine's poetry, and that of his predecessor in the post, W.S. Merwin. I do find Levine's pose of being a working man's poet to be an odd stance. I mean, really when was the last time he worked on the shop floor? When he was in his 20s, 50+ years ago?

[Face of the Bass]

I studied poetry throughout college, and was blessed to have a wonderful, encouraging mentor in the poet Jane Shore. Then I went to NYU and Levine was the exact opposite of that, and suddenly, without any encouragement or helpfulness, I realized I didn't really want to be a poet. I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to work in history, so that's what I did. So in a way I am grateful that my encounters with Levine convinced me to give it up, as there is far too much "navel gazing" going on in poetry for my tastes anyway.

Levine's self-styled everyman persona is a joke, though. Butchers and factory workers aren't the ones reading his poetry or giving him prizes. It's the "ivory tower" academics that he is so disdainful towards that have nurtured and advanced his career.

[7/4]

Levine's self-styled everyman persona is a joke, though. Butchers and factory workers aren't the ones reading his poetry or giving him prizes. It's the "ivory tower" academics that he is so disdainful towards that have nurtured and advanced his career.

I've never even heard of him until a few days ago.

[JSngry]

Levine's self-styled everyman persona is a joke, though. Butchers and factory workers aren't the ones reading his poetry or giving him prizes. It's the "ivory tower" academics that he is so disdainful towards that have nurtured and advanced his career.

Oldest trick in the book - piss on somebody's shoes and then get them to pay you to shine 'em up.

[Mark Stryker]

Levine has indeed sometimes been criticized for, as Dwight Garner put it in the Times the other day, leaning too hard on his blue-collar bona fides. But I do think it's important to remember, as Garner also pointed out, that Levine has lived in Spain, translated the work of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo and edited a volume of Keats’s poems. He has also specifically repudiated the descriptions of himself as a barstool Whitman. Garner quotes him saying: “I’m so weary of that anti-intellectual stance: I’m just standing here suckin’ on a beer writin’ these lines until the pool room opens. I love intelligent poetry — Stevens, Ammons, Tom Sleigh, Robert Morgan.” While Levine's plainspoken language is intended to reach a far wider audience than the work of more opaque academic poets, he's not specifically writing for the butcher or the line worker -- he's channeling his own experience into his art and putting it out there for everyone. That's a different thing.

Levine's working-class voice and stance is not an act -- it is part of the deepest core of an identity that was forged through his family background, childhood and his crucial young adulthood. As with many artists, especially writers, early identity becomes the source of the work for the rest of their careers and there's no statute of limitations on such influences. Now, yes, of course hypocrisy can be an issue in some cases -- rich artists posing as jus' folks when they've been eating caviar served by butlers and haven't worried about paying the heating bill for decades. But Levine is by no means in that class. He's a poet who has made a modest living teaching, and he was well into middle-age or later when the awards came his way. He was 63 when he won the National Book Award and 67 when he won the Pulitzer.

Edited August 12, 2011 by Mark Stryker