For the week of August 29 - September 4, 2001

‘The unknown 
poet of Fresno’

An interview with Philip Levine

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By ADAM TANOUS
Express Arts Editor

If you were to bump into Philip Levine in his stomping grounds of Fresno, Calif., or on a subway in Brooklyn, N.Y., you might just take him for a regular guy: funny, unassuming, well spoken, maybe a guy who works on a highway construction site or in an auto plant.

Philip Levine Photo by Frances Levine

The fact is, Levine has had such jobs and others like them. Further, he has a gift for making people laugh. He also happens to have a remarkable gift for poetry.

Levine published his first book of poetry in 1963. Thirty-six years later, he published "The Mercy," his 18^th book of poetry. Along the way, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Simple Truth," the National Book Award for "What Work Is," the National Book Critics Award for "7 Years from Somewhere," the American Book Award for Poetry for "Ashes: Poems New and Old," the Lenore Marshall Award for "The Names of the Lost" and several other awards and fellowships. In 1994, he published a collection of essays titled "The Bread of Time."

Levine, who is participating in the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference this week, recently spoke with me from his home in Fresno.

IME: In you book "What Work Is" there seems to be a sense of community and camaraderie among the factory workers, a world you lived in for a while. Poetry is such a solitary affair, do you ever long for that sense of belonging to a group?

Levine: You know a lot of that factory work, while you are doing the work there isn’t much communication because of the noise … Generally, I worked the night shift or the swing shift. The one I preferred was the swing shift, and we’d go out for a beer afterwards. And you would really get to know the people you worked with. Since the age of 30 I’ve been teaching, but, to be honest, I enjoyed people in my working class days more than the academics. They seem closer to the world, to life, to basic things. They were more openly affectionate. They were being more natural. Academia is a rather artificial world … I remember going East when I was 25 and sitting in on some classes at Harvard. I was struck by the formality and affectations. They had these fraudulent accents, and I’d say, "Is he English?"—No, he’s from Brooklyn. And I thought, where do they get these guys?

IME: It seems to me poetry is grounded in sensory perceptions and it is also an intellectual affair. How does a poem start for you?

Levine: I never start with an idea. I always start from the sensuous thing. Usually it is an image. Sometimes there will be a certain melodic phrase that occurs to me and that will generate what follows, but more often it is visual imagery or tactile imagery … Never an idea. When I was young, 18 or 19, yeah, I did (start with an idea) and I realized, Christ, they’re all clichés. Also, early on I was beginning to discover that writing was a process of learning. There were insights that you hadn’t articulated that you might bring to the surface through searching with language … About 20 or 21, I thought, forget the idea and see where the language takes me. Often it took me to remarkable discoveries about my own nature and my feelings.

IME: Teaching poetry. What is the one thing, if nothing else, you hope gets through to your students?

Levine: Oh, I’ll settle for a number of things. The first thing I want to show is the use of language is very special, and they have to pay enormous attention to what suggestions are made by the language, to its sounds, the implications of the word in terms of tone and class of word, to investigate the voice they are hearing … And I really want them to enjoy the poems. I never teach poems they don’t like.

IME: So, you want them to love poetry, in general?

Levine: Yeah, to open themselves to the wealth of it. They’re not all going to … I try not to present it as something, you know, you’re life is impoverished if you don’t read poetry—because it’s not. I do try to make the point that if it isn’t poetry, it should be music, it could be fiction, it could be painting … There should be some artistic element in their lives. A lot of people don’t dig poetry. I’ve got people in my family who don’t.

IME: You have a twin. Does he write poetry?

Levine: No, thank God.

IME: You wrote fiction at the beginning of your career. What made you move towards poetry? Was it a conscious decision?

Levine: Yeah, it was. I was about 25 and I realized fiction required a kind of patience I didn’t have. You had to stake out years before you were able to bring something to completion, say a novel. With poems, I could work intensely for days, but that wasn’t what was required of a novelist—it’s patience, regular schedules. I’d get 70 pages into a novel and I’d be exhausted.

IME: I suppose if you write a bad poem it’s easier to throw out than a novel you’ve spent two years writing.

Levine: Well, it’s not ‘if’ it’s when ... I throw away, certainly, half of what I write … There is no sin in writing badly. The crime is not recognizing it.

IME : Has your writing life turned out to be what you originally thought it would be?

Levine: It’s not that distant. It’s distant in some ways … When I started out writing … I felt that much of what I was reading was changing me in rather drastic ways. So I assumed that if I wrote well that would be the effect on my country (laughs) … I was really naïve. Then when I started publishing poetry, I learned these magazines have a circulation of 5000 in a country of 200 million—forget it—In that regard, I calmed down. As I look back on it, it’s kind of a relief. You know, I’m not the silent legislator of the Universe—I’m the unknown poet of Fresno and Brooklyn.

IME: Was there a moment in time when you remember thinking—ah, that’s what poetry is all about, that’s what I need to be doing?

Levine: The most illuminating moment I ever had was when I was reading a contemporary poet, Galway Kinnell … it was about 1961 … I saw this poem of his, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World" … And it is a fantastic depiction of the joys and difficulties of life on Avenue C … It’s a long poem, about 800 lines … and I thought, this is what ambition is about, this is what reaching for a big subject is about… I was in my 30s and I was probably thinking I was an extraordinarily good poet. And I looked at this and said, Phil, you’ve got a ways to go. You’ve got another couple hills to climb.

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