{"id":1025,"date":"2011-08-09T23:05:35","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T03:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/?p=1025"},"modified":"2011-08-09T23:06:53","modified_gmt":"2011-08-10T03:06:53","slug":"philip-levine-a-perfect-poet-laureate-for-these-tough-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2011\/08\/09\/philip-levine-a-perfect-poet-laureate-for-these-tough-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Levine: a perfect poet laureate for these tough times"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"e26b170012445c56d240655bdd03f7bf\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: left; margin: 10px 10px 10px 0;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5595881567027133\";\r\n\/* Medium Rectangle *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"8584504377\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 300;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 250;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"269\" data-permalink=\"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2011\/03\/06\/savannah-stopover-preview-7-sanders-bohlke\/window-17\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/window6-e1299440530555.jpg?fit=67%2C77\" data-orig-size=\"67,77\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;4.8&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;NIKON D40&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;1244646881&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;38&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;200&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0.033333333333333&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"window\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/window6-e1299440530555.jpg?fit=67%2C77\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/window6-e1299440530555.jpg?fit=67%2C77\" tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/window6-e1299440530555.jpg?resize=67%2C77\" alt=\"\" title=\"window\" width=\"67\" height=\"77\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-269\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/>I was thrilled to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/10\/books\/philip-levine-is-to-be-us-poet-laureate.html?hp\" target=\"_blank\">in the NYT <\/a>a few minutes ago that Philip Levine, the 83-year old Detroit native who held blue collar jobs as a young man, has been chosen by librarian of Congress James Billington as the nation&#8217;s next poet laureate. He succeeds W.S. Merwin, who was a pretty lowkey presence in the position as far as I know.<\/p>\n<p>The opening paragraph from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/poet.php\/prmPID\/19\" target=\"_blank\">Poets.org<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 10, 1928, Philip Levine was formally educated in the Detroit public school system and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University), Michigan&#8217;s only urban public research university. After graduation, Levine worked a number of industrial jobs, including the night shift at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory, reading and writing poems in his off hours. In 1953, he studied at the University of Iowa, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers&#8217; Workshop. There, Levine studied with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his &#8220;one great mentor.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And from that same website, an achingly beautiful poem:<\/p>\n<p>The Two<br \/>\nby Philip Levine<\/p>\n<p>When he gets off work at Packard, they meet<br \/>\noutside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He&#8217;s tired,<br \/>\na bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion<br \/>\non his own breath, he kisses her carefully<br \/>\non her left cheek. Early April, and the weather<br \/>\nhas not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.<br \/>\nThe two gaze upwards at the sky which gives<br \/>\nnothing away: the low clouds break here and there<br \/>\nand let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.<br \/>\nThe day is like us, she thinks; it hasn&#8217;t decided<br \/>\nwhat to become. The traffic light at Linwood<br \/>\ngoes from red to green and the trucks start up,<br \/>\nso that when he says, &#8220;Would you like to eat?&#8221;<br \/>\nshe hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,<br \/>\nthough spiced with things she cannot believe,<br \/>\n&#8220;wooden Jew&#8221; and &#8220;lucky meat.&#8221; He&#8217;s been up<br \/>\nlate, she thinks, he&#8217;s tired of the job, perhaps tired<br \/>\nof their morning meetings, but when he bows<br \/>\nfrom the waist and holds the door open<br \/>\nfor her to enter the diner, and the thick<br \/>\nodor of bacon frying and new potatoes<br \/>\ngreets them both, and taking heart she enters<br \/>\nto peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke<br \/>\nto the see if &#8220;their booth&#8221; is available.<br \/>\nF. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no<br \/>\nsecond acts in America, but he knew neither<br \/>\nthis man nor this woman and no one else<br \/>\nlike them unless he stayed late at the office<br \/>\nto test his famous one liner, &#8220;We keep you clean<br \/>\nMuscatine,&#8221; on the woman emptying<br \/>\nhis waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote<br \/>\nwith someone present, except for this woman<br \/>\nin a gray uniform whose comings and goings<br \/>\nwent unnoticed even on those December evenings<br \/>\nshe worked late while the snow fell silently<br \/>\non the window sills and the new fluorescent lights<br \/>\nblinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.<br \/>\nNot who ordered poached eggs, who ordered<br \/>\nonly toast and coffee, who shared the bacon<br \/>\nwith the other, but what became of the two<br \/>\nwhen this poem ended, whose arms held whom,<br \/>\nwho first said &#8220;I love you&#8221; and truly meant it,<br \/>\nand who misunderstood the words, so longed<br \/>\nfor, and yet still so unexpected, and began<br \/>\nsuddenly to scream and curse until the waitress<br \/>\nasked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed<br \/>\nyears before I left Detroit, the diner was burned<br \/>\nto the ground in &#8217;67, two years before my oldest son<br \/>\nfled to Sweden to escape the American dream.<br \/>\n&#8220;And the lovers?&#8221; you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.<br \/>\nTake a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,<br \/>\na wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume<br \/>\nof frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices<br \/>\nof spent breath after eight hours of night work.<br \/>\nCan you hear all I feared and never dared to write?<br \/>\nWhy the two are more real than either you or me,<br \/>\nwhy I never returned to keep them in my life,<br \/>\nhow little I now mean to myself or anyone else,<br \/>\nwhat any of this could mean, where you found<br \/>\nthe patience to endure these truths and confessions?<\/p>\n<!--CusAds0-->\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was thrilled to read in the NYT a few minutes ago that Philip Levine, the 83-year old Detroit native who held blue collar jobs as a young man, has been chosen by librarian of Congress James Billington as the&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2011\/08\/09\/philip-levine-a-perfect-poet-laureate-for-these-tough-times\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-1025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artsculture","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gN9R-gx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}