Philip
Levine, a poet laureate in 2011-2012, died at his home in Fresno California on Saturday
14th February, 2015, of pancreatic and liver cancer, his wife said
Sunday. He was aged 87.
He was a native of
Detroit and son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Levine was profoundly shaped by
his working-class childhood and years spent in jobs ranging from driving a
truck to assembling parts at
a Chevrolet plant.
Although he taught
in several colleges, he had little in common with the academic poets of his
time. He was not abstract or insular or digressive. He consciously modeled
himself after Walt Whitman as a poet of everyday experience and cosmic wonder,
writing tactile, conversational poems about his childhood, living in Spain,
marriage and parenting and poetry itself.
"We've
lost a great presence in American poetry," said Edward Hirsch, a friend of
Levine and president of the Guggenheim Foundation.
Levine captured the
ways "ordinary people are extraordinary," while writing poems that
are accessible to readers, Hirsch said Sunday. "They move between the most
ordinary diction and high romantic heights."
Levine loved the
earth and sky as much as any poet of nature, but he came to be identified with
poems about work and workers, like "Buying and Selling" or
"Saturday Sweeping," in which employees toil under a leaky roof and
"blue hesitant light." In "What Work Is," the title piece
of his celebrated 1991 collection, he offers a grim sketch of standing on line
in the rain, hoping for a job.
He was among the
country's most decorated poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1995 for "The
Simple Truth" and National Book Awards for the 1979 collection
"Ashes" and for "What Work Is." His other honors included
the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and a National Book
Critics Circle Award. In naming Levine poet laureate in 2011, Librarian of
Congress James H. Billington cited his "plainspoken lyricism" and his
gift for expressing "the hard work we do to make sense of our lives."
Levine was born in
Detroit in 1928, the son of an auto-parts salesman who died when Philip was 5.
Although his mother found work as an office manager, Levine remembered his
childhood as "a succession of moves from first a house to a series of
ever-shrinking apartments."
The future poet was
a scrawny kid — 5 feet 2 inches, 125 pounds — who imagined himself in peril on
the streets of Detroit, "the most anti-Semitic city west of Munich."
He would imagine walking home from school with a rifle, shooting at Cadillacs,
Lincolns and other cars owned by rich people.
By the end 1942,
when he was just 14, he had worked at a soap factory and, like a first kiss,
discovered poetry. He would walk the streets late at night, speaking to the
"moon and stars about the emotional revolution that was raging"
inside him. In college, Wayne State University, he read the verse of Stephen
Crane and T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams and "immersed"
himself in the history of poetry.
"I
believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would
give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own," he
later observed.
Exhausting factory
hours made Levine so determined to write that he showed up in 1953 at the
University of Iowa's Writers Workshop even though a planned fellowship had
fallen through. He was told he could sign up for one course, but he enrolled in
three. One of his teachers, the poet John Berryman, became a mentor.
"He
seemed to feel I had something genuine," Levine told The Paris Review in
1988, "but that I wasn't doing enough with it, wasn't demanding enough
from my work. He kept directing me to poetry that would raise my standards."
Another poet, Yvor
Winters, allowed Levine to stay with him at his home in California and picked
him for a Stanford Writing Fellowship in 1958. Around the same time, Levine
joined the faculty of California State in Fresno and remained there for more
than 30 years. He also taught at Princeton University, Columbia University and
several other colleges.
His debut
collection, "On the Edge," came out in 1963. Other books included
"Not This Pig," ''They Feed the Lion" and "1933." For
a time in the 1960s, he lived in Spain, still under the rule of Francisco
Franco. Levine developed a deep bond to the country and to its people,
especially those who had fought Franco during the country's civil war of the
1930s. He wrote poems about Spain and helped translate works by the Spanish
poets Gloria Fuertes and James Sabines.
Back in the U.S.,
Levine was an opponent of the Vietnam War and defender of civil rights and the
rights of working people. In "Coming Home, Detroit 1968," he took in
"the charred faces" and "eyes boarded up" of his hometown,
which had been devastated by riots the year before. In 1968, he also was among
the writers who vowed not to pay taxes until the Vietnam War ended.
"I
can remember feeling full of the power of a just cause and believing that power
would not fail me. It failed me or I failed it. We didn't really change the way
Americans lived, unless you take hairstyles seriously," he once said.
"I'm not a man
of action; it finally comes down to that. I'm not so profoundly moral that I
can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I'm a
contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes." Levine was
married twice, to Patty Kanterman and to Frances J. Artley, his wife since
1954.
Rest in Peace, great man!
ReplyDelete