A Word on Words; 3128; Phillip Levine

i'm dancing in the once again welcome to our own words our guest today is philip levine i think america's premier poet welcome to oregon where it's well possible truce won the pulitzer prize but that's only one of seventeen books of poetry you've written as well as toward an all of our views of their time their time is a dobro time why toward a barge than a year old enough to be entitled to full barton yes i didn't want her and an autobiography for a number reasons says i put the book together i realize that these enormous holes and what could have been an autobiography example there's nothing in the whole book about about marriage and fatherhood and its joys and catastrophes love what areas it's largely a vet

people who'll infringed on me your eye and fringe on them all for me it's really really about the people who formerly both professionals teachers an amateur teachers who have most profound teacher's overhead so i wanted to be a kind of it in the book looking in other directions but in a way reflecting on those influences in order to show how i became a poet i became not so much the main but the poll you you are an acclaimed poet i mean i i don't know about how a poet makes it in today's society there was a time when i think a poet's really were read and revered and their

work was to look forward to it seems to me in that term it must be very very tough for a poet to find a place to be published although with your reputation i think that's not necessarily true in your days but my guess is there was a time when it was very tough a fun place to be published yet it's impossible impossible here oh oh i mean in the beginning i think my family thought i was crazy odd but it was it kept me out of trouble was put it that way and i never as a young person and by young i mean under forty never believed that i would do this and make a living at it that there would always be some other source of income or or would have begun and so the chore became a

hollow eyed by enough time to do it then and then of course i got married and had children and you don't provide for a family you know we were it was stuff how's it feel to be called on the walt whitman of the industrial heartland are to be described as compared with william carlos williams his great damage just terrific i mean they're my heroes in a way not in a way they are my heroes especially when cars ways for me the great him a man who you know we devote his life to poetry but to move to a community was that he was a community doctor he was a great friend to many people he's seemed open to the poetry that others were writing younger people everybody for his whole lifetime you just a man of enormous tager deep generosity

and rope criticism of fiction rob plays wrote everything and meanwhile carried out a practice as a doctor then was beloved by his patients and in and wonderful new jersey and pretty awful period new jersey around paterson i read your poetry and then there's not much moon and june too there's not much romance in that sense the media understand them described romance and it's from the days in the auto factories to the time to study the holidays i guess first it weighing now wayne state the bum you traveled abroad have produced experiences you wrote

movingly about sorts plane so i read you thought of your poetry as storytelling and yet and you know and in the sense of the john it's not a narrative poetry i don't think maybe you think it is occasionally it is and upon called the walker tom jefferson really is a narrative or a by in large are mixing narrative of lyric poetry i'm in a kind of meditative i go use the story to move into a meditation constantly so it's a mixed john rowden something that in a way i've found but they were found and beautifully done robert penn warren he was a model for me a poet who could handle a storyline and yet move away from mcginty and to other concerns and keep a year and move back as it courses terrific fiction writer so he was he was a master

hardy thomas hardy was another model for me some of the great novelist who also turned the poetry and they were marvels that are used extensively and he'd take you from the edge to read a poem that moved me having never been in those of plants by having read about the sounds likes him and strife and slow intention in trouble and violent it took to win workers' rights i was touched by us sweet will you would you read sweet will the years by experian and to him if half the suite will the man who stood beside me thirty four years ago this night

fell onto the concrete oily floor detroit transmission and we stepped carefully over him into a wake and then went back to his press it was friday night and the others drama that every friday he drank more than he could hold and fail and it wasn't any dumber for it so just didn't get up at his own sweet lou or he'll hit you at his own suite will was just with the old black man said to me and he smiled the smile of one who was still surprised that dong graying the cracked and broken windows could start assault to singing in the co star truce and wipe the board back of his head with a crumpled handkerchief and looked at his own blood as though woodward dirt and puzzled just how it got there and denny white the hands of his fingers carefully monitored time the way the mother wipes the fingers of a sleeping child and climbed back on his wooden soda pop

case to his punch press and hollered at all of us over the oceanic roar of work addressing us by our names the nation's nigger kite conti river at but again the tune at all to like america the beautiful and they danced a little two step and smile showing the floor stained teeth left in the front and took another sort of cheery brand in truth it was no longer friday for night it turned to day as it often does for those were patient so it was saturday in the year of forty eight in the very heart of the city of man where your cadillac cars get manufactured in truth all those people are dead they've gone up to heaven singing time on my hands or begin the beginning and the cadillacs of all gone back to

earth and nothing that we made that night is worth more than me and in truth i'm not worth a thing or what might be denied too bad eyes and my one long nose and my breath of old lies in my sad tales of men with the earth break them back each one to dirty blogger bloody they're not worth a thing just like it was set up by magic birth when the stars collided and fire fell from great space integrate space and people rose one by one from coal beds to tend a world that runs on and on and its own suite will let's check that in before the great deal you know i'll be somewhere and yet i read that you talk about a man in cypriot know and you've said

that he was the only anarchist you'd know who knew he was a narrative and then and then i ran across and this may be an excerpt from lebanon has read again here comeback cypriot o'mara said well when i undress in the role of your brain tell me again at this world will be ours in my dreams and my life soprano come back out of the way and what prompted that ball the memory of that guy i was a young guy will i must have been thirteen and i worked at a school for dry cleaning up and this guy would first saw you know some

family i mean he didn't really enter my consciousness that powerfully at first was a political time it was served there were two early on and there were all these arguments going on in this place political arguments because we had a guy who was a co maker there who was a real star anise impossible overbearing and then did you guys who ran the store were italian immigrants who because of course italy was on the other side of the accents were vying job be a patriotic to each other and gradually became aware of this quiet man who went about his work with the with the dignity and a

precision that intrigued me is english was very turned out he was a survivor of the spanish civil war and to have a lawyer the ad had survived the spanish civil war ii rai it here the scars on his shoulders and arms and he explained that they were he called them the big gifts of my country analyst carl he have to give gifts of my country and there wasn't there was such a remarkable dignity about him and he was such an idealist and his notion was said wong spend one's life working for a society of justice and decency in which all things were sheared years ago in the book will anarchist you could stay home is so he had found the old christian society wanted a quick re created under a kind of

heaven on earth and when you got to serve realist equipped and said you know what chance and we got to do such a thing in the face of the power government capital and what had he would always say something like we don't win tomorrow philip widow when the next day it takes awhile there was on and he had his patience about him and with the gifts of this country exhibited you know we paid a price those cars here they have paid a heavy price for this wisdom in this beauty so i was it became a kind of teacher to me i thought this is the model of human being a man who wants to share all the wealth in the world with everyone on the va at univision that i thought was worth trying to listen to a sand to fill you're just tuning in were

talking with the pulitzer prize winning poet philip levine about is focus on truth about other books seventeen all the critics enough of votes to get published or when you make the critics who look down their nose at the work of writers your work is most often acclaimed occasionally case really i really don't hear in there and somebody uses and so i was not aware that his work is still evolving he's still going at nine had a villa critics and by large i don't read about myself a lot my wife operates the

way as was canaries do and coal mines you know she goes ahead and maine and says a voice a fill up no need to consult the us is john furey at dr ira the worst are few i think i ever got to a woman named helen chandler big we at harvard and an influential critic and i was staying in another man's house and i he got the new york review of books and i opened it up and she was revealing adrienne rich and me did for she savaged under and rich who i think is one of our best poet and then she said to me and i put it down i thought that when he's getting at dinnertime a day then at that point i knew i had become and then fill holes that's david criticism i made it didn't really mean it didn't mean they have their job whatever the

hell it is it's the first it is to of course evaluate what were going to loosen dave i don't i don't think it is to savage i recently read at a memoir by the widow widow of random giraffe and for him ending near the end of that you quoted a review by a man named joseph bennett that appeared in the new york times and was so personal so say he still nasty and so incompetent that man was a fabulous poet and in the crib ben its inability to see what was there to see also that darrelle work was growing and changing he was judging it by what it had been willie had improved he was an enemy the

world war poet forever war two was over he was writing a different subject different style different voice is one of his best books just to terrible dreadful and i show to my wife and we figured there had to be something personally when he couldn't be that he could be that nasty its effect on criticisms you that perfect job for real jerk and ingo and really creating havoc and staining people's lives i guess it has a useful function it i get lots of practical unhelpful criticism from other poets and their tough on me because a and tough on them and i needed on that emily dickinson at war with and i'm not a great genius and the guy who got worried that through lots to work and getting lots of help from shark people and that i still need that but i don't i don't find these professional

critics of much use speaking of another type of criticism i don't think they're the same award in poetry including the pulitzer that you had not one but i know that you i know that you want a grant from the nea and i know the argument will offer years were then they pay much attention to it and suddenly it was immersed in criticism because it was funding work that some found objectionable some found obscene some found pornographic what's your reaction to the rollie nea then the controversy that surrounded it wealthier senate can kick you is everybody pays the price for the worst garbage and some of the stuff that the nea fund that

was due to you know what i mean and aren't in the visual arts you know let's let's fond of that fund the picture the virgin mary immersed in year and then judgment on the brain that sounds like a high school track didn't i mean and so then the whole endowment has to take it garbage for one person's duke the decision i think by and large when when the state the hens to use public funds to promote the arts which i'm all in favor into trouble because the average you can always appealed to me to mediocrity the mediocre to say isn't this terrible where we doing this anyway and oracle what is the public that he can hold itself up as a judge for poetry says it never reads it anyway and i think i think you're asking for

trouble but you sometimes it's worth having a filing the nea is a lot of good work as a navy a lot and it's found all out a terrific stuff the sad part about it is the public knows few stupid mistakes they made it up as we speak relation at war and recently a poem war by you appeared and new yorker you about sharing that with i know you haven't yet have an avocado that then you go before the workers the war is not the war we have now that will become clear before the war saying his mother coming home he nails behind a parked car one hand over his mouth to still was breathing and she passes climbs the stairs and again the street is his we're in an american city toledo sometime last century there could be buffalo or

flint places of the same except for the names and eight or nine even though eleven kids of the same without an identity without a soul things were bad teeth in bed clothes we could give them names we could name the mother gertrude and diverse small office job typing bills of lading eight hours a day five and a half days a week we could give her dreams of marriage the boss is already married but we don't because she loads him as her son solve she loves the ones still hiding with one knee down on the concrete drawing the days last week he's had feelings young as he is you could feel heat cold pain just as a dog would like a dog will answer to his name co ed column they saw ali salim boykin there he didn't bark

he doesn't sit he doesn't dave burt stand one poll in a gesture submission except his whole name even as a kid he stands and faces us just as eleven years from now he'll stand and face his death flaming torre im on a bridgehead a grey monitor one gertrude goes and typing mechanically into the following winter night you as brick pollitt you want well i can't speak for all sorts of james dickey's seen fairly enthusiastic about it his experience might wooden my editors much more like that will for doma great bridgeport to award won a sense of the immense loss in the sense of the useless and seventies it was a way of solving anything

i suppose one can conceive of a war that would be necessary it would be hard to argue that we have any choice about going to war or two after especially after pearl harbor but it always seems to me the failure of either of you know of other ways of resolving our international problems in the case of this current war that to you know just seems an appalling event there was no need for it except the intense need early on the part of the bush administration to flex its muscle and showed could be done to preserve the election to come to to feast on whatever spoils or will be in the rebuilding and also a way of spending an enormous amount of money so many of our social programs which i think they despise can dry dries dry up to huge part and parcel of what i'm afraid we are living with these days in the

hill that almost sound like a poet a poll among written we have just about a minute left we just take that little tight and tell me what you think about the future of poetry i think in our aid poetry has become more important than ever largely because language is arriving at us so fast too papers radio television and the misuse of it is so gross so blind getting so corrupted you know we just we just had peace through war and freedom to annihilation and i think one of the central factor of poetry is that line which must be used in an inning in the regional clean precise an honest way and as long as it can do that it has a room you know there's room for it now and forever

only been talking to philip levine pulitzer prize winning poet i thank you for being here and they've all of you for being here and doesn't offer a word on words reading