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I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

Philip Levine

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Philip Levine
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: January 10
Died: 2015
Died: February 14
Anglicist
Educator
Essayist
Poet
Professor
School Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Filip Levin
Philippus Levine
Life
Son
Brought
Understand
Father
Cannot
Stills
Still
Years

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I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
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My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
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I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
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If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
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Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.
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My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
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But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
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I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
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Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
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Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
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You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.
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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Philip Levine
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My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
Philip Levine
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My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine