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My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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
Poems
Suppose
Somebody
Talking
Way
Earliest

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My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
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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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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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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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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 seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
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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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How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
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My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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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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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
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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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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
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Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
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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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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.
Philip Levine
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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.
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
Philip Levine
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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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I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
Philip Levine