New poet laureate – humanitarian voice

PROFILE

New poet laureate hopes to widen universe of verse

By Carolyn Kellogg LOS ANGELES TIMES

         JIM WILSON THE NEW YORK TIMES                                                                                                                                                      

Philip Levine, who was raised in Detroit, captures the American industrial heartland in his works.

Philip Levine, the Pulitzer Prize winner who was named the nation’s poet laureate last week, has spent much of his career listening and reflecting on the voices of America.   

In his new job, which will begin in the fall, he has one goal, he said.    “I want to bring poetry to people who have no idea how relevant poetry is to their lives,” he said from his home in Fresno, Calif., where he is a professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno.    He also hopes to bring some lesser-known poets into the limelight.

Levine’s writing career spans 60 years. Despite receiving many honors — the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts — he said he wasn’t prepared to hear that he would succeed W.S. Merwin as poet laureate.    “I was stunned,” Levine said — “especially at my age, at 83.”

Informed by his personal experience working in factories, Levine’s poetry focuses on the moments and textures of the day-to-day life of the working class. Robert Pinsky, another poet laureate, once described Levine’s plain-spoken poetry as having “the strength of a living syntax.”    Politics, particularly issues of class, thread through his poetry.    “My memories are an enormous store of situations, details,” Levine said.

Poetry connects by “having enough of the world in there to make the reader say, ‘Uh-huh, I know where he is.’”    David St. John, a professor of poetry at the University of Southern California who studied under Levine, called the poet “an American institution” and said, “This is a long-overdue appointment.    “He’s traditionally been one of the humanitarian voices, the voice of social and political justice in American poetry,” St. John said.

A sharp critic of the political environment, Levine remarked: “I had thought that the worst collection of people was an English Department having a meeting, but the U.S. Congress runs away with the award.”    Levine, born in Detroit, started working at industrial jobs when he was 14. He discovered poetry in high school reading “terrible” Stephen Crane, he told Mona Simpson in an interview in The Paris Review published in 1988.

The U.S. poet laureate is selected by the librarian of Congress in Washington. The duties and responsibilities of the poet laureate, who receives a $35,000 stipend, are largely ceremonial, but a poet who wishes to can undertake any projects he or she likes during his tenure. His yearlong term will begin in October.

(I wish there had been reference to the titles of some of his work.  With his background and sensitive ears and eyes,   I just know that I would very much enjoy reading him.   Looking forward to it.   Jan)