virtue of patience

LEVINE: I was unable to write any poetry about my working life while that was my working life. I tried a few times. And the poems were hysterical. I think they were just - you know, I couldn't control them. My anger was so overwhelming that I couldn't cope with it, just as I couldn't write about my boyhood very effectively until I was 40. It was still too powerful for me. But I'm patient, so I hung in there. And that's probably by chief virtue as a writer is my patience. So I waited, and I kept trying to write about factory work but I kept throwing the poems away. And the first poem I ever published about working in a factory, I was, I think, 31 or 2, but I don't like the poem anymore.

GROSS: Can you give me a sense of what was going wrong in the factory poems when you were still there? Is there anything...

LEVINE: Yes, I can. The language was overblown. You know, I wanted to use the word ‘eternity’ and - you know. I wanted to use a kind of Latin diction to - almost a Miltonic diction and a great chorus - build up a great chorus of sound and - to dramatize the horror show of some of the places I had worked. And I didn't have any - there was no tenderness in it for the people that I worked with. There was no - and that was a, you know - that was part of the reward that I got for those years was the people I was meeting, even though you didn't talk to them that much because places were often so loud. But you'd meet them afterwards or you'd make friends with them and spend time with them. And they weren't getting in the poems at all. The poems were, you know, my poor soul being hammered out of shape by General Motors. And they were a bit self-indulged.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, 1991.

room to be yourself

“For the power you so dearly aspire to, Levine, you must turn to the master, Milton, the most powerful poet in the language, though you might do well to avoid Latinate vocabulary. Have you studied Latin? Levine: “No.” “You might consider doing so; that way you’ll know what to avoid when you’re stealing from Milton. Do you have another favorite among your contemporaries?” Levine: “Dylan Thomas.” Berryman: “It doesn’t show, Levine, it doesn’t show. You’ve done a superb job of masking that particular debt. How have you managed that?” Levine: “I didn’t. I wrote through my Dylan Thomas phase and quit. It was impossible for me to write under his influence and not sound exactly like him except terrible.” Berryman: “Levine, you’ve hit upon a truth. Certain poets are so much themselves they should not be imitated: they leave you no room to be yourself, and Thomas was surely one of them, as was Hart Crane, who probably ruined the careers of more young poets than anything except booze. Levine, you might go to the source of Dylan’s own lyrical mysticism, and who would that be?” Silence. “Mr. Justice?” Justice: “Blake.” “Exactly, you might go to Blake, who is so impossibly lyrical and inventive no one in the world has the talent to sound like him.” In an unusually hushed voice he recited all of Blake’s early “Mad Song,” ending:

     I turn my back to the east
     From whence comforts have increas’d;
     For light doth seize my brain
     With frantic pain.

“Better to learn from a poet who does not intoxicate you,” said Berryman, “better to immerse yourself in Hardy, whom no American poet wants to sound like. A great poet seldom read.”

—Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” The Bread of Time (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)