(Christopher Buckley, Vievee Francis, Edward Hirsch, Dorianne Laux, and Malena Morling) Five poets who were close to Philip Levine and his work speak about his life and his influence on a generation, and read selections from his poetry, along with one original poem that was significantly influenced by his work.

Published Date: August 24, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Christopher Buckley by v Francis Edward Hirsch, Dorian Locks, and Molina Morley. You will now hear Dorian Locke provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Dorian Lux and I'll be moderating today's panel on Philip Levine, who was my mentor and friend until he passed away on Valentine's Day 2014. That was a sad Saturday morning in America though. Today we all want to celebrate his life and work with a few memories and poems. Thank you all for coming to help us celebrate a poet who meant something special in particular to each of us here on the stage and who meant something to each of you out there, which is why you are here in his book of essays, the Bread of Time, Phil said at last, I am happy for now. I know that before time eats me, I shall eat time like bread and like bread. Time will sleep within me. My time is coming. I carry it here in my heart, a holy stone that takes and receives the gifts of light.

Speaker 2 (00:01:31):

As so many of you know, Philip Levine was one of our most highly honored, widely read and dearly beloved American poets in his lifetime. He published 16 books of poems as well as several volumes of translations and two collections of essays. His list of honors includes two national book awards, two national book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, the Wallace Stevens Award, and finally the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Levine served as the United States poet laureate from 2011 to 2012. Philip Levine was one of the leading poetic voices of his generation. Edward Hirsch called him a large ironic Walt Whitman of the industrial heartland. He was a professor emeritus of English at Fresno State. After teaching there from 1958 to 1992, Levine and fellow poets and professors and dear friends, Peter Everwine and CJ Hens EK established the creative writing program at Fresno State. Even after his retirement, Levine remained deeply connected to the program for the rest of his life. The annual Philip Levine Prize for Poetry honors, promising new voices and poetry each year, and a little known fact the Fresno State Winery produces a limited edition special wine blend to honor Philip Levine

Speaker 2 (00:02:59):

With the proceeds benefiting the creative writing students through the Philip Levine scholarship. In June, 2015, the New York Public Library celebrated the life legacy and influences of Philip Levine with an exhibition called It's Me Singing Gone. But here the poetry of Philip Levine showcasing Levine's papers as well as original documents from some of his influences, including T s Elliot, John Berryman, Walt Whitman, and John Keats. Joining me today is Christopher Buckley whose star journal selected poems will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2016. His 20th book of poetry backroom at the Philosophers Club was recently published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He has edited the condition of the spirit, the life and work of Larry Levi, an early student among the many who worked with Philip Levine. He is also edited on the poetry of Philip Levine, stranger to Nothing, university of Michigan Press and first light a fest shrift for Philip Levine on his 85th birthday, he'll be chairing an A W P tribute panel to Omar Salinas later today.

Speaker 2 (00:04:10):

Also with us is ViiV Francis, author of three books of Poetry Blue Tail Fly, Wayne State University Press, which was Philip Levine's alma mater Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Kum second book prize and recently released Forest primeval, which has been shortlisted for the Pen Open book award. Her work has appeared numerous publications including Angles of Ascent, a Norton anthology of contemporary African-American poetry. She's an associate editor for Kalu and currently a visiting poet with us over at North Carolina State University. She also teaches with us at Pacific University's low residency M F A program and she's just been offered a full tenure track position at Dartmouth. We're honored to welcome Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur fellow who has published nine books of poems including The Living Fire, new and Selected Poems and Gabriel, A poem and five books of Prose among them, how to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller and a Poet's Glossary.

Speaker 2 (00:05:14):

He's president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Hirsch edited Phil's last two books, the Last Shift, his final collection of poems and My Lost Poets, his last book of essays. They will be out from N in November. He'll be reading with Natasha Trethaway on Saturday night. And lastly, Molina Morlin joins us. Molina was born in Stockholm and grew up in southern Sweden. She's the author of two books of poetry, ocean Avenue and Astoria. She has also published translations of work by noble laureate Thomas Trans Roamer into English as well as the collection 1933 by Philip Levine into Swedish. She's co-editor of the anthology Swedish Writers on Writing forthcoming this year from Trinity University Press, Morlan has received a Guggenheim fellowship and Atlanta Literary Fellowship. She's professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. For myself, my first book Awake was introduced by Philip Levine. I think it's safe to say that without Philip Levine, I would not be here with you now, nor would I have published the books that have followed. He was instrumental in my life and I think you'll hear in all our lives as both poet and human being. Each of us will speak a bit about Phil and Rita's selection from his poetry, along with one original poem that was significantly influenced by his work. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 3 (00:06:54):

Thanks Dorianne. It's an honor to be here with my friends and colleagues to celebrate and give thanks for Philip Levine, his genius, his generosity and his importance to all of our lives. Phil's poetry of work emphasized in blazing detail the dignity of the worker of the individual. It was singular in American letters, I think we all know that, but it was maybe half of what he accomplished. The media articles for his appointment as poet laureate. The many obituaries pointed singularly to the work poems, but it's important to remember the poems of the Spanish Civil War, the lyric narratives, cherishing family, the translations from the Spanish, and I think especially the incredible long poems throughout his career. No one, absolutely no one wrote as many inventive, brilliant long poems over the last 50 years, and I commend them to you when you go back. Looking through his books finally, often overlooked or Phil's metaphysical poems in which he forged a secular spiritualism, envisioning hope for our spirits and our lives and praising our collective being. The poem of Phil's I'll read at the end. Today is one of these metaphysical poems and we're grateful for the entire range of Phil's work, but we're even more grateful for the man, our friend, comrade, father, husband, and mentor. There was just no one more generous with his time, gifts, insight, and experience. There are four anthologies of his students who went on to publish and have careers in poetry. There are hundreds who have a life in poetry and hence a life because we knew or studied with Phil Levine. No one more generous.

Speaker 3 (00:08:56):

I was 29 when I came to teach at Fresno State. I had a number of friends who had won book awards, money prizes, tenure track jobs. I was teaching three classes of composition eight, nine and 11 and I felt I'd been a little left behind in the dust, but then I received the major poetry award of my life. One you couldn't apply for. I was assigned to share an office with Phil. I worked in the morning. He came in in the afternoon and I would sit there for two years grading papers, waiting for him to show up. And all I had to do was throw out a question about a poem in a recent magazine or a particular poet and my education in life, my tutorials in poetry began. He spent a lot of time with me and most of what I learned, if slowly about what it takes to be a poet and an ethical and democratic human being, I learned from the time Phil spent talking to me. My favorite memory of Phil helping with a poem goes back 10 years or so. He helped me with the three, maybe four poems in the last 43 years.

Speaker 3 (00:10:22):

Everybody went to Phil for help. He had all these former students who sent him and then lots of people who weren't his students and he responded to everyone in the years before there was email, if you can think back, he was a letter writer and he responded in long, wonderful letters to everybody by hand, usually with his Pelican 800 and brown ink on yellow legal pads. I think Larry Levi had a couple hundred letters there were at the Berg Library in New York. I had about 150 that are at the Benecke and Yale. He was just tireless in responding and help. So I tried not to ask him for too much help with poems because I knew he was avalanche always. I don't know how he found time to write all those books. He was writing so many letters and then helping people. But the last poem he helped me with was a poem called Poverty. I'd sent it to my usual editors. We all have pals that slash and burn our stuff and get back to us if we're smart and they'd done their worst or their best and it still wasn't working. And I thought, what do I do now? And I realized that if I sent this to Phil, he's not going to pull any punches. And so I highlighted about 20 lines of the poem that I thought were suspect and he got back immediately and said, yeah, cut those.

Speaker 3 (00:11:53):

So I mean, I was doing pretty well. I knew what to get rid of. But then he said, and you need help with the ending. So he rewrote the ending of the poem and sent it to me and said, okay, send me back the next draft. So I tightened it up, incorporated the ending, sent it back and he said, yes, this is more like it. He said, except the ending needs work. He rewrote the ending this time better and he sent it back and I looked at it and I didn't let my ego get in the way. I was smart enough to know a gift when I got one and I said, thank you very much. He put a note in there. He said, anytime you have a poem this good, feel free to send it. No pressure. I sent the poem Poverty along with a few other poems to five points.

Speaker 3 (00:12:47):

It won their James Dickey award and I was really surprised. You know how you do this? You send out and you never hear anything. And then I thought, well, it's not surprising considering the help I had. So I figured I owed Phil a bottle of wine, a good wine, and actually I owe him much more than that. So I'll read the poem, poverty from Rolling the Bones, and it should have Phil's name on it too. This is a poem about not only the impious situation most poets find themselves in, but also spiritual poverty. It has a quote from says that says, so the anger of the poor has two rivers against many seas. Viejo wrote that with God we're all orphans. I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador, so starvation keeps moving on. Its bony Boro passed his door. No cars, computers, basketball shoes, not a bottle cap of hope for the life ahead, just enough to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud of flies.

Speaker 3 (00:13:57):

It's the least I can do and so I do it. I followed the dry length of Mission Creek to the sea and have forgotten to pray for the creosote, the blue salvia, let alone for pork bellies and soybean futures. Listen, there are 900,000 Avon ladies in Brazil. Billions are spent each year on beauty products worldwide, 28 billion on haircare, 14 on skin conditioners despite children begging on the dumps, selling their kidneys, anything that's briefly theirs. 9 billion a month for a war in Iraq of chicken bone for foreign aid. I'm the prince of small potatoes. I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching the crusts I have to offer. I have no grounds for complaint though deep down where it's anyone's guess, I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious creed pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard. A little aperitif beneath Italian pines, but who cares what I wear or drink the rain.

Speaker 3 (00:14:59):

Know the rain is something we share at devours, the beginning and the end. The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice, box cars, snake eyes, and the horse you rode in on. Not one metaphorical breadcrumb and tow, not a single saluto. From the patronizers of the working class, Pharaoh Oil, Congress, the commissioner of baseball, all who will eventually take the same trolley car to hell or a SL heep on the outskirts of Cleveland. I have an a t M card, a AAA plus card. I can get cash from machines be towed 20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling. In disillusionment. My bones are as worthless as the next guys against the stars, against the time it takes light to expand its currency across the cosmic vault, I have what everyone has, the overdrawn statement of the air and my blood newly rich with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark. My breath going out equally with every atom of weariness or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I. That's a brilliant ending I came up with, isn't it? Geez.

Speaker 3 (00:16:27):

This poem I'm going to read of Phil's is called Ascension. It's a poem you won't find anywhere but in unselected poems. This is over at Greenhouse Review in the book fair at table 1163, there was a plan early on that I presented in. Phil went for it. That new selected came out and there are all these good poems left. I said, don't leave them. Let's collect them up and publish 'em. And so we did and he put in a section of new poems, all of which appeared in his books except for this one and we just read this and had it on a broadside at the tribute to Phil and Fresno in February.

Speaker 3 (00:17:07):

This shows the other side of his range. This is the metaphysical side ascension. Now I see the stars are ready for me and the light falls upon my shoulders evenly so little light that even the night birds can't see me robed in black flame. I'm alone rising through clouds and the lights of distant cities until the earth turns its darker side away and I am ready to meet my guardians or speak again the first words born in time. Instead it is like that dream in which a friend leaves and you wait parked by the side of the road that leads home until you can feel your skin wrinkling and your hair growing long and tangling in the winds and still you wait because you've waited so long below the earth has turned to light. But unlike the storied good in paradise, I see no going and coming.

Speaker 3 (00:18:07):

None of the pain I would've suffered had I merely lived. At first I can remember my wife, the immense depth of her eyes and her smooth brow and morning light, the long life body moving about her garden day after day at ease. In the light of those brutal summers, I can see my youngest son again moving with the slight swagger of the carpenter, hitching up his belt of tools. I can even remember the feel of certain old shirts against my back and shoulders and how my arms ached after a day of work. Then I forget exhaustion, I forget love. Forget the need to be a man, the need to speak the truth to close my eyes and talk to someone distant but surely listening. Then I forget my own trees at evening moving in the days last, heat like the children of the wind. I forget the hunger for food, for belief, for love. I forget the fear of death, the fear of living forever. I forget my brother, my name, my own life. I have risen somewhere. I'm a God somewhere. I'm a holy object. Somewhere I am.

Speaker 4 (00:19:35):

Hello, I'd like to speak today on Philip Levine's impact upon Detroit upon myself. I'm going to open with a poem of his, they feed they lion, one of my favorites. I just love this.

Speaker 4 (00:19:58):

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, out of black bean and wet slate bread. Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar out of creosote gasoline drive shafts, wooden dollies. They lion and grow out of the gray hills of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride West Virginia to kiss my ass out of buried aunties. Mother's hardening like pounded stumps out of stumps, out of the bones' knee to sharpen and the muscles to stretch. They lion grow. Earth is eating trees, fence posts, gutted cars earth is calling in. Her little ones come home. Come home from pig balls from the ferocity of pig driven to holiness from the fur ear and the full jowl come the repose of the hung belly from the purpose they lion and grow from the sweet glues of the trotters come the sweet kinks of the fist from the full flower of the hams, the thorax of caves from bow down come rise up. They lion in from the reeds of shovels, the grained arm that pulls the hands they lion in grow from my five arms and all my hands from all my white sins forgiven, they feed from my car passing under the stars. They lion from my children inherit from the oak. Turn to a wall they lion from they sack and they belly opened and all that was hidden burning on the oil stained earth. They feed they lion and he comes.

Speaker 4 (00:22:00):

I put this in seven or eight parts. One when Levine was made poet lawyer of the us I was sitting in a coffee house in Hamtramck, Michigan, a small city with its own mayor, fire and police departments and city council and historically Polish city and it is seldom had a mayor that wasn't of Polish descent, completely surrounded by the predominantly African-American city of Detroit, metropolitan Detroit where thousands upon thousands of blacks from the south migrated in order to work in Ford's. Factories where thousands upon thousands of Eastern European immigrants were encouraged to move to work in those same factories alongside a migration of Appalachian miners. Everyone was paid and the pay was good pay for that day in Detroit, we asked each other which car company our parents worked for. Our parents may have asked each other, which car company do you work for? Industrial, gray, earnest and pathologically led by the ethos of the assembly line.

Speaker 4 (00:23:12):

That is the Detroit Levine knew and whatever your racial background you worked on the line and it is by his lines that I came to know him. I never met him, but on the day he was made laureate, I cried from pride of place and so did a buddy of mine who worked at the Atlas plant that supplied the car company sitting near me. He was ours. It didn't matter that California took his attention any more than it mattered that California had taken Barry Gordy's attention. He was of us and us was a diverse body of plant workers, writers, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, readers of newspapers proud that something of Detroit was being lauded and it was about time too. Detroit is not an easy city. I hate easy cities. I hate the insistence in the easy place upon conventional values, the quietude that adores itself, the rimmed and solarity.

Speaker 4 (00:24:15):

I am no easy poet, straightforward in the main. My nails get dirty. I like a Detroit boy and a t-shirt and flannel, unpretentious, enraged because things ain't fair. I like girlfriends that bring you pie and give you the keys to their cars because you don't have one or sell you their piece of shit because it's better than nothing. Levine is read by a broad swath of Detroiters because he had pride of place and we loved that place. Black riders love that place. We feed our lions and we name them, we walk our lions on dog chains with swagger we roll deep and hard and only those outside of us think black and white and Latino and Asian don't interact In Detroit three last year a tiger escaped into the abandoned Packard plant days to find the damn thing. I worried that the homeless fed it, that it fed upon the packs of wild dogs or they it five In his poem they feed they lions.

Speaker 4 (00:25:20):

The prepositional phrase out of certainly brings to mind the phrase up from echoing Booker t Washington's up from slavery and in the refrain they lions alluding to the note on extent maps here be lions, which is to say this land and in this case the land being both black Detroit and the Appalachian interior from which so many white Detroiters migrated terror, incognito the unknown, the dangerous, the not fully explored if at all, the threat being in the way language bends into vernaculars both toward and away from each other. The way peoples either immerse move into each other or separate into blocks neighborhoods suburban city proper and they feed they lion the they is protean. It shifts depending upon your vantage. He levine is not appropriating urban black English, not as much as he is drawing attention to it. And if you have lived in the Appalachians, the vernaculars are not that distant.

Speaker 4 (00:26:23):

So less the egregious and wince inducing backdrop vernacular of berryman than the necessary conflation that suggests we black and white and poor and working poor are in this conflagration together and just what is the lion? We know what it is. It is Hayden Sphinx. It is the Y's rough biblical beast. It is the hair I wear right now just as threatening now as it was when South Carolinians insisted their female slaves cover it up as it was when Afros were halos. As it is, as it is when the New Yorker puts a natural on Michelle Obama's caricature six Philip Levine. As with others who know best, the royal of immigrant tribes in Detroit did not turn from the seeing of others and what he saw, he saw also in his mirror. As much as Eminem sees to draw contemporary corollary whether we like him or not, Eminem has the right to write eight mile.

Speaker 4 (00:27:22):

He was no distant observer. He was in the thick Levine did know the factory workers and he knew those blacks from the south that sought Henry Ford's double-edged promise to open poetry to the laborer. Much the way Faulkner opens prose to the disenfranchised south. He honors the slippage of standard English into something far more robust. Further, his factory worker is every factory worker. I feel perfectly suited to say this as I have worked if briefly in those factories as a young woman, the pay was good. Pay perhaps the best I've had thus far. General Motors assembly division, my job ended after being hit by a Hilo seven from Levine. I and other black writers. Don't think here is a white writer writing Detroit. We think here is a writer of the city writing the city We are of his influence, so pervasive as to be unseen. We don't think about the air until it's unavailable. He opened the doors of the plant, so many of us who were born into or grew inside of plant. How ironic Francine Harris comments cogently on the beauty of plants in Detroit. He saw that cell, same beauty in the people around him and all of their variations.

Speaker 5 (00:28:38):

Am I close?

Speaker 4 (00:28:44):

I've chosen a poem. So many of my poems are actually influenced by Levi, but keys the cathedral two blocks away from a flat in a city where I used to live chimes every morning at dawn and the sound is vague whereas the rounds fired off on a random evening when I went back to visit Detroit were clear moving through the air with such clarity. I stayed down flat on the bed with an arm thrown over my still sleeping husband until it was over though next time a window may shatter or the skull of the old man, a house or so over, I found four shells the next morning in the side yard. Sometimes the early bells told a song. I recall from childhood, a childhood spent in a church dotted south. Though those whitewashed churches lack the ornament of St. Florian. I've come to covet when there's a knock on the back door.

Speaker 4 (00:29:31):

I don't answer. Of course there are those who don't knock but try the knob or key my car on the curb because I have a car and that's enough to inspire hate in someone spilling out of Kelly's bar next door who saved for nothing but a week of drinks down in a night. Salvation works that way. A man begins to thirst for what clothes eyed. He saw glinting like Micah in a stream and he reached from the bank of his dreams to cup that coin to bring it wet to the lips. I understand I too can taste it. The metal and the rapids moving through me, entering the way the promise of bells enters. Yes, I might be saved by such a stream if only temporarily, but considered the way the man that keyed my car felt momentarily assuaged by bourbon, a drink he felt to be a drink of class to forget. He had been accused of having none till he saw my car daring to sit on his tires like a sign saying you who have nothing. He thought he was okay, thought the night it carried him to the lety. I get it, but I don't blame strangers for possessing what I don't and I don't expect the water to be anything other than it is. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:30:51):

That was just terrific. Thank you. Really nicely done. I've been reading him my whole life. I started out at 18 with not this pig, which was his second book. I come from Chicago, but anyone who comes from a working class or as he came and I did from a lower middle class family and you wanted to write a city poetry, he was the one that helped guide us to something by bringing in people who weren't otherwise in poetry. I met him in 1982, I was 32, I just published my first book and he took an interest in me. I had gotten a job at Wayne State University where he'd gone to school when it was Wayne University and he'd heard there was a poet teaching there. And so he wrote me a letter and when he came to Detroit to see his twin brother, I met him.

Speaker 6 (00:31:44):

I was 32, he was 54. He's exactly the same age as my parents. My mother loved Phil by the way. I once heard her say, you're so much more handsome than your brother. But he was an identical twin. He was like, what? Anyway, that's more about my mother. But anyway, Phil liked it too. So he was coming to visit his brother Eddie, and he invited me over for brunch. It was like getting a call really on high. I was extremely nervous and I went there and I met him and the next day I had a car and he didn't. So I drove him around Detroit and that was the beginning of our conversation, which I'll go on having with him for the rest of my life. At their first brunch, his brother Eddie, who was extremely funny and also could do incredible imitations of Phil on the phone, you couldn't tell them apart.

Speaker 6 (00:32:37):

They had the same so he could just be brutal like Phil and his humor. But there was a moment when Phil went to the bathroom and I was talking, Eddie knew all kinds of poets through Phil and I was talking about someone we knew in common from Detroit and I said, this guy is the angriest person I've ever met. And Eddie said, you didn't know my brother when he was young. And that just struck a chord for me because although I didn't know Phil, then by then Phil had changed slightly. The anger had tempered, it was still there but turned into something else. But I did know his poems. And what I want to do is make a case for you or say something about his poetry because I think if you go back and read his early poetry, I think you'll find that it almost completely breaks apart in rage.

Speaker 6 (00:33:26):

His first book is called On the Edge and it really is on the edge. It's threatening to break down. And he was in his mid thirties when he published it. His next book is called Not This Pig, and that's titled poem. The center poem of that book is called Silent in America. And if you remember the key lines in this are who ate his own shit in his own rage. And that rage culminates in the tremendous poem that you read. They feed they lion, there's almost nowhere to go with it. Silent in America leads to almost a kind of desolation or desperation. And what I want to say about his early work is he had sympathies for the failed, the marginal, the disenfranchised always out of his own personal rage, which attached itself to Detroit and to workers and to the disenfranchised everywhere. But he didn't have a politics and he was lucky.

Speaker 6 (00:34:20):

He went to Spain and he spent a year in Barcelona from teaching at Fresno State. And when he was there, he got especially interested or maybe he was already interested, but he got committed to the poets of the Spanish Civil War, to Neruda, to Vallejo, to Lorca, to Raphael Alberte especially to Miguel Hernandez. He did a terrific translation of Hernandez, his lullaby of the onion, and he got interested in the anarchist politics and he wrote a book called 1933 first, which moves from rage to an elegy for his family. He heard an interview where Galway Canal, who was a big influence on Phil and a friend of his said that he wanted tenderness in his poetry. And Phil thought to himself tenderness I could use a little of that because there, I mean it was there in him as a person, but it was not in his poetry.

Speaker 6 (00:35:12):

And 1933 begins to let in tenderness towards the family, towards his relatives. And then in the name for the lost, he begins to get a politics into his poetry. And the poetry begins to be about remembering not just about rage. There are a couple lines I want to read to you from Gift for a Believer to Flavio Constantine who was an when old Nathan Pine gave two hands to a drop forge at Chevy. My spit turned to go all and I swore I'd never forget. That's the turn I swore I'd never forget. And then Brianna Ventura Deru was in a Spanish anarchist. And the same poem in your vision to Rudy whispered to an old woman that he would never forget the sons and daughters who died believing they carried a new world there in their hearts. And the idea of dying and believing that you have a new world in your hearts entered his poetry and began to change it because it began to give his poetry utopian politics out of the rage. The rage was always there. I don't mean to deny it, but it also was tempered by some kind of egi feeling and then some kind of vision. And the poem I'm going to read for you, I'm not going to read one of my own poems because I want to try and get you to come to my reading tonight.

Speaker 6 (00:36:34):

I'm going to read you a poem called To Cipriano in the Wind. And what he does in this poem, if you know it, is he takes the names of two workers in Detroit whose names he didn't remember, and he gives them the name of Cipriano Mera who is an anarchist. And the great move in his poetry is this move of incorporating the poetry of rage with the poetry of elegy, with the poetry of a kind of vision of hope or celebration. And I think it gives it a greater expansiveness, it gives it a large visionary quality and that's where I think there's an element of him in Keats because he's ultimately a romantic poet because he believes in the boundlessness of human possibility to cipriano in the wind. Where did your words go? Cipriano spoken to me 38 years ago. In the back of peerless cleaners we're raised on a little wooden platform.

Speaker 6 (00:37:32):

You bowed to the hissing press and under the glaring bulb, the scars across your shoulders. A gift of my country gleamed like old wood dig, dod you said into my boy's wide eyes without his no riches and ferrante, the dipper Sicilian coat maker laughed. What could a pants presser know of dignity? That was the winter of 41. It would take my brother off to war where you would come from. It would bring great snowfalls graying in the streets and the news of death racing through the halls of my school I was growing. Soon I would be your height and you'd tell me eye to eye. Someday the world is ours. Someday you will see and your eyes burned in your fine white face until I thought you would burn. That was the winter. 41 baton would fall to the Japanese and Sam Boian would make the long march with bayonet wounds in both legs and somehow in spite of burning acids splashed across his chest and the acids of his own anger rising toward his heart, he would return to us and eat the stale bread of victory.

Speaker 6 (00:38:44):

Cipriano, do you remember what followed the worst snow? It rained all night and in the dawn on the streets gleamed and within a wild and within a week a wild flocks leaped in the open fields. I told you our word for it spring and you said spring. Spring it always come. After soon, the Germans rolled east into Russia and my cousins died. I walked alone in the warm spring winds of evening and said, dignity. I said, your word cipriano into the winds. I said, someday this will be ours. Come back. Cipriano Mira, step out of the wind and dressed in the robe of your pain. Tell me again that this world will be ours. Enter my dreams or my life. Cipriano, come back out of the wind.

Speaker 5 (00:39:34):

Thank you.

Speaker 7 (00:39:50):

Hello everyone. I want to thank Dorian for organizing this and I want to thank you all for coming. I'm going to read Phil's poem, the Simple Truth.

Speaker 7 (00:40:04):

I bought a dollar and a halfs worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June, the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet and in the mountain oaks overhead, the birds were gathering for the night. The js and mockers squawking back and forth. The finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland. She was someone out of my childhood in a pink Spangled sweater and sunglasses, praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the roadside stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw, sweet corn trucked all the way she swore from New Jersey. Eat, eat. She said, even if you don't, I'll say you did

Speaker 7 (00:41:18):

Some things you know all your life. There are so, so simple and true. They must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme. They must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames. They must be naked and alone. They must stand for themselves. My friend Henry and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I'm saying? It's onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter. It's obvious it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong. It stays there for the rest of your life unspoken made of that dirt. We call earth the metal we call salt in a form we have no words for and you live on it. And now I'll read one of my poems. It's called Simply Lit for Philip Levine.

Speaker 7 (00:42:56):

Often toward evening after another day, after another year of days in the half dark on the way home, I stop at the food store and waiting in line I begin to wonder about people. I wonder if they also wonder about how strange it is that we are here on the earth and how in order to live we all must sleep and how we have beds for this unless we are without and entire rooms where we go at the end of the day to collapse and I think how even the most lively people are desolate when they're alone because day two must sleep and sooner or later die, we're always looking to acquire more food for more great meals. We have to have great meals. Isn't it enough to be a person buying a carton of milk, a simple package of butter and a loaf of whole wheat bread? Isn't it enough to stand here while the sweet middle-aged cashier rings up the purchases? I look outside, but I can't see much out there because now it is dark except for a single Vermillion neon sign floating above the gas station like a miniature temple simply lit against the knight.

Speaker 7 (00:44:42):

Now I'm going to read a piece that was published in a book called Coming Close for the Essays on Philip Levine. It was edited by Marie Lesperance and Thomas Maureen, and I've cut it to fit the timeframe here. There are certain people who have appeared in my life as if they were angels. They seem to have shown up at times when it was critical for me to turn a corner or to navigate a difficult stretch of road in order to travel on towards more fruitful and rewarding experiences. When I look back at the events that make up my particular human life, it is especially clear to me how these certain people have been important in ways that might be impossible to explain in words. It is also true that when I try to imagine what my life would've been like without them, it all goes dark, becomes a lost life, a life devoid of entire realms of beauty, sanity, humor, courage and common sense.

Speaker 7 (00:45:51):

Philip Levine was one of these angels, a cornerstone in my development as a writer from whom I have learned everything that is important in regards to living a life writing poems. He was a great teacher primarily because he taught by example, by being totally and unequivocally himself. Phil did not come to class armed with a stack of quirky exercises or assignments for us to complete. He never entered the classroom with a given prefabricated topic in mind for discussion, nor did he ever have us write in particular prescribed forms. It was not that he believed that formal poems should not be written for. It happened that some of the students in the class wrote in given forms. It was more a matter that he believed we ought to write directly out of the experience of who we are and out of the moment of the poem as it is occurring.

Speaker 7 (00:46:47):

He often stressed that if one lets one's rational, mind and intelligence take over, or if one stays with what one initially thought to write before embarking on the actual writing, it is impossible to write an original poem. It is also impossible to evolve as a writer this way because in order to evolve or grow, it is essential to follow the imagination of the poem to new and undiscovered territory. In other words, in order not to write a poem that has already been written, it's important to trust and follow the imagination. I can still hear him say The poem is smarter than you are. Phil never gave us any assignments other than that. We were to bring a new poem to each and every class.

Speaker 7 (00:47:35):

Phil arrived the class empty handed, carrying only a small yellow knapsack across one shoulder. He always entered the classroom slowly as if he had all the time in the world. In fact, I've never seen him rush anywhere, nor have I ever witnessed him lose his common sane presence even in New York City where everyone else is rushing as if they are perpetually late and have somewhere important to go, even their feel walked slowly. When I was a graduate student in the creative writing program at N Y U in 1991, I used to sometimes see him before class walking slowly along university place. It was as if he had made a promise to life, never to rush through it, but instead to carry himself steadily with clarity and dignity and always noticing what might be occurring around him. After he would settle into a chair in the classroom, we'd give him our freshly written poems. He'd allow the moment to dictate what would happen next

Speaker 7 (00:48:39):

In class after class. Phil's teaching was ingenious and effortless. He never had to reach far to get to the problem in one of our poems or to point out its strengths. He was outrageously honest and had a way of making us all laugh even at ourselves, which proved invaluable given that most of the time the poems we brought to class were not yet poems. He shot down bullshit pretty quickly and did not allow us to make excuses for our poems or for anything. He encouraged us to keep on working on our poems, revise them and bring them to him at his office hours. I recall that at Tufts University were Phil taught during the fall for a number of years in the 1980s there would often be a long line outside his office. No matter how many people were waiting to see him, he never appeared distracted or rushed in a meeting.

Speaker 7 (00:49:33):

He calmly read my poem, giving it his full and undivided attention. Before I met Phil, I found his poems one afternoon at Shakespeare company, the wonderful old bookstore that is now gone on the upper west side of Manhattan on a shelf that housed many books by him. I was drawn in particular to one entitled 1933. I was immediately struck by the voice of the poems, a voice whose strength was unmistakable and whose lyricism was at once deeply rooted and tender. At this time, I had read mostly Thiel. I owned his selected poems and carried it with me everywhere. I had a little bit of an infatuation with her crane even though I did not understand his poems. Also, weeks before a friend had lent me a copy of the collected Wallace Stevens

Speaker 7 (00:50:23):

And urged me to read the Man with a blue guitar. Nothing I had read had prepared me for the clarity and engaging rhythm of Phil's poems, which I was discovering were about life the way it really is without needless embellishments. I noticed too how the clarity of the poems was tinged with the surrealism that helped reveal the beauty and mystery of that which is common, that which one might even dismiss as ugly. It also dawned on me as I stood there in the bookstore that the poems were about real people with real ordinary lives and the poems held within them an industrial landscape and they illuminated unremarkable human situations as well as places that hardly anyone notices because they're so obvious that we take them as much for granted as we do our own forgotten breaths. Of course, 1933 is a book very much about loss.

Speaker 7 (00:51:22):

In the year 1933, Phil's father died when Phil was only five years old and the book is in a sense analogy for his family somehow made a connection then emotional and somewhat abstractly to those poems perhaps because I had only a few years before left Sweden for the US and in a sense had lost everything and nearly everyone in my former life. Perhaps I recognized something in Levine's poems of my own unremarkable ordinary life and family, as well as something of the rather dull and orderly industrial port city in which I had grown up. It was maybe a year after finding Phil's poems while flying back to the US from visiting my family in Sweden that I was reading 1933 for the Teenth time and began to hear the poems in my head in Swedish High above the Atlantic. I scribbled down the first drafts of my translations of the poems that fall.

Speaker 7 (00:52:22):

I had the good luck to meet Phil after a magnificent and hilarious poet reading he gave at UMass in Amherst to the town where I was going to school. After his reading, I was awestruck and a bit nervous, but walked up to him and told him that I was translating his poems into Swedish. His extraordinary friendly demeanor put me immediately at ease. After our meeting, I wrote Phil a letter thanking him for the reading and told him that I had questions about some of the poems I was translating, asking if it would be possible to meet sometime. I shortly thereafter received a generous and encouraging letter inviting me to meet with him during his office hours at Tufts University. I think what struck me most as I sat there opposite field in his modest nondescript office was his kind and earnest face and his lively yet grounded presence.

Speaker 7 (00:53:23):

There was something unusually sane and fun and accepting about him. He was incredibly generous and patient with my rather ridiculous list of questions. I had never before translated anything and was still finding my way in English. I suddenly worried little that my questions made him wonder what was going to come of this translation project. Yet he kindly answered every single one of them, even engaging me with stories of events that had inspired the poems that first day. He did not only answer my translation questions, he also made sure to ask me about my own writing and what I was reading. After we talked a while, he had to go teach his intro to poetry class and invited me along writing this. I'm reminded of what the great Larry Levi wrote in his brilliant essay about Phil Quote. He's the only person I've ever known who seemed to be fully awake to this life, his own and the lives of others, an amazing talker. It surprised me when I noticed how deeply and closely he listened to students. Why in the world did he care so much about what we did? Because we mattered so much to him, we began to matter to ourselves and to matter in this way. To feel that what one did and how one wrote actually might make a difference was a crucial gift Levine gave to each of us.

Speaker 7 (00:54:54):

I know this gift from Phil helped save me from myself and empowered and inspired me to pursue no matter how impossible or impractical alive writing poems, I can't think of anything more valuable and beautiful than a gift such as this with its indelible and resonant presence. Thank you so much

Speaker 2 (00:55:30):

And that was wonderful, all of you, just everything I had hoped for and more. This is a poem by Phil that sits in our guest room. When our guests come to visit us, most of whom are poets, they read the poem as they walk through the door and read it when they walk back out. It's called Ask for Nothing thing. Instead walk alone in the evening heading out of town toward the fields asleep under a darkening sky. The dust risen from your steps, transforms itself into a golden rain, fallen earthward as a gift from known known God. The plane trees along the canal brink, the few valley poplars hold their breath as you cross the wooden bridge that leads nowhere you haven't been for. This walk repeats itself once or more a day. That is why in the distance you see beyond the first ridge of low hills where nothing ever grows. Men and women, astride, mules on horseback, some even on foot, all the lost family you never prayed to see, praying to see you chanting and singing to bring the moon down to the last of the sunlight behind you. The windows of the town blink on and off. The houses closed down ahead. The voices fade like music over deep water and then are gone. Even the sudden tumbling finches have fled into smoke and the one road whitened in moonlight leads everywhere

Speaker 2 (00:57:27):

And this is the poem that I wrote for Phil and luckily he was able to see it before he left us and it's called my known Phil Levine and it's closely patterned after wss Merwin's poem Berryman, and the title is taken from Phil's essay titled My known John Berryman, which in turn is based on the Thomas Wyatt poem. My known John points, my mine own Philippine. What he told me, I will tell you, there was a war on it seemed we had lived through too many to name to number. There was no arrogance about him, no vanity, only the strong backs of his words pressed against the tonnage of a page. His suggestion to me was that hard work was the order of each day. When I asked again, he said it again, pointing it out twice. His muse, if he had one, was a window filled with a brick wall, the left hand corner of his mind, a hand lined with grease and sweat, literal things.

Speaker 2 (00:58:46):

Before I knew him, I was unknown. I drank deeply from his knowledge, a cup he gave me again and again filled with water, clear river water. He was never old and never grew older though the days passed and the poems marched forth and they were his words. Only no other words were needed. He advised me to wait to hold true to my vision, to speak in my own voice, to say the thing. Straight out there was the whole day about him. The greatest thing he said was presence. To be yourself in your own time to stand up that poetry was precision, raw precision, truth and compassion. Genius. I had hardly begun. I asked, how did you begin? He said, I began in a tree in Lucerne, in a machine shop, in an open field, start anywhere. He said, if you don't write, it won't get written. No tricks, no magic about it. He gave me his gold pen. He said, what's mine is yours. What Phil gave all of us is ours now, and I thank you for coming today and sharing in some of his bright light and I'd like to thank Eddie and Chris and Molina and Bybee. Thank you all very much.

Speaker 8 (01:00:53):

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