Philip Levine died Feb. 14 at age 87. This interview originally appeared in Tablet on April 16, 2012. To read a selection of verse by the poet, including “Library Days,” “The Seventh Summer,” and “Growth,” scroll below the interview.***This year, 83-year-old Philip Levine, poet of the working class, was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. Tablet book critic Adam Kirsch once pointedly noted that Levine “goes out of his way to tell us that he is essentially a peasant. … In his poetry he returns again and again to his pre-academic life as a manual laborer.” Having grown up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Detroit, Levine worked in factories until the age of 30, when he began teaching English and creative writing.Here, Levine talks to Tablet contributor Jake Marmer about his writing, ethics, being Jewish, and more.You’re best-known as the poetic voice of the blue-collar experience. Do you feel enriched or limited by this qualification?I’d say I’m indifferent to it. I don’t embrace it fondly. Robert Frost wouldn’t write just because he was a nature poet. It’s something that’s there, and it’s obvious—and it’s limiting. I think I write handsome poems about a great range of subjects.James Billington, the librarian of Congress, who picked you for the Poet Laureate award this year, called you a “very, very American voice.” Perhaps more than any other ethnic group in the United States, Jews have struggled with their dual identity. To what extent do your Jewish and American identities overlap and where are they disparate?I think I’m a typical example of a certain kind of an American Jew. That is: liberal, radically left, independent, big-mouthed, angry, proud. I know a lot of people like me. My family did not come to the United States for religious reasons: They came to survive. None of them were religious, not in the conventional sense. They didn’t keep kosher, they didn’t go to shul. They didn’t much care about that at all. What they cared about was being proud, raising their children to be like them—strong, proud. Detroit was a viciously anti-Semitic city. It was the home of Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, that’s all you need to know. A Jew in Detroit felt he or she was immersed in a non-friendly milieu. I have this poem called “Zeide”—do you know it?I don’t think so—it’s about your grandfather?Certainly not about my grandmother! Of course it’s about my grandfather—or somebody’s grandfather. And I have another poem about my grandmother—who I identify as Polish. I don’t call her Jewish, because she regarded herself as Polish and became a Christian Scientist—how do you like that? Born in a little shtetl in what was then part of the Russian Empire, and is now Ukraine. I didn’t care much for my bubbe. But my grandfather, Zeide, I loved. He was lecherous, often drunk—but fun. Great to be with. A gambler. Made money and lost money. And you could never tell—he’d never show it.What has changed about your approach to writing and what remained the same—you’ve been writing for 50 years now?Seventy years. My earliest poems were not written with the benefit of the knowledge of poetry. Poetry was not particularly well taught in my school. My inspiration was largely based on the Old Testament, the King James version. I was also fascinated with Southern Baptists and that they used the biblical language and biblical rhythms. I never paid attention to the content, but I just loved the words themselves and the cadences.Once I discovered poetry—and my first discovery was English war poet Wilfred Owen—he had an enormous impact. In college I found modern poetry. I had never seen poetry about the urban world. Everything we read in class was poetry about the natural world, bucolic. And then I see T.S. Eliot, and his “Preludes.” There’s the city, beautiful images of the city. I said, “Wow, I don’t have to fake this nature-love, I can write about what I want.” My early poems ignored the place I lived in—maybe it was an effort to remove myself, I don’t know. That was the first big change.The second big change came about when I began to discover Dylan Thomas, the sudden musicality of his work. He at the time was touring the United States, and giving readings. His behavior was outrageous, which only endeared him to young poets like me. Unfortunately, he drank himself to death at the age of 40, but I forgave him that. And then, when I was 26 or 27, I studied with John Berryman. His standards were very high, and he had a huge impact on me. For one thing, he liked what I did, he liked the idea of the guy writing about Detroit. I never had a really terrific poet read my work and really admire it.Berryman, of all the people I ever studied with, was the one who gave me insight into how to become a better poet, and I saw the ferocity with which he pursued poetry. I thought: “I’m going to have to be that ferocious if I’m going to make it.” And I became that ferocious. Poetry right at the center. The way Rafael Nadal, a great tennis player, puts tennis right at the center of his life. If he’s doing something that doesn’t contribute to his becoming a better tennis player, he doesn’t do it. He saw all those young girls were taking his energy away—he stopped fucking all those young girls—which actually I think was a mistake.And the same thing with me—not the young girls part, because none were clamoring for me—but I just put poetry at the center, and I realized that everything else in my life was secondary. Until I started having kids. And then I realized these things were equal. My love for my wife and my children, and my love of poetry. I somehow had to work out a way to be a good husband, and a good father and yet save enough time and energy to be a good poet.Speaking of family, you seem to write more often about your parents and siblings than about your kids—is that accurate?You got the ratio right. The past is much larger. The source of my poetry is my memory. I have a very good memory, and I remember a great deal. Coleridge commented that imagination has only the present and the past to work off of. Where else will it get its imagery? From things you actually see and remember. And I think much more from what you remember—what you heard, what you felt in the past. In the present, you’re just trying to write the fucking poem.Even as you began teaching English and creative writing, for many decades you continued writing about Detroit and those early factory days. Did you ever feel compelled to write about your university life and career?Who the hell wants to read about the life of a professor? Do you? I don’t.The Poet Laureate award is one of the great many tokens of recognition you have under your belt—Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc. Have any of these influenced or altered your life in any discernible fashion?Financially, that’s all. My editors love me because I sell lots of books. And I now charge a lot of money for readings. Ever since I got the National Book Award for What Work Is, my books started selling. It sold over 40,000 copies—that’s rare. And it’s still selling.I have a copy!Hang on to it! So, financially this award influenced me, yes, but in no other way. I have seen—I’ll leave this guy nameless—a classmate at one time who got a Pulitzer when he was 29 or 30. It went to his head in an appalling way. He became a Mr. Important. He wrote one other decent book, and after that everything he wrote was shit, and there wasn’t that much of it anyway. He had let the prize tell him he was significant. No prize tells you you’re significant, that’s just horse-shit. By the time I got these things, I’ve seen a lot of these prizes go to people who were unreadable but were politically in the right place at the right time. Because there’s a lot of corruption in everything—why not in poetry? By the time I got it, I said, “Great, I’ll enjoy it, but I just got to get back to work.”What have you done over the years to grow as a poet, to improve your writing?I stopped drinking to excess. I stopped smoking dope altogether because it’s bad for your memory. Because that’s where my poems-to-be are waiting, in my memory. I stopped lying, because I’m very superstitious. I have this feeling that I’m misusing language when I lie, and language is my medium—I can’t betray it. If I start lying, my poems won’t come to me.But what about the craft itself?I’ll go back to tennis here. Once you learn to hit a certain shot, you can hit it every day. And I constantly read poetry: often for pleasure, but also for obligation—students, fellow poets, etc. And I go back to some of the poets whose influence was powerful with me. I re-read the “Song of Myself” probably every year. I read William Carlos Williams almost every week. I read the 16th-century poet Thomas Wyatt constantly, studying how he handles the line, how he shifts in tone. And the contemporaries whose work I love—Galway Kinnell. I read some stuff for inspiration and also to see how they do it, I’m just constantly reading.Are you excited about anybody in American poetry now?Larry Levis. Book called Winter Stars. He thrilled me. Tony Hoagland is terrific—he’s funny, disrespectful, constantly surprises you. A young woman named Matthea Harvey and another one, Daisy Fried and another guy who just got picked for an award, Louis Asekoff—his last two books were terrific.You were talking about getting that perfect “tennis shot” down and using it daily. And I think that very musical, fluid, free verse is your shot. Have you had any interest in the avant-garde?No, I don’t enjoy reading it. They throw away the narrative, coherence. They throw away a lot. I have surreal elements in my work due to the influence of [César] Vallejo, a Peruvian poet I translated. In 20th-century English there was so much experimentation that proved successful but we didn’t follow through on. Like Williams and [Wallace] Stevens, their free verse feels so authentic to me. My first two books had rhyme and meter—I was a very disciplined writer because my life was so chaotic. But once my life got a real form and I knew where the next meal was coming from and I was teaching, then I got looser. Library Days I would sit for hours with the sunlight streaming in the high windows and know the delivery van was safe, locked in the yard with the brewery trucks, and my job secure. I chose first a virgin copy of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, every page of which confirmed life was irrational. The librarian, a woman gone gray though young, sat by the phone that never rang, assembling the frown reserved exclusively for me when I entered at 10 a.m. to stay until the light dwindled into afternoon. No doubt her job was to guard these treasures, for Melville was here, Balzac, Walt Whitman, my old hero, in multiple copies each with the aura of used tea bags. In late August of 1951 a suited gentleman reader creaked across the polished oaken floor to request the newest copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships only to be told, “This, sir, is literature!” in a voice of pure malice. I looked up from the text swimming before me in hopes of exchanging a first smile; she’d gone back to her patient vigil over the dead black phone. Outside I could almost hear the world, trucks maneuvering the loading docks or clogging the avenues and grassy boulevards of Detroit. Other men, my former schoolmates, were off on a distant continent in full retreat, their commands and groans barely a whisper across the vastness of an ocean and a mountain range. In the garden I’d planted years before behind the old house I’d long ago deserted, the long winter was over; the roses exploded into smog, the African vine stolen from the zoo strangled the tiny violets I’d nursed each spring, the mock orange snowed down and bore nothing, its heavy odor sham. “Not for heaven or earth would I trade my soul, rather would I lie down to sleep among the dead,” Prince Myshkin mumbled on page 437, a pure broth of madness, perhaps my part, the sole oracular part in the final act of the worst play ever written. I knew then that soon I would rise up and leave the book to go back to the great black van waiting patiently for its load of beer kegs, sea trunks and leather suitcases bound for the voyages I’d never take, but first there was War and Peace, there were Cossacks riding their ponies toward a horizon of pure blood, there was Anna, her loves and her deaths, there was Turgenev with his impossible, histrionic squabbles, Chekhov coughing into his final tales. The trunks— with their childish stickers— could wait, the beer could sit for ages in the boiling van slowly morphing into shampoo. In the offices and shops, out on the streets, men and women could curse the vicious air, they could buy and sell each other, they could beg for a cup of soup, a sandwich and tea, some few could face life with or without beer, they could embrace or die, it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do.Excerpted from News of the World by Philip Levine. Copyright © 2009 by Philip Levine. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The Seventh Summer How could I not know God had a son? the biggest kid asked. I considered. No one told me. Did I ever go to church? Yes, but they spoke a language I didn’t actually understand. The three stared at me. I could have answered that it was possible God did not have a son and that this picture over what was to be my bed was a fake— for one thing it wasn’t a photograph, for another it looked like an ad for Life, but I was already sorry I’d said, “Who is he?” referring to the figure displayed behind glass in a plain wooden frame. What I truly wanted to know was why God had let anyone do such a thing to his son, nail his hands and feet to a huge wooden cross from which he sagged in what appeared to be less discomfort than I would have felt. “The Jews done it,” the biggest one said, as though reading my mind. I felt a chill run through me, sure that once more I was going to be blamed for what I had not done or what I’d done but done without meaning to, but the boys —the oldest was sixteen, over twice my age—left me to myself, for it was early to bed for everyone. I lay awhile in the silent dark of the farmhouse wondering if it could be so, that God had a son he had let die, and if this were so why no one had told me so that I might understand why life could be so puzzling for all of us. Days passed before Lars, the fourteen year old, told me that it was OK, this Jesus had died so that all of us could be saved, in the end things turned out for the best. That was Sunday, after the boys had returned from church— to which I did not go—, and before we walked into town to swim in the big public place. I remember best how sweet was the lake water we swam in, how I could even swallow little gulps of it and not feel ill and how large the bodies around me were, Lars and Sven thrashing after the girls in their dark wool suits, the girls squealing with mock hurt when they would catch them up in their pale arms, for though their faces were deeply browned their bodies were ghostly. Sven, Lars, and Thomas, three boys as big as men, who let me climb to their secret room beside the hay loft, where they smoked and spoke of women, the laughter rushing out of their great throats, the strange words I had never heard before coughed out in sudden spasms, and such hopes uttered as they moved about the room in a half-dance, half-sword-fight, calling out the magic names of the absent girls as they stroked their own bodies at chest and crotch or rolled on the floor in mock death agony. August in Michigan, the world spinning around me, my mother gone in the grief of final loss, from which one day she would awaken in daylight, one year before the wars in Ethiopia, Spain, and China could give me growing up its particular name, and yet I sat at their table that night, head bowed in the grace I did not say, thankful for corn, beans, and poisonous pork, and understood it all.Excerpted from What Work Is by Philip Levine. Copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Growth In the soap factory where I worked when I was fourteen, I spoke to no one and only one man spoke to me and then to command me to wheel the little cars of damp chips into the ovens. While the chips dried I made more racks, nailing together wood lath and ordinary screening you’d use to keep flies out, racks and more racks each long afternoon, for this was a growing business in a year of growth. The oil drums of fat would arrive each morning, too huge for me to tussle with, reeking of the dark, cavernous kitchens of the Greek and Rumanian restaurants, of cheap hamburger joints, White Towers and worse. They would sulk in the battered yard behind the plant until my boss, Leo, the squat Ukranian dollied them in to become, somehow, through the magic of chemistry, pure soap. My job was always the racks and the ovens— two low ceilinged metal rooms the color of slick skin. When I slid open the heavy doors my eyes started open, the pores of my skull shriveled, and sweat smelling of scared animal burst from me everywhere. Head down I entered, first to remove what had dried and then to wheel in the damp, raw yellow curls of new soap, grained like iris petals or unseamed quartz. Then out to the open weedy yard among the waiting and emptied drums where I hammered and sawed, singing my new life of working and earning, outside in the fresh air of Detroit in 1942, a year of growth.Excerpted from What Work Is by Philip Levine. Copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. “Ode for Mrs. William Settle” In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago, a woman sits at her desk to write me a letter. She holds a photograph of me up to the light, one taken 17 years ago in a high school class in Providence. She sighs, and the sigh smells of mouth wash and tobacco. If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the man she’s about to address in her odd prose had a life span of 125/th of a second in the eye of a Nikon, and then he politely asked the photographer to get lost, whispering the request so as not to offend the teacher presiding. Those students are now in their thirties, the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts and bright crested blazers have gone unprepared, though French speaking, into a world of liars, pimps, and brokers. 2.7% have died by their own hands, and all the others have considered the act at least once. Not one now remembers my name, not one recalls the reading I gave of Cesar Vallejo’s great Memorium to his brother Miguel, not even the girl who sobbed and had to be escorted to the school nurse, calmed and sent home in a cab. Evenings in Lake Forest in mid-December drop suddenly; one moment the distant sky is a great purple canvas, and then it’s gone, and no stars emerge, however not the least hint of the stockyards or slaughter houses is allowed to drift out to the suburbs, so it’s deathless darkness with no more perfume than cellophane. “Our souls are mingling now somewhere in the open spaces between Illinois and you,” she writes. When I read the letter two weeks later, forwarded by my publisher, I will suddenly discover a truth of our lives on earth, and I’ll bless Mrs. William Settle of Lake Forest for giving me more than I gave her, for addressing me as Mr. Levine, the name my father bore, a name a man could take with courage and pride into the empire of death. I’ll read even unto the second page unstartled by the phrase, “By now you must have guessed, I am a dancer.” Soon snow will fall on the Tudor homes of the suburbs turning the elegant parked sedans into anonymous mounds, the winds will sweep in over the Rockies and across the great freezing plains where America first died, winds so fierce boys and men turn their backs to them and simply weep, and yet in all that air the soul of Mrs. William Settle will not release me, not even for one second. Male and female, aged and middle aged, we ride it out blown eastward toward our origins, one impure being become wind. Above the Middle West, truth and beauty are one though never meant to be.Excerpted from The Simple Truth by Philip Levine. Copyright © 1994 by Philip Levine. Excerpted by permission of Knpf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.