Philip Levine Quotes & Sayings

As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life. — Philip Levine

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand. — Philip Levine

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life - or at least the part my work played in it - I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life. — Philip Levine

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.
Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR — Philip Levine

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write. — Philip Levine

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back. — Philip Levine

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. — Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly, and changes nothing. — Philip Levine

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you'll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you're able. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is ... a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. — Philip Levine

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

...with no morning the day is sold. — Philip Levine

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here. — Philip Levine

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong. — Philip Levine

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. — Philip Levine

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

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. — Philip Levine

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry. — Philip Levine

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry. — Philip Levine

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you. — Philip Levine

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. — Philip Levine

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. — Philip Levine

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home. — Philip Levine

... the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come.
- Excerpt from the poem The Mercy — Philip Levine

Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human - the only animal that's got it - , bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go. — Philip Levine

No one that night turned
into literature, nothing that we did or didn't
entered the mythology of boys growing into men
or girls fighting to be people. — Philip Levine

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it? — Philip Levine

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 — Philip Levine

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work. — Philip Levine

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

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. — Philip Levine

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark. — Philip Levine

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

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. — Philip Levine

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do. — Philip Levine

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