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Philip Levine

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Philip Levine

Poet of the working class

From Bob Holman & Margery Snyder,
Your Guide to Poetry.
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Levine as poet: Philip Levine is known as the poet of the working class, not only because so many of his poems tell stories of his immigrant grandparents, the blue collar workers & his own workingman’s life in Detroit, but also because so many of them address the common man in apparently simple, colloquial language. He was in, but not really of, the Beat generation -- he knew Ginsberg & Snyder, but his voice is his own, unique & beloved.

Levine as teacher: In an interview in The Cortland Review, Levine recounts how he came to Fresno State University, an out-of-the-way rural school in California’s Central Valley: he had no Ph.D. but needed to find a job in California for the sake of his son’s asthma, & had to choose between teaching literature in Fresno or technical writing in LA. And it turned out he loved teaching & fostered generations of poets there -- Lorna Dee Cervantes even called him “the father of Chicago poetry.”

Books by Philip Levine: His best-known collection is called... what else could it be?... What Work Is, and it is of course the place to begin reading Levine.

Breath (poems, Knopf, 2004)
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What Work Is (poems, Knopf, 1991)
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New Selected Poems (poems, Knopf, 1991)
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The Simple Truth (poems, Knopf, 1994)
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The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (essays & memoirs, Knopf, 1994)
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They Feed They Lion & the Names of the Lost (reissue of two early collections in one volume, Knopf, 1999)
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The Mercy (poems, Knopf, 1999)
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So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry series, University of Michigan Press, 2002)
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