Philip Levine Quotes (51 Quotes)

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.

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

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

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

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

We slept together
But did not speak.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

You smell all of your childhood,

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

I write what's given me to write.

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

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

I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

What actually took place is now lost.

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

American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.

I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry.

Mad, dying, Sierra Kid enters the capital

We work in rain,
heat, snow, sleet.

I have endured, as Godless Nazarite,
Life like a bone even a dog would slight;
All that the dog would have, I have refused.

The world takes up its trades; the man his wits,
And, bottom up, he mumbles from the deep,
"Life was a dream, Oh, may this death be sleep.

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

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.

How much earth is a man.

In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.

When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.

It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.

To love and to be loved, I've drunk for love.

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

I'll show you how to make love.

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.

Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.

I cannot now remember
how I got home.

Have you ever
had a vision?

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.

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.

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.

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

No one says, Children are burning.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

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

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

Oh, yes,
let's bless the imagination.

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

I don't know how much the music has influenced my writing I know it's inspired me, and the young jazz musicians I went to school with in Detroit, Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, Bess Bonier, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, were the first people I knew who were living the creative lives of artists.

Let him repeat that prayer,
the prayer that night follows day,
that life follows death, that in time
we find our lives.

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.

For the love of mother, he says.

I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep.