But I’m too old to be written about as a young poet.
Category Archive: 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.
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.
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.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
I write what’s given me to write.
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.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.