Quotes from Philip Levine

Give me back my young brother, hardand furious, with wide shoulders and a cursefor God and burning eyes that look uponall creation and say, You can have it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.