Quotes from Philip Levine

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

The earth drinks all that's left of you and asks for more.

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

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.

To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn't know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.

I am the soul stretching into the furthest reaches of my fingers and beyond from "Last Words," The New Yorker , Poems: December 13, 1982 Issue.

I have tried to write poetry for people for whom there is no poetry.

with no morning the day is sold.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

I write what's given me to write.

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

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.