Quotes from Philip Levine

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.

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

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

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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace…salt for the spirit.

If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name.

All day I searched shopwindows, record bins, bookstores, even a Greek bakery for a hint of what I can't say.

I speak to H. in a bar in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer he waits out the day

When her eyes spilled over with happiness, I saw she took your words to heart as I never could.

two brothers held together by what they can't share.