“The whole history of poetry is yours. Poets love when you pay them homage.”
– Philip Levine, master class workshop, October 11, 2002, University of Michigan
I’ve been trying to write this post ever since I heard about Philip Levine’s passing. He was one of the first “living” poets I met almost 20 years ago during my freshman year of college when this whole poetry thing became necessary. I remember him reading a draft of a new poem at that reading, “The Mercy” which would become the title poem of his next book. I vaguely even recall going to dinner with him and some other select students and faculty.
He came back to campus my senior year of college (Muhlenberg’s English dept was in love with him, particularly his book What Work Is), and I do remember two moments from that dinner–all over the Nobel Prize in Literature. Whether T. S. Eliot counts as the only American to have won for Poetry or not. And some choice words for certain writers who have “campaigned” for the prize (ahem, Walcott). I asked if he would read “The Mercy” again that night at the reading, and he closed with it. That poem in many ways bookended my college years–I even remember a classmate imitating it in our final poetry workshop. You can hear him read it over at Poets&Writers.
I’d have one more encounter with him, when I was working on my MFA at the University of Michigan. I remember my cohort-mate, the fabulous Canadian poet Suzanne Hancock getting into a fight with him at a Hopwood Tea over whether Anne Carson was a “real” poet or just a classicist (Suzanne won), and his insightful feedback (“get to the subtle, moving ending the most effective way possible”) on my poem “Restoration” (it’s in Skin Shift) during a master class workshop. Here are some other notes I took during that master class:
- Don’t set up rhythmic expectations you can’t fulfill (metrical lines in free verse)
- Range of diction is the range of the degree of reality taken on in the poem
- Frost – his structures are 19th c., Emersonian attitude, yet models syntax after speech -> sense of spontaneity, and yes, that means sometimes you must end a line on a prepostion
- The stubbornness of things.
- Good line, good passage, good pacing makes you a poet. Learn pacing to make the good sections of a poem stand out.
- The poet selects on the basis of what a thing reveals (motion toward symbolism).
- Revise on the basis of what’s there. Be patient. First draft, get it all out on the page no matter what direction it takes. Read it out loud. Use the best parts to revise. The way to revise is to listen to what you’ve written. Tone.
- The whole history of poetry is yours. Poets love it when you pay them homage.
- Re-embroider antique ideas.
- In the 20th c., “things” have become increasingly important in poems.
- Implication – use of “we” – Auden did it best, 20th c. invention
- Rilke – “spilled religion” – the vessels of our faith and emotion have over-flowed – they fall on people and things and ennoble them.
- Don’t lie a lot. Inspiration will bypass you.
I haven’t read his work in years, since a brief obsession in the early 2000s when I bought all his books, but I look forward to catching up on the last book or two I missed, and rediscovering my faves: “On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane,” “They Feed They Lion!,” and, of course, “The Mercy.” Here are its closing lines:
…mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.