Philip Levine Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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.

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

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

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

I write what's given me to write.

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

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

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

Our Valley

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you'll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you're able.

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.

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

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

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 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

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

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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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.

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.

...with no morning the day is sold.