The Nature of Things

Philip Levine, a much-honored American poet, died last week at age 87 . Mr. Levine had won just about every award it is possible for a poet to win in his long career and he had capped all that with a stint as our Poet Laureate in 2011-12. Much has been written since his death about how he made poetry of the everyday event's of ordinary people's lives. He wrote about the work that they did, often hard and dirty labor. In their obituary for him, The New York Times wrote that his poetry " was vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor." Levine knew first-hand about that work. He had held many of those jobs himself in his early years. He was born in Detroit and the lives of the laboring masses who made Detroit a great city were often the theme of his writing. Here is one of those poems. Detroit, Tomorrow BY  PHILIP LEVINE Newspaper says the boy killed by someone,    don’t say who. I know the mother, waking, ...

The Library of Congress has chosen a new Poet Laureate of the United States.  His name is Philip Levine.  I must confess I don't remember having heard of him before today. The fact that I had not heard of him is just more proof of my cultural ignorance because he is an award-winning poet.  He's won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among other awards.  At 83 years old, he is the oldest poet laureate ever chosen and his main topic is not one that we normally think of as inspiring poetry.  He is a poet of the working class.  He constructs poems from the everyday work of ordinary people. The bits and pieces of his poetry that I found online today were very evocative and I think he merits a closer look.  For example, there were these lines from his 1999 poem "He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do." Fact is, silence is the perfect water: unlike rain it falls from no clouds to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes, to give heart t...