Philip Levine

Me: "Mom, we got a new poet laureate today."
Mom: "What happened to the old one?"


Today, Philip Levine was appointed to be the U.S.'s new poet laureate. I hadn't read Philip Levine before, so I took this opportunity to read some of his poems.

The write-ups emphasize that he's 83, and from Detroit, the Whitman-esque writer of industrial America.

He has also lived in California, which works into lots of his poems. His poems are often unrhymed (if there's any rhyme [why is that such a hard word for me to spell?], it's internal), relying instead on the pressure from regular, short lines and on enjambment and on alliteration. Perhaps the lack of rhymes is what people mean by Whitman-esque? Perhaps it is in his focus on the common man. He ends up praising the immigrant--not in any particularly political way, but simply, it seems, because his experience included lots of people who were first- or second- generation Americans.

He isn't like Whitman, however, in his utter lack of pretension. In many of his pictures he's casually dressed. It really seems like he doesn't take himself too seriously at all.


(picture, picture)