Philip Levine Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

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.

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

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

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

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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.

Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.

My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.

I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.

When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.

I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about.

It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.

American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.

I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry.

In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.

I don't know how much the music has influenced my writing; I know it's inspired me, and the young jazz musicians I went to school with in Detroit, Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, Bess Bonier, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, were the first people I knew who were living the creative lives of artists.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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

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.

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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

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

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

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 write what's given me to write.