A Sleepless Night

April, and the last of the plum blossoms
scatters on the black grass
before dawn. The sycamore, the lime,
the struck pine inhale
the first pale hints of sky.

An iron day,
I think yet it will come
dazzling, the light
rise from the belly of leaves and pour
burning from the cups
of poppies

The mockingbird squawks
from his perch, fidgets,
and settles back. The snail, awake
for good, trembles from his shell
and sets sail for China. My hand dances
in the memory of a million vanished stars.

A man has every place to lay his head.

Levine is American - but his work is riddled with travelling, searching and finding calm and repose in the little of wonders. He's American, but particularly his fascination for Europe shines through. There could have been a role by the Russian - Jewish background of his parents, who were immigrants.

Yet Levine is at its most poignant when he returns to Detroit, his birthplace, and when he writes with the voice of the working class. As John Martone wrote on Levine,

Whitman shouted, `Vivas for those who have failed.' Levine, who uses Whitman's line as an epigraph, has gone on to show us a universe of failure and dignity in the face of failure. Of all contemporary poets, he has probably remained most faithful to the world of the American underclass and working class, who know as he does what it is to endure `a succession of stupid jobs'.

From They Feed They Lion:

Coming Home, Detroit, 1968

A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,
Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,
Chevy gray. The fat stacks
of breweries hold their tongues. Rags,
papers, hands, the stems of birches
dirtied with words.

Near the freeway
you stop and wonder what came off,
recall the snowstorm where you lost it all,
the wolverine, the northern bear, the wolf
caught out, ice and steel raining
from the foundries in a shower
of human breath. On sleds in the false sun
the new material rests. One brown child
stares and stares into your frozen eyes
until the lights change and you go
forward to work. The charred faces, the eyes
boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry
of wet smoke hanging in your throat,
the twisted river stopped at the color of iron.
We burn this city every day.

I'd say Levine does not speak for just the American underclass - he writes for the working class universally; that the setting of a majority of his poetry is in America is happenstance. Perhaps his poetry was also aided by Levine's growing conviction that the American Dream was a masquerade of false hope.

About Philip Levine

L.'s working experience lent his poetry a profound skepticism in regard to conventional American ideals. He had seen too many victims of the crushing pressures felt in the lives of the poor, so he quite naturally found within himself an uncanny empathy with the outcast and the despised in general. In L.'s first two books, On the Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968), the poetry dwells on those who suddenly become aware they are trapped in some murderous processes not of their own making. In "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives," for example, the pig trotting off to market intends to keep his dignity, no matter what the charnel house outcome is, as if that kept dignity marks a triumph.

[. . .]

L.'s poetry developed its distinctive style and subject matter also during the same years as the U.S. was enmeshed in the African American struggle for civil rights. From L.'s point of view, the dehumanization of factory labor was just another example of what had happened over the centuries to racial minorities. Everything human was or would be turned into a commodity. People and all they cared about were bound to be bought, sold, trashed. The American Dream for some had always been a nightmare. Such is the insight that drives L.'s third book, They Feed, They Lion (1972). The title poem was inspired by race riots in Detroit in the late 1960s and forms the refrain of a chant that conjures the fury of the thwarted and dispossessed.

"They Feed, They Lion" is not for this diary. The first time I came across it, many years younger, inchoate in English poetry, it struck me right between the eyes with its power and the undercurrents of rage rattling behind the words. Only now, as I've hit upon 30 years, having suffered my own way through a varieties of droning work -although never with the prospect it will be for the rest of my life - only now the events of the world have politicised my world view, I can read "They Feed, They Lion" and feel the poem. It is, to Levine's own admittance, an exceptional creation in his oeuvre.

On "They Feed They Lion"

When you speak of rage, and of realizing you can't be rational, it sounds like the poem "They Feed They Lion." In terms of form and voice, that poem seems unique in your whole body of work. Is that fair to say?

Yes, it is. I really don't know how it came into being. But I do remember that I had the idea for it and waited several days before I wrote it. I kept saying to myself, "I'm not ready to write this. I want to wait, and just let it germinate."

What was that initial idea? Can you put it in a nutshell?

The first thing that came into my mind? I had the title, which derived entirely from a statement that was made to me. I was working alongside a guy in Detroit -- a black guy named Eugene -- when I was probably about twenty-four. He was a somewhat older guy, and we were sorting universal joints, which are part of the drive-shaft of a car. The guy who owned the place had bought used ones, and we were supposed to sort the ones that could be rebuilt and made into usable replacement parts from the ones that were too badly damaged. So we spread them out on the concrete floor, and we were looking at them carefully, because we were the guys who'd then do the job of rebuilding them. We had two sacks that we were putting them in -- burlap sacks -- and at one point Eugene held up a sack, and on it were the words "Detroit Municipal Zoo." And he laughed, and said, "They feed they lion they meal in they sacks." That's exactly what he said! And I thought, This guy's a genius with language. He laughed when he said it, because he knew that he was speaking an English that I didn't speak, but that I would understand, of course. He was almost parodying it, even though he appreciated the loveliness of it. It stuck in my mind, and then one night just after the riots in Detroit -- I'd gone back to the city to see what had happened -- somehow I thought of that line. "There's a poem there," I said. "But I don't know what it is. And I'm just going to walk around for a couple of days and see what accumulates."

I waited two days, got a good night's sleep, and got up in the morning and wrote the damn thing. It struck me that it was a long line, and that it would be out of the poet Christopher Smart. Do you know his work? He's an eighteenth-century mystical poet, a great poet, and his greatest poem was written in a madhouse. We only have a fragment of it. It's a sort of call-and-response poem -- very incantatory. I said, "That's the rhythm I'm going to try and use." It's the only time I've ever tried to utilize that rhythm.

But when I met Levine, this was not what pulled me towards him. For I came upon Levine as a youth searching, looking, wondering where life was heading for. Too afraid to release from the iron grip of modern life yet incapacitated by fear of making mistakes in it, I found the words of Levine a godsend. Here was a man who would look back on his journeys, carrying on his shoulders the melancholy of times lost and things unachieved - yet still able to square his shoulders and weep with open pride.

From 7 Years From Somewhere:

7 Years From Somewhere

The highway ended
and we got out and walked
to where the bridge
had washed out and stared
down at the river moving
but clear to the bottom
of dark rocks. We
wondered, can we go back
and to what? In the hills
of the lower Atlas
7 years ago. You
pointed to a tall shepherd
racing along the crest
of a green hill, and
then there were four,
and they came down, stood
before us, dirty, green
eyed Berbers, their faces
open and laughing. One
took my hand and stroked
the soft white palm
with fingers as brown
and hard as wood. The sun
was beginning to drop
below the peaks, and I
said Fez, and they
answered in a language
we hadn't heard before.
Fez, and with gestures
of a man swimming
one told us to double
back, and we would find
a bridge. We left them
standing together in their
long robes, waving and laughing,
and went on to Fez, Meknes,
Tetuan, Ceuta, Spain,
Paris, here. I have
been lost since, wandering
in a bombed-out American
city among strangers
who meant me no harm.
Moving from the bars
to the streets, and coming
home alone to talk
to no one or myself
until the first light
broke the sky and I could
sleep a moment and waken
in the world we made
and will never call
ours, to waken to
the smell of bourbon
and sweat and another day
with no bridge, no old city
cupped carefully in
a bowl of mountains,
no one to take this hand,
the five perfect fingers
of the soul, and hold it
as one holds a blue egg
found in tall grasses
and smile and say something
that means nothing, that
means you are, you
are, and you are home.

I'm far from finished exploring Levine (or other poets for that matter) - currently, I'm struck how his style and choice of metre have changed over the years. Whereas his earliest work was interesting, but not as captivating, Levine has gone through a period of enthusiastically dabbling in surrealism - an element that was there from the start. There was a period of writing about the deepest of human losses. As he aged, his style seems to have become more prosaic with a deeper drive for storytelling and reminiscing. Perhaps his move to California influenced this, who can tell. Oscillating between quirky reminiscence, his traditional melancholy and his focus on family, his most recent bundles may actually form the very soul of his work. Levine received the Pullitzer for Poetry for his 1995 bundle "The Simple Truth".

My favourite bundle remains "7 Years From Somewhere" but for the one last punch of Levine, I leave with the poem that I read in the Borders bookstore in Bristol now 4 years ago, leaving me literally reeling with vertigo.

"What Work Is"
 We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.