Quotes by Philip Levine
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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.
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.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Detroit was just a Levine-size town.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
I write what's given me to write.
I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep.
In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
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.
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.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.
My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.
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