biography

Michael Lia March 11 2012 Mrs. Salamone Poet biography: Phil Levine Phil Levine’s life was difficult sometimes. He was exposed to many hardships in his life. He was a Jewish kid in the time of Hitler. Levine also had to adapt to life without his father, a Jewish immigrant, who died in 1933, was going to be hard. He was born in 1928 and grew up in the dangerous run down city of Detroit. Levine worked a blue collar job and described in his poem, “What is work”, this is where he started his poetic thinking. First came his thinking, then writing for himself and eventually publishing his deep heartfelt poems that have brought him so far in life. Levine, with a Jewish immigrant father, who died when Phil was 5 years old, had a lot to write for. He also was living in a time where he faced anti-Semitism, this also influenced his writing. He didn’t quite realize his potential power, as a poet, in his initial years of life. He finally realized his brute force in 1946 when he started writing poetry during the hours he was free from work. Levine, starting after he finished school at Wayne University, worked a night shift at Chevrolet Gear and Axel Factory. About writing poetry when not working the night shift, Levine has written: "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."(Poetry Foundation) This shows the influence of his job on his poetry. Studying at the University of Iowa in 1953 and returning in 1957 teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. Fully educated with a purpose, Phil Levine is a masterpiece of a poet. "Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit (where Levine grew up) or in central California (where he now resides), sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage or to the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence." (Poetry Foundation) Said about the free verse poet Phil Levine, who noticed no one writes poetry about factory work so he believed that it was his job. Levine writes about past experiences in his life that took place when he was growing up. Also, Phil likes to write his poetry with similar length stanzas that are filled with meaningful, serious pieces that are brought together deep within his peculiar brain. “Though he takes on the largest subjects of death, love, courage, manhood, loyalty… he brings the mysteries of existence down into the ordinarily inarticulate events and objects of daily life. Because Levine values reality above all in his poetry, his language is often earthy and direct, his syntax colloquial and his rhymes relaxed.”(Poetry Foundation) Levine also likes to write poems that describe specific situations and poems that are relative to one’s life. Phil Levine was very successful, he was appointed 2011-2012 Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and published many books and received many awards throughout his life. Awards and books include: On the Edge (The Stone Wall Press), in 1963, followed by Not This Pig (Wesleyan University Press) in 1968. News of the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Breath (2004); The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (Atheneum, 1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the 1977 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and They Feed They Lion (1973). Phil Levine, being the poet laureate, means a lot to our country and the whole genre of poetry. I find this very interesting because he writes his poems about his life, yet many readers can connect and appreciate them in their own lives. This is why he is who he is, and he reached most every poets lifelong goal of becoming the poet laureate. Phil Levine’s story just says one thing to me, it says, if you stick to one thing your whole life and keep on practicing and progressing you have nothing to lose except time, and the whole world to gain.

__Works Cited__ "Philip Levine (poet)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 Mar. 2012. . Poetry Foundation. 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. . Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 1997. Web. 15 Mar..