Philip Levine -- America's 18th Poet Laureate

"Detroit is perfect for me," Levine said in his gravelly, urban-Midwestern voice. "It's not dinky. It's just big enough. I know it. I'm a Detroit-sized poet. It took me a long time to be able to write about it without snarling and snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward those who'd maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had touched and blessed me." 1

Philip Levine has been selected by the Library of Congress to serve as 18th Poet Laureate of the United States. Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 10, 1928. He attended Detroit public schools and Wayne University (now Wayne State). In 1953, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa where he studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
Levine held a number of factory jobs, including one at Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory, and was inspired by the workers he met.2

“I saw that the people that I was working with…were voiceless in a way,” he explained in Detroit Magazine. “In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard. Nobody was speaking for them. And as young people will, you know, I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be. And sure enough I’ve gone and done it. Or I’ve tried anyway…”3

For a black man whose name I have forgotten
who danced all night at Chevy Gear & Axle,
for that great stunned Pole who laughed when he called me Jew Boy,
for the ugly who had no chance,
the beautiful in body, the used and the unused,
those who had courage and those who quit.
~From "Silent in America"4

Levine has taught at University of Iowa, California State University at Fresno, and Tufts University and has served as visiting professor at a number of Ivy League schools. He has won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. “For all his acclaim and awards, Levine “goes out of his way to tell us that he is essentially a peasant, . . . he returns again and again to his pre-academic life as a manual laborer…on presenting himself as a common man, more at home with the workers than with the professors.”5

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Works Cited
1.“The Poet of the Night Shift.” Russell Frank. Dec. 28, 1994. 8 Aug. 2011 .
2.“Philip Levine.” Poets.org : from the Academy of American Poets. 30 Sept. 2011.
< http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/19>.
3.“Philip Levine : biography.” Poetry Foundation. 30 Sept. 2011 < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-levine>.
4.Frank, Dec. 28, 1994.
5.Ibid.