American - Poet | January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine
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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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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.
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I write what's given me to write.
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I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
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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.
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But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
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Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
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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.
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
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