Philip Levine

Levine wrote back to us, marking our poems assiduously. Since then I have received many letters from him, always on yellow legal paper with comments like, “I’m not sure my remarks, which are fairly nasty at times, really indicate . . .” His comments, though never nasty, were always serious, as if he took the business of correspondence to be part of the education of a poet. I had the feeling he wrote many such letters to young poets around the country: poets driving trucks, picking oranges, poets who were waiters and acupuncturists’ assistants and college students. Levine takes his role as mentor with the responsibility of a sacred vocation. He has sometimes had trouble from the administrations of high-tuitioned writing programs for allowing auditors—poets who were a little older, talented and too broke to pay—into his classes.

I was first introduced to Philip Levine through the mail in the summer of 1976. I was studying literature at Berkeley, and my friends and I, all college freshmen and sophomores, were ardent readers of Levine, W. S. Merwin, Donald Justice, Gary Snyder, and Hart Crane. A friend from the college literary magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, introduced me to Ernest Benck, a California poet, who kindly sent some of both of our poems to Levine.

New Poet Laureate of America

America has a new poet laureate, as the Library of Congress names Philip Levine in the one-year position. He will succeed W.S. Merwin in the post. Born in Detroit in 1928, Levine has used his poetry to examine blue-collar life, often embroidering everyday events with a sense of myth.

Announcing America's most prestigious poetry post Wednesday, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington called Levine "one of America's great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling 'The Simple Truth'—about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives."

Billington was referring to a collection of poems titled The Simple Truth, for which Levine won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 — not, it should be noted, the David Baldacci thriller of the same name published in 1999.

A central passage of that collection's title poem goes like this:

Some thingsyou know all your life. They are so simple and truethey must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be

naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Levine has also been featured on The Writer's Almanac, with Garrison Keillor. At the Almanac website, you can hear Garrisonread some of the poems.

For Newscast NPR's Neda Ulaby filed this report:

As a kid, Philip Levine hated the 'prissy' poetry they taught in school. He started writing poems at 13, but he modeled his rhythms on the preachers he heard on the radio.

"Detroit at the time was probably half Southern," he said, "and any Sunday, I loved it."

Levine, who's won virtually every major prize for his work, including a Pulitzer and two Guggenheims, is celebrated for evoking the richness of ordinary American life. Here is a line from his poem "Call It Music":

"The perfect sunlight angles into my room before willow street, part milk part iron as it passes from me into the world."

As he told the AP, Levine wasn't sure he should take the Library of Congress post:

"I'm a fairly irreverent person and at first I thought, "This is not you. You're an old union man,'" Levine said during a recent telephone interview from his home in Fresno, Calif.

"But I knew if I didn't do this, I would kick myself. I thought, "This is you. You can speak to a larger public than has been waiting for you in recent years.'"

Levine's new official title is the Poet Laureate Consultant In Poetry — a slightly redundant moniker which suggests, once again, that government job titles are not created by poets.

Important Questions

Q: Why is the year 1066 important?

Ans: 1066 is the date of Norman Conquest of England and the beginning of Anglo – Norman literature in England. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 greatly influenced the evolution of the language. For about 300 years after this, the Normans used Anglo-Norman, which was close to Old French, as the language of the court, law and administration. By the latter part of the fourteenth century, when English had replaced French as the language of law and government, Anglo-Norman borrowings had contributed roughly 10,000 words to English, of which 75% remain in use.

Q: To which country did King Alfred belong? Name one of his prose works?

Ans: Alfred belonged to the ninth century he was the king of Wessex(871). Alfred is actually noted for his translation works. He translated or got translated Pastoral Care of Pope Gregory.

Q: What is the period of the middle ages? What are the sources of information about the middle ages?

Ans: Roughly speaking, the middle age refers to the period of 1066 to 1485 (Norman Conquest of England to the end of the wars of Roses). The middle age is briefly reflected in Doomsdays Book, pipe Rolls, Court Rolls, chancery records and account books.

The Formalist Approach

The formalist approach emphasizes the manner of reading literature that was given its special dimensions and emphases by English and American critics in the first two-thirds of the Twentieth century. It should be mentioned, that to many students of literature during that era, this approach came to be called the New Criticism.

Church Going

Some Questions with Answers

1. Answering bigger and smaller questions—for example, why is the air “blent”?
2. Who is recognizing “our compulsions”?
3. And why are they “robed as destinies”?
4. And by whom are they robed? And to what is “that” referring in the line “that much can never be obsolete”?
5. The final two lines baffle as well.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Answers:

1) The air is blended in the sense that it holds, in solution, a mixture of smells and associations (see stanza five). But why “blent”? Why such an archaic, literary word? At the very beginning of the poem, when the speaker walks into the church, he finds a “tense, musty, unignorable silence / Brewed God knows how long.” (Get it, God knows?) By the end of the poem, that defensive, jokey tone is gone. The speaker is trying to make his language live up to the dignity he sees in the church. That’s how it strikes me, anyway.

(Here and throughout, Larkin makes a big deal of the church as container. He starts off by wondering about the roof, how old it is and whether it’s in good repair. He associates the end of “superstition” with the caving-in of the roof, when all that’s left is “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” He calls the church a “special shell,” and so on.)

2) Who is recognizing our compulsions? Yes. Exactly. I think this question goes straight to the heart of the poem. If there is no one in the church (no God, no clergy, no belief, no superstition), then there is no one to recognize our compulsions. There is no one to call them sins and forgive them. No one to take them seriously. No promise that we will be rewarded or punished for what we do or given a “destiny” that is special to ourselves.

3) Why “robed”? We tend to think of robes as royal or ceremonial garments and as symbols of redemption: “Lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9-10). To take our compulsions (a quasimedical term borrowed from psychiatry) and robe them as destinies is to ... well, you can decide what that might mean, no?

4) By “that much,” I think Larkin means the feeling that the church is “a serious house on serious earth.” In the last lines of the poem he tries to explain this feeling—or at least say where it comes from.

Again, these are just places you might start. My next question would probably have to do with the tone of that last stanza. Is there something not quite serious about that line “A serious house on serious earth it is”? Is there something wishful, and ironic, about “blent”? And so on. Another reader might ask how much the last lines had to do with churches and how much with poems about churches. Both readers would be asking questions, not just about what’s on the page, but about their own biases and interests and ... compulsions.

So, as for your most general question—how to read poetry well—I have no idea, except to pay attention to the specific words on the page, and the implied tone of voice, and to think about what you read. Just what you’re doing. It sounds childish to say, but one thing I like about poems is that you are allowed to stare at them, and think about them, for as long as you like. In this sense, they resemble slow movies, or portraits, or nudes, or most of what we think of as art: poems give you permission to pay attention to a degree that would be rude or embarrassing face to face with, for example, a person.

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea was an enormous success for Ernest Hemingway when it was published in 1952. At first glance, the story appears to be an extremely simple story of an old Cuban fisherman (Santiago), who catches an enormously large fish then loses it again. But, there's much more to the story than that...The Old Man and the Sea helped to revive Hemingway's reputation as a writer of great acclaim. This slim volume also contributed enormously to Hemingway's recognition as a world-renowned writer--with the award of the Nobel Prize for literature. The popular reception of the novel comes from its part-parable, part-eulogy style--recollecting a by-gone age in this spiritual quest for discovery. Touching and powerful in turns, the story is told in Hemingway's simple, brittle style. The book reaches out to a very human need--for stability and certainty.