August 10: Poet Laureate Levine

Philip Levine, born in Detroit in 1928, was named the 18th Poet Laureate of the U.S on this date in 2011. Levine won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth (1994) and the National Book Award for What Work Is (1991), among numerous awards. He began working in auto plants at the age of 14, and continued while pursuing his college education (including a mail-order master’s degree) in the early 1950s. Levine taught at California State University in Fresno from 1958 until 1992, and has had stints as artist-in-residence at Princeton, Columbia, Tufts, and elsewhere. According to Publisher’s Weekly, 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 . . .” To read the title poem from What Work Is, click here. To see him read his poem, “Belle Isle, 1949,” click here.
“I believed that if I could transform my experience [as a worker] 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.” —Philip Levine
Watch Philip Levine give his inaugural reading as 18th Poet Laureate of the United States