Words that work

To list Philip Levine’s accomplishments would be a long task, and it’s much easier to simply suggest a poem or two (try “They Feed They Lion” or “Our Valley”). The U.S. Poet Laureate and a retired professor of English at Fresno State University will be in Sacramento on June 2 to read at the SummerWords creative writing colloquium at American River College.

He spoke with SN&R by telephone from his New York home, where he lives half the year.

You get back to California frequently?

I spend half the year in Fresno. I spend the summers there, and this year I’ll be there June, July and August, and I’ll come back to New York, then back to Fresno for January, February and March. If my wife had her way, we’d be here, in New York, all the time, and if I had my way, we’d be there. So we compromise. It works, so we’ve been doing something close to this ever since I retired.

As poet laureate, you must travel a lot. Do you enjoy it?

It’s almost over with—the position, that is. Yes, I have enjoyed it. For the most part, it’s been quite wonderful. I’ve met a lot of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and some of them have been quite astonishing.

I was quite taken in your poems by, first, the way you write about work, and second, the sense of place. I’m thinking particularly of the poem “Our Valley,” which I just read. Even though that’s probably about the part of the valley down by Fresno, it made me think of the Sacramento Valley. How important do you think a sense of place is in writing?

Everybody lives somewhere, and unless you're writing abstractly—and some people do; they just have that aesthetic—so unless the poem is largely mental, it’s situated somewhere. My poetry is always situated somewhere. Often it’s situated in the city I grew up in, Detroit. And also in New York, and I lived in Spain for awhile and situated some poems in Barcelona, which I loved.

And, of course, the valley. I came there in 1958, and Fresno was a much smaller town, maybe 120,000 people. You could almost always see the mountains. It was the first time I’d seen mountains like that, when I came West. I found them awesome. They dwarf you.

I used to go up into them often when I was younger. I had a motorcycle so I could shoot up there quickly. I loved it.

I don’t know if this is the case where you are, up in Sacramento, but in Fresno, during some of the winter months, you get this heavy tule fog, which can be a little depressing. But if you shoot up to 5,000 or 6,000 feet, you’re above it.

I just loved it, being up in the mountains. It gave me a different view, both literally and metaphorically, of where I was living. I would look down on it—the valley and the city—quite literally. I’d think “What a filthy mess it is down there, and how sublime it is up here!”

I’d get a little snobbish sometimes. I found the mountains inspiring.

In many ways Fresno is very like Detroit, the city where I grew up. That sounds nuts, but socially and culturally, the two were quite similar. You had a very small minority—you might almost say “royalty”—who owned everything and who ran everything, even politically. And then you had the workers, a class with its own mythology attached.

I found that same mythology in Barcelona: this mythology about the useless people from the south who come up to the city and ruin it. In Barcelona, they came from the rural south of Spain, and in Detroit, of course, they came from the southern U.S., and in Fresno, they come from Mexico. And the mythology is that those people are lazy and stupid and useless.

And yet, of course, all the labor that takes place is done by those people, and they get just enough of the rewards to stay alive and produce the next generation of serfs.

And I taught at Fresno State which was very like Wayne—it wasn't Wayne State yet, because it hadn't been taken over by the state. It was the city college, a public school. At Fresno State, it was familiar, but it looked different. It looks even more different now.

And now they’ve air conditioned it. When I first came there, it wasn’t air conditioned. I couldn’t imagine how the students could learn anything or pay attention when it was so sweltering. And of course, they didn’t.

The first of your books that I read was What Work Is, and it was such a surprise. I didn’t know that poets wrote about work.

And yet, we do.

That’s right. And later on, I read Carl Sandburg, who also wrote about work, although he did tend to romanticize it…

So does Whitman. He’s our greatest poet, and he talks about work as if people are playing in the Philharmonic instead of moving a big piece of granite, this big rock. They forget that work is, really, work.

I certainly identified with those poems, coming from a solidly working-class family where I was the first to go to college.

I, too, am the first to go to college. I don’t really know what kind of education my parents had, although my father spoke several languages. He’d been in the British Army, stationed in the Middle East, so he knew Russian, Polish, English, Arabic, Yiddish—of course, by the time he was my father, he only spoke English. He read Yiddish, though. There were several influential Yiddish newspapers, and he read the American Daily Forward in Yiddish. Now it’s published in English, with a special edition once a month in Yiddish.

My parents deterred me from learning it.

It would be a much smaller audience for poetry in Yiddish.

That it would. The more recent Jewish emigrés from the former Soviet Union don't speak Yiddish. They barely speak Hebrew; most of them speak Russian.

It seems as if there's a real renaissance in poetry, both with traditional styles and with the spoken word movement. We’ve got four weekly reading series that I know of in Sacramento alone…

Oh, that’s everywhere. Last year in New York, I did this thing called Page Meets Stage. I’m a page poet, and I gave a reading with a stage poet, which is supposed to be a guy who invents his poems up on the stage. But he actually memorizes the poems and performs them, he told me. He was very young—he was like, 25—but also quite good.

And I did the same thing in Seattle last March or April with another spoken word poet, and he was also good.

I enjoy it, and of course I profit from it, from this expansion of the audience for poetry.

I remember when I was young, my mom went into the book business and she would say, “I’m going somewhere to look at these books. Is there anything you want?” And she would pick up a lot of poetry for me.

She knew a lot about the publishing industry, even though she worked for herself, and I asked about it.

So she’d given me a first edition of one of William Carlos Williams’ books, and it was signed. I asked how many were in the first edition, and she said 900. Now, these days, my books print about 10,000. That book you mentioned before, What Work Is, has sold more than 40,000 copies. It’s incredible. I know successful novelists who don’t get that many books sold.

Of course, since I’ve been the poet laureate, everything is back in print. It’s all available now.

So now that we’re at the end of our time here, I want to ask: Given the state we’re in now, with an economy that isn’t being called a depression but looks a great deal like one—Paul Krugman says it’s a depression—and war, and a nation that seems to be not just divided but almost at each other’s throats—so in that sort of state, what is poetry to do?

Weep. Look on and weep.

If you look at the Great Depression, what we needed – we’d go to those Frank Capra movies and they had wonderful moments of comedy. You had to laugh at something. We needed that.

Poetry does not usually play a major role in uniting or dividing people. Occasionally, it can. W. H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939.” I’ve heard that poem over and over since 9/11. It’s about the beginning of World War II, the invasion of Poland. But I can’t remember a poem like that about Pearl Harbor, which is the analogous event to 9/11.

I don’t think that poetry has any special function. Poets do, because we’re citizens. Poetry doesn’t separate us in any way, other than perhaps we think about these things more.

We have a lamentable situation, in that one of our major political parties wants to return us to a less democratic time. They want to eliminate social security and welfare. As a young man, I saw these things come into being. I watched, with FDR, Truman and LBJ, and we were moving into more openness and a more diverse populace with access to better pay and better opportunities, and more people of color in positions of influence—an enormous amount of progress just in my lifetime. And yet I see a major political party that wants to backtrack.

When [President] Obama was elected, I thought the country had taken a major step toward making amends for one of our major sins, the sin of racism. Then an hour and a half after he was elected, you had all these people saying he wasn’t a citizen. And then one of the parties—I’m not going to name them—has taken advantage of this.

The president speaking out on the decency of gay people being allowed to marry, well, it isn’t much of a stretch to see that yes, they are citizens, and yes, they have rights. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a scholar of constitutional law to see that; you just have to be a decent citizen.

I’m disappointed in America’s religious leaders, that they don’t recognize their own codes. Christianity says that faith, hope, and charity are the greatest goods, and of these, the greatest is charity, and yet the religious right turns away from the greatest good named by their own religion, the good of charity. I think [President] Reagan was just so successful in telling everyone that charity is about black people driving around in Cadillacs—although how anyone with eyes could ever believe that, I don’t know; it's just untrue—but believe it they did, and now look where we are.

Just look where we are.