Belle Isle, 1949
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere .
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to* the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.
Philip Levine, "Belle Isle, 1949" from The Names of The Lost.
Copyright © 1976 Philip Levine.
Reprinted with the permission of Antheneum Publishers, Inc.
Expatriate
Poet
Philip Levine left Detroit
years ago, but the city has
burned itself deeply into his psyche
ROBERT ISRAEL
Special to The Jewish News
hilip Levine, who has
been writing, teaching
and publishing poetry
since the early 1960s
and who has won
numerous awards for his work, was
born and educated in Detroit. After
graduating from Wayne State Uni-
versity and working at "a succession
of stupid jobs," he left the city for
California, where he teaches at the
University of California at Fresno.
But Detroit has never left him. He
has written about the city in almost
all of his books.
He has written about working in
a Detroit grease shop and about
watching the snow fall on Grand
River Avenue from the grungy win-
dows of the Automotive Supply
Company. In One For The Rose," he
describes a bus ride from Akron,
Ohio back to the city, passing the
Ford Rouge plant. He has written
about Hamtramck and Belle Isle.
And in his most recent book, Sweet
Will, published last year, there are
more Detroit poems — one about
working at Detroit Transmission,
another about taking the Woodward
Avenue bus.
Sometimes the city is portrayed
in romantic terms, as a "city of
dreams."
Sometimes it is a city of lost
dreams, a place where one grows old
before one's time.
Most frequently, Levine, a poet
who has won the National Book Cri-
tics Award and the American Book
Award for his work, looks at Detroit
as a harsh, unwelcoming place.
"A winter Tuesday," he writes
in "Coming Home: Detroit, 1968,"
the city pouring fire, Ford Rouge
sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,
Chevy gray. The fat stacks of bre-
weries hold their tongues. Rags,
papers, hands, the stems of birches
dirtied with words."
There is an anger seething in
Levine's descriptions, an anger often
acted out by immigrants who are
tired of working assembly lines,
making cars that ultimately are
worthless.
That immigrant experience —
Levine is the son of Jewish immig-
rant parents — is also celebrated as
well as maligned, its spirit full of
song, as in "An Ordinary Morning,"
from Sweet Will:
"A man is singing on the bus
coming in from Toledo," he writes.
"His voice floats over the heads that
bow and sway with each turn, jolt,
and sudden slowing. A hoarse, quiet
voice, it tells of love that is true, of
love that endures a whole weekend."
In a recent interview, Philip
Levine talked about growing up in
Detroit, about the anger he still feels
about a past that has become his
present, and about his hopes for the
future:
"Yes, I'm still angry about the
whole American set-up," Levine