arts & entertainment
"THE SIMPLE TRUTH"
From The Simple Truth
Poet
Of The
People
"Poetry has been
very generous to
me, and I'm very
glad I became the
poet of Detroit.
I loved the city
when I grew up
there. It was a
place of adventure,
mystery and
magic."
— Philip Levine
The nation's new poet laureate, Detroit native
Philip Levine, owes much to his Motor City roots.
Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer
hilip Levine, recently named America's poet
laureate by the Library of Congress, has read-
ing decisions to make. There are some 20 of
his collections to review with public presentations in
mind.
Levine, who wrote his earliest verse in Detroit, cur-
rently is focusing on two very different events soon
approaching in the nation's capital.
One will be traditional as he opens the literary sea-
son of the Library of Congress. The other, essentially
nontraditional, places him before union activists
linked to poems that recall his pre-fame factory shifts
in the Motor City.
"I would like to show the range of my interests, emo-
tions, style and methods:' says Levine, 83, in a phone
conversation from his New York home. "I will read very
serious poems, not very serious poems, early poems
in a more formal style and recent work in my current
voice.
"I think the range will show that I've lived a long life
and written about it. I've lived in a number of places
and with a great many different people entering my
work. I will tell about an America that stretches back."
Levine's talents, meriting a Pulitzer Prize for The
Simple Truth (1994) and National Book Awards for
What Work Is (1991) and Ashes: Poems New and Old
(1980), place him on a list of familiar American poets
chosen laureates, including Robert Frost, Conrad
Aiken, Stephen Spender and Billy Collins. He is the lat-
est Jewish poet laureate in a line dating back to Karl
Shapiro in 1946 and, most recently, Robert Pinsky from
1997 to 2000.
The Simple Truth
Levine's subjects often are readily familiar to Michigan
readers, who recognize Hamtramck neighborhoods,
General Motors plants and Central High School among
many other landmarks.
"Philip Levine is one of America's great narrative
poets:' says James Billington, the Library of Congress
librarian who made the appointment. "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:'
Since being named the nation's 18th poet laureate,
Levine's volumes of poetry — his latest is 2009's News
of the World have sold out and been ordered again
at local stores. Other titles include On The Edge (1963),
The Names of the Lost (1976), 7 Years From Somewhere
(1979),A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988), New Selected
Poems (1991) and The Mercy (1999).
Nonfiction projects include The Bread of Time:
Toward an Autobiography (1994), Don't Ask (1981) and
So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (2002).
Editing projects include The Essential Keats (1987) and
translated collections of Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes
and Mexican poet Jaime Sabines.
"I believed that if I could transform my experience
into poetry, I would give it the value and dignity it did
not begin to possess on its own," Levine says about his
days on the auto line.
"I thought, too, that if I could write about it, I could
come to understand it; I believed that if I could under-
stand my life — or at least the part my work played in
it — I could embrace it with some degree of joy"
I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they 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.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
—
Detroit Beginnings
Levine's poetic awakening is tied to the awakening of
the northwest Detroit neighborhood of his youth.
"When I was almost 14, my mother bought a house
on Santa Rosa north of Seven Mile recalls the poet,
whose father had died years earlier.
"They were just starting to build up these blocks,
and there were very few houses. The war started for
the United States in 1941, and the building stopped.
"The blocks were full of trees and shrubs, and I
would go into these woods just before nightfall. I
started composing poems, which I never wrote down.
If my twin brother, Eddie,
had found them,
he would have
shown them to
my schoolmates,
and they would
have giggled."
Levine gave his
poems to memory.
"I found a voice
"THE NEW WORLD"
From The Mercy
A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."
My grandfather in his prime could outshout
the Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles
along the river. Hamtramck hungered
for yellow freestone peaches, downriver
wakened from a dream of work, Zug Island danced
into the bright day glad to be alive.
Full-figured women in their negligees
streamed into the streets from the dark doorways
to demand in Polish or Armenian
the ripened offerings of this new world.
Josef Prisckulnick out of Dubrovitsa
to Detroit by way of Ellis Island
raised himself regally to his full height
of five feet two and transacted until
the fruit was gone into those eager hands.
Thus would there be a letter sent across
an ocean and a continent, and thus
would Sadie waken to the news of wealth
without limit in the bright and distant land,
and thus bags were packed and she set sail
for America. Some of this is true.
The women were gaunt. All day the kids dug
in the back lots searching for anything.
The place was Russia with another name.
Joe was five feet two. Dubrovitsa burned
to gray ashes the west wind carried off,
then Rovno went, then the Dnieper turned to dust.
We sat around the table telling lies
while the late light filled an empty glass.
Bread, onions, the smell of burning butter,
small white potatoes we shared with no one
because the hour was wrong, the guest was late,
and this was Michigan in 1928.
Poet on page 98
September 22 • 2011
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