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Wesleyan Poetry Program
Not This Pig
A compelling second collection of poetry.
"Not This Pig shows [Levine] to be a poet of growing power and strangeness. In most of his poems Levine sketches in an apparently concrete experience, but he blurs the edges so that the reader is propelled into the realms of mystery."-Judson Jerome, Saturday Review
".one of the best books of poetry to come out of the sixties. his perspective is usually so healthy and so complete that I have come back to the poems again and again."-James McMichael, The Southern Review
"Not This Pig shows [Levine] to be a poet of growing power and strangeness. In most of his poems Levine sketches in an apparently concrete experience, but he blurs the edges so that the reader is propelled into the realms of mystery."-Judson Jerome, Saturday Review
".one of the best books of poetry to come out of the sixties. his perspective is usually so healthy and so complete that I have come back to the poems again and again."-James McMichael, The Southern Review
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
1 person is currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Philip Levine
138 books154 followersPhilip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan. d. February 14, 2015, Fresno, California) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit.
He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1946 and went to college at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he later dedicated the book of poems The Mercy. Levine got his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he calls "stupid jobs". He married his first wife Patty Kanterman in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953. In 1953 he went to the University of Iowa without registering, studying among others with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his "one great mentor". In 1954 he graduated with a mail-order masters degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence", and married actress Frances J. Artley. He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. The same year, he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. In 1958 he joined the English Department at California State University in Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He has also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, and the University of California at Berkeley.
He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.
Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1946 and went to college at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he later dedicated the book of poems The Mercy. Levine got his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he calls "stupid jobs". He married his first wife Patty Kanterman in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953. In 1953 he went to the University of Iowa without registering, studying among others with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his "one great mentor". In 1954 he graduated with a mail-order masters degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence", and married actress Frances J. Artley. He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. The same year, he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. In 1958 he joined the English Department at California State University in Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He has also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, and the University of California at Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 17, 2019
I overrated this book the first time I read it; perhaps I overrate it now. But it is hard not to overrate a powerful voice, particularly when it sings to us of something new. Not this Pig (1968), the first widely available collection of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Philip Levine, still radiates--almost fifty years since its publication--with power and originality.
Except for isolated passages in Frost and Sandburg, no American poet spoke with a workingman’s voice like Philip Levine. And he had a right to it too. He grew up in the Motor City (as Detroit was then called), steeped in the auto industry: his father owned an auto parts store, and he himself began to work in the plants, building Chevrolets and Cadillacs, starting at the age of 14. But he completed high school too, graduated from Detroit’s Wayne State, and kept on scribbling his poems. Later he moved to Iowa where he met his mentor John Berryman, and a world of possibilities opened before him.
I loved this book when I first read it in the late sixties, and have remembered it through the years as an almost flawless series of memorable working class poems. Reading it again now, I find many of the poems only fitfully effective, others needlessly obscure, and perhaps half of them not worth reading again. Although the book contains only two American masterpieces (“To a Child Trapped in a Barbershop” and “Animals are Passing From Our Lives”), at least a third of the book is written in a new, distinct urban voice. It is the voice of a worker who is losing his moorings: poems full of beer, blackened hands, the sounds of machines, surrealism, pointless destinations, and random epiphanies. (There are also some very good poems about Spain. “The Midget” is my favorite.)
I will end with a poem I think is representative. Not perfect, and it meanders a little. But it stays in the mind:
THE RATS
Because of the great pressure
of steel on steel
I cannot hear the shadows hunched
under the machines. When the power
fails, the machines stop,
and the lights go out
I am listening to myself
to my breathing and to
the noise my breathing makes.
They are moving, the shadow
out of time, out
of sight, somewhere out
there in the darkness, and
when the lights
come back they are no longer
where they were.
Someone who never stood
next to me has poisoned
the shadows. They are dead
in the stairwell or under
the floorboards, darker
than ever and more compact
and moving in the sweet air
sweetening the air I breathe.
Later I will be in
the parking lot looking
for my car or I will remember
I have no car and it
will be tomorrow or years
from then.
It will be now.
I will have been talking
sitting across from where
you sit at ease on
the outrageous, impeccable sofa
I have admired,
and in that quiet that comes
in speech I will hear them
moving toward you in the light
bringing their great sweetness.
December 9, 2016
The second book by working class American poet, and poet laureate, Philip Levine (1928-2015).
Poetry Review: Not This Pig was Philip Levine's second book, published at age 40, five years after his first, On the Edge. During his lifetime he won two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize in 1995, and in 2011 was appointed poet laureate of the United States. Levine was a proud poet of the working class, born in the industrial city of Detroit, then still car maker to the world. He was influenced by Spanish poetry, having traveled there and having read Garcia Lorca, Jimenez, Machado, Alberti, among others. He also was an admirer of John Keats, and edited a collection of Keats's poems. In this early collection, Levine wrote often about work, family, time and memory. His wife, children, father live here. In Not This Pig, people and places are named: Eugene, Little Joe, Dr. Leo, Lonnie; Toledo, Dubuque, Fresno, Barcelona. The late 60's were a turbulent time in America, and he wrote of Latinos, blacks, Jews. He wrote of things that are used, are worn from use, and of work. Levine describes the assembly line: "the slow elephant feet/of the presses sliding down/in grooves"; lunch break: "marked/my bread with the black/print of my thumb/and ate it,"; mornings on the job: "it's 5:30, middle June./I rise, dress,/assume my name/and feel my/face against a hard towel." Perhaps in part because of the Spanish poets, in these poems Levine takes everyday incidents and finds the poetry in the moment, abstracting it from the commonplace, placing it at a higher level, a better thought. As such, although there is something valuable to be found in each of the poems, some are difficult to understand, and I won't lie, some are downright baffling (the titles are often a valuable clue). Here are bits of four of the poems that stood out to me:
"To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop"
You think your life is over?
It's just begun.
"The Midget"
no one hears or no one cares
that I sing to this late born freak
of the old world swelling my lap,
I sing lullaby, and sing.
"Animals Are Passing from Our Lives"
The boy
who drives me along believes
that any moment I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife
discovering television
"Baby Villon":
... he holds my shoulders,
Kisses my lips, his eyes still open,
My imaginary brother, my cousin,
Myself made otherwise by all his pain.
This was only his second book, but already the strengths that mark Levine's later work were visible. In Not This Pig Philip Levine sees the real world through a poetic veil, but he sees the real world. [3½★]
Poetry Review: Not This Pig was Philip Levine's second book, published at age 40, five years after his first, On the Edge. During his lifetime he won two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize in 1995, and in 2011 was appointed poet laureate of the United States. Levine was a proud poet of the working class, born in the industrial city of Detroit, then still car maker to the world. He was influenced by Spanish poetry, having traveled there and having read Garcia Lorca, Jimenez, Machado, Alberti, among others. He also was an admirer of John Keats, and edited a collection of Keats's poems. In this early collection, Levine wrote often about work, family, time and memory. His wife, children, father live here. In Not This Pig, people and places are named: Eugene, Little Joe, Dr. Leo, Lonnie; Toledo, Dubuque, Fresno, Barcelona. The late 60's were a turbulent time in America, and he wrote of Latinos, blacks, Jews. He wrote of things that are used, are worn from use, and of work. Levine describes the assembly line: "the slow elephant feet/of the presses sliding down/in grooves"; lunch break: "marked/my bread with the black/print of my thumb/and ate it,"; mornings on the job: "it's 5:30, middle June./I rise, dress,/assume my name/and feel my/face against a hard towel." Perhaps in part because of the Spanish poets, in these poems Levine takes everyday incidents and finds the poetry in the moment, abstracting it from the commonplace, placing it at a higher level, a better thought. As such, although there is something valuable to be found in each of the poems, some are difficult to understand, and I won't lie, some are downright baffling (the titles are often a valuable clue). Here are bits of four of the poems that stood out to me:
"To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop"
You think your life is over?
It's just begun.
"The Midget"
no one hears or no one cares
that I sing to this late born freak
of the old world swelling my lap,
I sing lullaby, and sing.
"Animals Are Passing from Our Lives"
The boy
who drives me along believes
that any moment I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife
discovering television
"Baby Villon":
... he holds my shoulders,
Kisses my lips, his eyes still open,
My imaginary brother, my cousin,
Myself made otherwise by all his pain.
This was only his second book, but already the strengths that mark Levine's later work were visible. In Not This Pig Philip Levine sees the real world through a poetic veil, but he sees the real world. [3½★]
October 1, 2021
Favorites:
The Everlasting Sunday
Commanding Elephants
Above It All
The Midget
The Everlasting Sunday
Commanding Elephants
Above It All
The Midget
May 29, 2021
8.5/10
This is a binge-worthy collection of poetry if I’ve ever read one (and I have).
Philip Levine (1928-2015) was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2011-2012. He grew up in Detroit. He taught English at many universities across the U.S. including California State University, Fresno, where he taught for over three decades. He is Fresno's dumb bard. These are not my words. They are his:
“I am Fresno’s
dumb bard, America’s last
hope, sheep in sheep’s
clothing.”
—“Silent in America”
Not This Pig (published 1968) is the first and only collection of Levine's work that I have read (so far). I will keep my eye out for more from the late poet, lest he be forgotten by the history of American verse. I would say that Not This Pig is a quick, easy read, but I don't want you to get the idea that it is shallow. It does not lack depth. It's not forgettable "pop poetry". It's easy to read in the way good poetry should be, while still retaining meaning and originality. When I say "binge-worthy" I do mean that it is worth reading and that you will want to keep flipping the pages.
This is a binge-worthy collection of poetry if I’ve ever read one (and I have).
Philip Levine (1928-2015) was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2011-2012. He grew up in Detroit. He taught English at many universities across the U.S. including California State University, Fresno, where he taught for over three decades. He is Fresno's dumb bard. These are not my words. They are his:
“I am Fresno’s
dumb bard, America’s last
hope, sheep in sheep’s
clothing.”
—“Silent in America”
Not This Pig (published 1968) is the first and only collection of Levine's work that I have read (so far). I will keep my eye out for more from the late poet, lest he be forgotten by the history of American verse. I would say that Not This Pig is a quick, easy read, but I don't want you to get the idea that it is shallow. It does not lack depth. It's not forgettable "pop poetry". It's easy to read in the way good poetry should be, while still retaining meaning and originality. When I say "binge-worthy" I do mean that it is worth reading and that you will want to keep flipping the pages.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews