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Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems
Philip Levine was the authentic voice of America's urban poor. Born in 1928, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he spent his early years doing a succession of heavy labouring jobs. Trying to write poetry 'for people for whom there is no poetry', he chronicled the lives of the people he grew up with and worked with in 'Their presence seemed utterly lacking in the poetry I inherited at age 20, so I've spent the last 40-some years trying to add to our poetry what wasn't there.' Much of his poetry addresses the joys and sufferings of industrial life, with radiant feeling, as well as painful 'It took me a long time to be able to write about it without snarling or snapping. I had to temper the violence I felt toward those who maimed and cheated me with a tenderness toward those who had touched and blessed me.' Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine has continually written poems which search for universal truths. His plain-speaking poetry is a testament to the durability of love, the strength of the human spirit and the persistence of life in the face of death. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
176 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2006
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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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November 17, 2025
'America, I'm feeling sentimental about the wobblies' - GINSBERG (Allen).
Value in poetry ought to be inimical to value in capital. This might sound perversely equivalent to a bourgeois, Wildean aesthetic, but I think it can be true without reducing art to the realm of the perfectly useless. It can illuminate, comfort, amuse but insofar as it does so, it should communicate through the specific what is universal in illumination, in being comforted and amused rather than the falsely universal parts of those feelings that capital squats over.
Levine is far from being an aesthete and yet his poetry can be read as an attempt to recognise what remains unproductively (perhaps, merely) human in the instrumentalised, industrial landscapes of Detroit. Some poems make this move straightforwardly, like the famous 'What Work Is' or the movie Spanish Civil War poems, but my favourites leave things less complete. Take 'Salts and Oils,' a series of fragmented post-War recollections, unusual and familiar: eating borscht and white bread on 34th and 8th, throwing up in the alley behind the YMCA, the rain on Armistice day. It is a narrative of lost illusions, of the irony of victory to the down-and-louts, of mundane lists and poor but welcome food. There is nothing of apparent use in these memories; they suggest only the futility, violence and waste of life on the periphery of society's grand imperatives. Indeed, the poem recuses its content of meaning in the final third before performing a breathtaking volta into an imaginative register:
These were not
the labors of Hercules, these were not
of meat or moment to anyone but me
or destined for story or to learn from
or to make me fit to take the hand
of a toad or a toad princess or to stand
in line for food stamps. One quiet morning
at the end of my thirteenth year a little bird
with a dark head and tattered tail feathers
had come to the bedroom window and commanded
me to pass through the winding miles
of narrow dark corridors and passageways
of my growing body the filth and glory
of the palatable world.
Apart from anything, this sudden soaring towards takes one off guard--there is no 'but' to signify the turn, simply a 'one quiet morning...' Levine is perhaps thinking of Keats in the tattered bird, perhaps Dedalus' smithy of the soul,' or of those various confrontations staged between poets and their muses throughout the centuries but the bird's command is not to vain flight artfully separate from being but to pass through, to ingest the burden of existence. The sudden change rearranges the tawdry memories we've drifted through into something like a poetics of the gut, a metabolisation of the palatable world. The poem then begins to diminuendo through the gnomic:
Since then I've
been going out and coming back
the way a swallow does with unerring grace
and foreknowledge because all of this
was prophesied in the final, unread book
of the Midrash and because I have to
grow up and because it pleases me.
While much of Levine is approachable and direct, I find these lines incredibly obscure and I find the reduction of the poetic task from the bird's command to 'because it pleases me' particularly hard to parse, but this doesn't mean it isn't an astonishing feat that charges the entire poem with a dread opacity that can suffuse much of the relationship between being and what we choose or are forced to do with it.
These are poems of pig-iron and timber and material lives. Levine is simply incredible. Other poems I enjoy, for posterity and because it pleases me: 'Look,' '28,' 'Ask for Nothing,' 'My Father with Cigarette...,' 'On the 52nd Street,' 'The Two,' '1/1/2000,' 'My Father in the Wind.'
Value in poetry ought to be inimical to value in capital. This might sound perversely equivalent to a bourgeois, Wildean aesthetic, but I think it can be true without reducing art to the realm of the perfectly useless. It can illuminate, comfort, amuse but insofar as it does so, it should communicate through the specific what is universal in illumination, in being comforted and amused rather than the falsely universal parts of those feelings that capital squats over.
Levine is far from being an aesthete and yet his poetry can be read as an attempt to recognise what remains unproductively (perhaps, merely) human in the instrumentalised, industrial landscapes of Detroit. Some poems make this move straightforwardly, like the famous 'What Work Is' or the movie Spanish Civil War poems, but my favourites leave things less complete. Take 'Salts and Oils,' a series of fragmented post-War recollections, unusual and familiar: eating borscht and white bread on 34th and 8th, throwing up in the alley behind the YMCA, the rain on Armistice day. It is a narrative of lost illusions, of the irony of victory to the down-and-louts, of mundane lists and poor but welcome food. There is nothing of apparent use in these memories; they suggest only the futility, violence and waste of life on the periphery of society's grand imperatives. Indeed, the poem recuses its content of meaning in the final third before performing a breathtaking volta into an imaginative register:
These were not
the labors of Hercules, these were not
of meat or moment to anyone but me
or destined for story or to learn from
or to make me fit to take the hand
of a toad or a toad princess or to stand
in line for food stamps. One quiet morning
at the end of my thirteenth year a little bird
with a dark head and tattered tail feathers
had come to the bedroom window and commanded
me to pass through the winding miles
of narrow dark corridors and passageways
of my growing body the filth and glory
of the palatable world.
Apart from anything, this sudden soaring towards takes one off guard--there is no 'but' to signify the turn, simply a 'one quiet morning...' Levine is perhaps thinking of Keats in the tattered bird, perhaps Dedalus' smithy of the soul,' or of those various confrontations staged between poets and their muses throughout the centuries but the bird's command is not to vain flight artfully separate from being but to pass through, to ingest the burden of existence. The sudden change rearranges the tawdry memories we've drifted through into something like a poetics of the gut, a metabolisation of the palatable world. The poem then begins to diminuendo through the gnomic:
Since then I've
been going out and coming back
the way a swallow does with unerring grace
and foreknowledge because all of this
was prophesied in the final, unread book
of the Midrash and because I have to
grow up and because it pleases me.
While much of Levine is approachable and direct, I find these lines incredibly obscure and I find the reduction of the poetic task from the bird's command to 'because it pleases me' particularly hard to parse, but this doesn't mean it isn't an astonishing feat that charges the entire poem with a dread opacity that can suffuse much of the relationship between being and what we choose or are forced to do with it.
These are poems of pig-iron and timber and material lives. Levine is simply incredible. Other poems I enjoy, for posterity and because it pleases me: 'Look,' '28,' 'Ask for Nothing,' 'My Father with Cigarette...,' 'On the 52nd Street,' 'The Two,' '1/1/2000,' 'My Father in the Wind.'
Displaying 1 of 1 review