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Sweet Will
Collects sixteen new poems--including a long meditation--which transform, by means of the imagination, the ordinary events of daily life into the magic of the events of daily life
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1985
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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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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 2, 2019
I thought I had read everything by Levine, particularly from the 70s to the 90s, but discovered this on my shelf (in an edition reprinted by Univ of Iowa Press in their Prairie Lights Books editions). Even more surprisingly, when I started through it the first time, I thought I didn't like it! And I have have never had that reaction to a Levine book before.
Why? I think I felt there were too many poems that were too obviously trying to be symbolic, and that felt more heavy handed than Levine poems usually felt. The narrative elements were subdued, played down in the face of this stretch for meaning. But I quickly realized this was the wrong interpretation of what he was doing.
I think in the 80s, Levine lost some of the revolutionary fervor that had animated those great books at the end of the 70s. And he hadn't quite discovered the depth of his commitment to working people that informed the books from the 90s and beyond. There is something in "Sweet Will" that feels a little desperate in the face of the darkness. He looks into the night hoping for light, but doesn't find much of it:
When the long day turns
to dark and you're nowhere
you've ever been before, you
keep going, and the magic eyes
that gleam by the roadside
are those of animals come
down from the invisible hills.
Yes, they have something to tell
or something to give you
from a world you've lost.
But by the end of the book, in the remarkable fairly long poem "Jewish Graveyards, Italy," he can write something like this:
I can
stand under an umbrella, a man
in a romance I never finished
come to tell the rain a secret
the living don't want and the dead know:
how life goes on, how seasons pass,
the children grow, and the earth gives
back what it took
That is the attitude that shapes so much of the later Levine, and it is great to see it articulated right at the end of this darker book.
And there is one of his great Detroit poems in this book, that gets reprinted in his various selected. "An Ordinary Morning," describing a bus ride from Toledo to Detroit, and it ends with some lines that deserve to be famous:
the brakes
gasp and take hold, and we are
the living, newly arrived
in Detroit, city of dreams,
each on his own black throne.
Why? I think I felt there were too many poems that were too obviously trying to be symbolic, and that felt more heavy handed than Levine poems usually felt. The narrative elements were subdued, played down in the face of this stretch for meaning. But I quickly realized this was the wrong interpretation of what he was doing.
I think in the 80s, Levine lost some of the revolutionary fervor that had animated those great books at the end of the 70s. And he hadn't quite discovered the depth of his commitment to working people that informed the books from the 90s and beyond. There is something in "Sweet Will" that feels a little desperate in the face of the darkness. He looks into the night hoping for light, but doesn't find much of it:
When the long day turns
to dark and you're nowhere
you've ever been before, you
keep going, and the magic eyes
that gleam by the roadside
are those of animals come
down from the invisible hills.
Yes, they have something to tell
or something to give you
from a world you've lost.
But by the end of the book, in the remarkable fairly long poem "Jewish Graveyards, Italy," he can write something like this:
I can
stand under an umbrella, a man
in a romance I never finished
come to tell the rain a secret
the living don't want and the dead know:
how life goes on, how seasons pass,
the children grow, and the earth gives
back what it took
That is the attitude that shapes so much of the later Levine, and it is great to see it articulated right at the end of this darker book.
And there is one of his great Detroit poems in this book, that gets reprinted in his various selected. "An Ordinary Morning," describing a bus ride from Toledo to Detroit, and it ends with some lines that deserve to be famous:
the brakes
gasp and take hold, and we are
the living, newly arrived
in Detroit, city of dreams,
each on his own black throne.
August 8, 2016
If you want the endless zenith that is Philip Levine, my highest recommendation could only be this collection or What Work Is. They both consist of exemplary tales that match the senselessness of everyday existence with natural landscapes slashed by industrialization.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews