Quotes by Philip Levine

“Detroit was just a Levine-size town.”

“Back then, I couldnt have left a poem a year and gone back to it.”

“It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but Im not counting on it.”

“I write whats given me to write.”

“My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.”

“Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. Youll have that readership. Keep going until you know youre doing work thats worthy. And then see what happens. Thats my advice.”

“But Im too old to be written about as a young poet.”

“My fathers life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.”

“I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and Id get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep.”

“I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.”

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.

I believed even then 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. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — Excerpt from the poem “The Mercy

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me its the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Dont come back.

Therell always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.