Philip Levine

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

— Philip Levine

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

— Philip Levine

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

— Philip Levine

“Poetry is like truth: on one level it simply is, and as such it is available to anyone. Anyone, that is, who…

— Philip Levine

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

— Philip Levine

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

— Philip Levine

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing…

— Philip Levine

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

— Philip Levine

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

— Philip Levine

“… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these…

— Philip Levine

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it…

— Philip Levine

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what…

— Philip Levine

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

— Philip Levine

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment…

— Philip Levine

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

— Philip Levine

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say.…

— Philip Levine

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

— Philip Levine

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy…

— Philip Levine

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that…

— Philip Levine

“ Gospel The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns…

— Philip Levine

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's…

— Philip Levine

“ The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying…

— Philip Levine

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they…

— Philip Levine