Philip Levine

“I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.”

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

“There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.”

“My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.”

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

“But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.”

“I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.”

“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.”

“No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.”

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

“I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.”

“My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.”

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

“If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.”

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

“I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.”

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

“I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.”

“But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.”

“How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.”