Philip Levine

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

“My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.”

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

“I write what's given me to write.”

“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.”

“Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.”

“It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.”

“… 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”