Philip Levine Quotes

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

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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

By: 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 work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

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... view

By: 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 where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem... view

By: Philip Levine

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine

My mother carried on and supported us.. view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: 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 the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: 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 in time, an observed fragment of eternity... view

By: 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... view

By: Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write... view

By: Philip Levine

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

By: Philip Levine