Philip Levine: Straight talk from the poet laureate

[John F]

An unlikely choice for the title "poet laureate," Philip Levine might have been more comfortable with its earlier incarnation, "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress." As in his poems, he's a salty, funny guy, and he's been around the block a few times. He's also the kind of poet who would never have gotten this recognition when the tenant of the White House was named Bush.


Philip Levine Still Knows How to Make Trouble
By ANDREW GOLDMAN
Published: November 4, 2011

You were recently named America’s poet laureate. What has been most surprising about the gig?
How much attention it’s gotten. People like my doctor or the guy who sells me wine or the people in my gym come up to me and say, “Oh, Phil, this is marvelous.” Some of them didn’t even know I was a poet. Now there are mobs of people when I give readings. I read at a high school in Pennsylvania, and there were 600 people.

You’ve read to sparse crowds before? How about zero?
University of San Francisco, in ’69, after I published my second book. There was one person there, and he’s the guy who drove me. He found a place to park and came in and said, “Where is everybody?” I said, “You’re everybody.”

Amiri Baraka lost the title of New Jersey’s poet laureate after publishing a poem in which he suggested that Israel was complicit in 9/11. Considering you once described yourself as a “dirty Detroit Jew with bad manners,” what scenario could you imagine that would prematurely end your own term?
I’m 83 years old. I don’t think there’s any intern with the patience to be seduced by me. I guess I would talk about the sliminess of certain people in political office and then that would be relayed to Fox News and then our dear Republican right would get very upset. It would be easy enough to make trouble.

You’ve written many poems about the “stupid jobs” you worked during your 20s at various Detroit auto plants. Which was the worst?
Chevrolet gear and axle. I worked nights, mainly in a forge room, stamping out large pieces of metal in a drop forge. I couldn’t get over my fear of that red metal.

Did you get the feeling that a lot of the guys you worked with were also scared?
Oh, yeah, especially the younger guys. I remember going into the bathroom and hearing a guy crying. He looked like a kid right out of high school, 18 or 19, and I thought, Oh, God, don’t spend your life like this. We hadn’t learned to get drunk.

People would show up drunk?
I don’t know that they went drunk, but they sure got drunk there. There was a guy at Chevrolet gear and axle who passed out half the time. I have a poem about it called “Sweet Will.” I was shocked that he was down there on the ground, and a guy said to me: “Don’t touch him, he’ll punch you. Let him get up at his own sweet will.”

You’ve written that as a kid, you had such hostility for the upper class that you fantasized about firing a gun at every Cadillac you saw. Still hate the rich?
I don’t, because I’ve met them now under silly circumstances, and they seem like hopeless jerks to me, for the most part. There’s a kind of Protestant ethic that believes that if you’re really a good person, God will reward you with a full table and a garage full of automobiles and a beautiful husband or wife — that we should be judged by what the world has delivered to us. I think if we started making radical changes in the way wealth is distributed in this country, it would be a hell of a lot better.

You’ve said you always vote for “the impossible losing candidate” that the Democrats put up. Your team actually won last time. What do you think so far?
Well, we think we won.

You think Obama’s a Manchurian Candidate?
No. I don’t. But I think I voted for a man who is not as able and confident as I thought. When he campaigned, he seemed like a genius, but I think he may not have been up to the task. It’s foolish to say this, but the guy we need right now is Lyndon Johnson. We need a bully and a really shrewd manipulator.

I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems.
Hell, no. I can’t believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.” You’re going to run with it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/magaz ... ouble.html

[jbuck919]

True his words--every one true.