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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I write what's given me to write.
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.
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.
Philip Levine

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

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

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Philip Levine