{"id":6300,"date":"2015-02-16T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T14:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6300"},"modified":"2015-02-24T07:05:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T14:05:51","slug":"philip-levine-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/02\/16\/philip-levine-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Levine Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

An Appraisal: The Poet Philip Levine, an Outsider Archiving the Forgotten<\/h1>\n

By\u00a0DWIGHT GARNER<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine\u2019s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. Mr. Levine had toiled in auto plants as a young man. \u201cI saw that the people that I was working with,\u201d he told Detroit Magazine, \u201cwere voiceless in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Levine\u2019s death<\/a>\u00a0is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn\u2019t pull his poetry down into brackishness.<\/p>\n

He was a shrewd and very funny man. I\u2019m not sure another major American poet could give advice quite like the following, from a poem called \u201cFacts,\u201d collected in Mr. Levine\u2019s classic 1991 book \u201cWhat Work Is\u201d:<\/p>\n

If you take a \u201937 Packard grill and split it down<\/p>\n

the center and reduce the angle by 18\u00b0 and reweld it,<\/p>\n

you\u2019ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce<\/p>\n

just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.<\/p>\n

Mr. Levine was among those poets, and there are not enough of these, whose words you followed even outside their poetry. His interviews, for example, were feasts for the mind. To get back to Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, and Ida and Cal for a moment, here is what he told\u00a0The Paris Review<\/a>\u00a0in 1988 about the unpeopling of American poetry:<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times An Appraisal: The Poet Philip Levine, an Outsider Archiving the Forgotten By\u00a0DWIGHT GARNER Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine\u2019s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. Mr. Levine had toiled in auto plants as a young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}