by Ed Simon
When critics describe Philip Levine as a “working class poet,” normally they have in mind his Detroit-upbringing, or his effecting verse about rarely discussed subjects such as laboring on the assembly line of a Ford factory. Often, there is a sense that the former Poet Laurette of the United States is particularly working class not just because of his subjects, but because of his style as well; that Levine writes in an unaffected, unadorned, and unpretentious manner. This is the poet whom in one of his most famous lyrics could defiantly write in the second-person that “You know what work is – if you’re/old enough to read this you know what/work is, although you may not do it./Forget you,” that piecing two-word sentence after the end-stop simultaneously a declaration of independence from a particular variety of literati and a declaration of allegiance to another. All of this is fair, good, and true, Levine’s style of low-spun verse meticulously and carefully presents particular commitments in a manner that reads easily but is nonetheless intricate to compose, but that style need not be limited to those particular subjects for which the poet is most renowned.
Indeed another poem from that 1991 collection What Work Is entitled “Soloing” does nothing less than explicate the origin of poems, or rather the origin of inspiration, and the manner in which human connection can be forged through artistic engagement; all of that accomplished without ever resorting to multisyllabic Latinate words like “transcendent,” “luminous,” “numinous,” or “incandescent.” The narrator of “Soloing” recounts a narrative whereby he comes to visit his mother in California, when she tells him about how in a dream the saxophone playing of John Coltrane moved her to tears. Unlike a more metaphysically-inclined poet, say a Robert Hass or a Louise Gluck, Levine is a poet who eschews an overly-theological diction. “Soloing” is, in many ways, a manifestly concrete poem; abstractions are avoided throughout. We’re presented with images like a television which is “gray, expressionless;” of suburban streets with the “neighbors quiet,” of “palm trees and all-/night super markets pushing/orange back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.” Yet there is a sacred in Levine’s profane, this land of abundance and plenty, where the repetitive parallelism and redundancy of “orange back-lighted oranges” is a miracle in its own way (not least of all in the eerie exactitude of the image).
Levine plays with this trope of the Golden State as a type of promised land (so different from the Detroit in the collection’s other poems), where “I have driven for hours down 99,/over the Grapevine into heaven…. Finding solace in California/just where we were told it would/be.” This Edenic language shouldn’t be read as ironic; indeed, when Levine writes “What a world, a mother and her son/finding solace in California” the chuckling weariness of it isn’t an expression of sarcasm, but of amazement. That amazement is the through-line in the poem’s story, both that the elderly mother can be so moved by the music of a “great man half/her age,” but also that the ineffability and inexpressibility of artistic connection can move anyone. Read more »