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.
Just as Levine describes the Eden of California with that cliché of “What a world,” so too does he use that exact same phrase in a clause that introduces the description of his mother’s aesthetic theophany. There is something to that word “theophany” – though it’s a very un-Levine word – especially as the poem begins with “My mother tells me she dreamed/or John Coltraine, a young Trane/playing his music with such joy/and contained energy and rage/she could not hold back her tears.” It’s a fascinating beginning; the invocation of dreaming is almost prototypically mystical. Had the mother described crying to an actual recording of Coltraine this would be a very different sort of poem, though it should be admitted that the dream as described is an unexpected one. She’s apparently simply dreamt of Coltraine playing a solo, but the details are unclear – is she imagining actual music which he composed or are these fantastical invented melodies, maybe even songs unremembered? What’s important is the expression of that performance, of “joy/and contained energy and rage,” a descending rhetorical tricolon expressed in polysyndeton that moves from joy to rage, while understanding both of those emotions as being eruptions of that energy which connects them.
“’He was alone,’ she says, and does/not say, just as I am, ‘soloing.’” There is a profound loneliness to the scene, all of these isolated individuals nestled within each other. The narrator’s mother dreaming – the most solitary activity a human can experience; Coltraine playing the literal solo of the dream which is after all the title of the poem; and the narrator himself, whose aloneness is continually evoked throughout the lyric, most explicitly (if not literally) by that previous gloss on the mother’s comment. Despite that, the poem is about connection in the midst of such aloneness, of the mother being moved by the idea of Coltraine, of this possibility of a musician coming “to my mother/in her sleep to give her the gift/of song – which shaking the tears/away – she passes to me.” Soloing is thus never actually soloing, even if a scene invented in sleep, for the idea of Coltraine has moved the narrator’s mother, and now the narrator’s mother is able to move him with that same vision. More than the actual music – which we’re giving a sense is perhaps incongruous with his mother’s age – is the possibility of music, of the transcendence it offers (another un-Levine word). That Levine courts cliché in the phrase “the gift/of song” is to speak to the universality of the experience, but the poem insists on its singular majesty as well.
Indeed, what’s most remarkable, what the narrator is also amazed by, and perhaps terrified by as well, is the possibility of missed connection, which only underscores how it must be viewed as a type of grace, as a gift. After he’s had this dream recounted, “I can hear the music of the world/in the silence” but he fears that on his sojourn to visit his mother he could have just as easily “turned back and lost the music.” Our lives are defined by an infinite number of choices, and those decisions we don’t take – to answer that email request, call that date back, continue on our travels to visit our aging mother – preclude particular possibilities. As much as we damn those poor choices made, we’re also haunted by those alternate realities where we didn’t make those decisions which were good. In celebration of those gifts received, it’s in the final third of the poem that Levine fuses abstractions and the concrete together in a lush image of the landscape of California, of the “great bowl of mountains… hidden in a cloud of exhaust,/the sea spread out like a carpet of oil.” It’s a Michigan poet’s grubby experience of this Eden, bathed in smog and slick with grease, but in its earthiness it contains the seeds of beauty, where even in a universe where the “roses I had brought/from Fresno browned on the seat/beside me” also contains the possibility of majesty and glory in the form of an imagined saxophone solo, where entropy is forever beat back in the ecstasy of artistic connection, even just the mere suggestion of it.