Quotes by Philip Levine - Page 1

I write what's given me to write.
Philip Levine / Poet
Given
Writing
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How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
Philip Levine / Poet
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You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
Philip Levine / Poet
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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Philip Levine / Poet
Novelists
Temperament
Geared
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But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Philip Levine / Poet
Poet
Written
Young
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I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
Philip Levine / Poet
Dramatic
Dramatic Change
Imagine
Seventies
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I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
Philip Levine / Poet
Armstrong
Hours
Jazz
Three
Louis
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My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
Philip Levine / Poet
Died
Father
Grew
Strong
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Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
Philip Levine / Poet
Gone
Left
Years
Poem
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I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Levine / Poet
Lucky
Mother
Poet
Me Mother Who
Encouraged
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But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Philip Levine / Poet
Intensity
Commonly
Poem
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
Philip Levine / Poet
Home
Listening
Son
Home Music Listening
Sons
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My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
Philip Levine / Poet
Talking
Way
Way Of Talking
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I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
Philip Levine / Poet
Lasts
Tears
Useless
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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine / Poet
Best Poetry
Going To Work
Irony
Subject
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My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine / Poet
Ambition
Mother
Song
Carried
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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine / Poet
Oblivion
Ordinary
Sea
Save
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No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
Philip Levine / Poet
Fraud
Hype
Sound
Writing
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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine / Poet
Poetry
Memories
People
Memory
Poems
Working People
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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
Philip Levine / Poet
Causes
Intensity
Sticks
Tremendous
Realized
Stick
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I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.
Philip Levine / Poet
Father
Son
Years
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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 / Poet
Mercy
Afraid
Maybe
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Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.
Philip Levine / Poet
Havens
Stills
Waiting
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I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
Philip Levine / Poet
Believe
Country
Destiny
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Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.
Philip Levine / Poet
Poet
Voice
Young
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Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
Philip Levine / Poet
Home
Extraordinary
Oblivion
Ordinary
Thinking
Writing
Save
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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 / Poet
Feels
Like Me
Parent
Me Parents Feel
Invent
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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 / Poet
Commonplace
Eternity
Ordinary
Pay Attention
Appears
Observed
Fragment
Transform
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Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
Philip Levine / Poet
Elegance
Naked
Simple
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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 / Poet
Advice
People
Readership
Who Cares
Worthy
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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 / Poet
Conscious
Notion
States
Intensely
Poem
Revise
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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 / Poet
Detroit
Facts
Ironic
Work Me Doing
Worker
Crummy
Twenty
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You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.
Philip Levine / Poet
Looks
Saws
Surprise
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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 / Poet
Alive
Dominant
Reconstruction
Voice
Carried
Destroy
Poem
Reconstruct
Throughout
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I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.
Philip Levine / Poet
Giving
Joy
Writing
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Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.
Philip Levine / Poet
Careers
Long
Writing
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Philip Levine Quotes - Page 1

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