The Politics of Philip Levine

...Red Dust (1971)) together with 19 new poems lacking the exuberance of those tunky angels, thistles, and Sulamis in his They beed They Lion (1972), the earlier pieces have a raw violence that disappears in Levine's current manner "The houses are angry because they're watched," reads one poem, while (shades of Salome) "the moon bends down to the canal and bathes her torn lips " In a more successful trope, a clenched fist is "Iron growing in the dark,/it dreams all night long/and will not work A flower that hates God, a child/tearing at itself, this one/closes on nothing " If Thoreau saw the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation, Levine observes them suffering inarticulate frustration, sometimes culminating in violence The newer poems are quieter, more reflective "On a Drawing by Flavio" (Levine's friend, the artist, Flavio Constantim) is a meditation on a portrait ol the poet as "the Rabbi of Auschiwitz " "He has these/long tapering fingers/ that long ago reached/for our father's hand/long gone to dust, these fingers that hold/hand to forearm./forearm to hand because/that is all God gave us to hold " Thus prayer is turned into a gesture of necessity rather than piety, an acknowledgment of helplessness At the same time, the poet discovers a kind of reconciliation with himself, despite his having been cross-blocked because "I am this hand that/ would raise itself/against the earth/and I am the earth too ' Hand to forearm, then, represents a union with the divided self Here and elsewhere, this transcendental vision keeps Levine's poetry from becoming simplistic, or from falling into too much proletarian pastoral There are no pat answers Indeed, the poet provides no solutions at all "I lived wisely, in the sight of everything,/and told no one how to live " The only lessons about life come from the dead At "Montjuich," the fortress where Durruti and Ascaso lie buried, he tells them, "It wasn't/[God] who filled your/lungs with the power/to raise your voices/against stone, steel/ animal, against/the pain exploding in your own skulls/ against the unbreakable/walls of the State /No, not he That/was the gilt only the dying could hand/from one ot you/to the other " In the last line of Ashes, "hand in hand, the living and the dead are entering the world," an unbroken unity Ashes speaks in a more Job-like tone than 7 tears from Somewhere, yet ultimately its cinders are not the detritus ot Auschwitz or Spain, they are the symbol of a mystic freedom m which sell becomes a small hunting I lame across the sky a line flake of dust that moves at evening like smoke at a great height above the earth and see it all This passage is as good a metaphor as any for Levine's generous perspective Believing that poetry is a ' public good," he makes his the antithesis of an for arts sake (ev en it, characteristically he appreciates different styles in others) And the high seriousness of his verse shows up the trivolity of expression the insipidness of imagination of many contemporary poets Philip Levine is integrity is salt to our laded palates...

...Writers & Writing THE POLITICS OF PHILIP LEVINE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The title of Philip Levine's new collection, 7 Years from Somewhere, (Atheneum, 70 pp , $4 95) refers to an encounter with Berber herdsmen in North Africa, where the disoriented poet was seeking directions Though they shared no common language, a fleeting communion was achieved that seems, in retrospect, highly significant to the writer "I have been lost since," he mourns, "and I could sleep a moment and waken/in the world we made/and will never call ours " Mostly he laments that since the incident seven years ago, there has been no one to take this hand, the five perfect fingers of the soul, and hold it as one holds a blue egg found in tall grasses and smile and say something that means nothing, that means you are, you are, and you are home Although Levine has a better idea of where he's going than most of his contemporaries, a sense of displacement in his work sounds a continual threnody for the disunity of mankind He is particularly concerned with the class struggle and the resistance to injustice "A lot of the rage one encounters in contemporary poetry has to do with the political facts of our lives," he has said But cynics who associate "political poetry" with strident declamation or simple-minded dogmatism will have to revise their thinking in the face of his humanism "When I say I'm a romantic poet," he insists, "it seems to me that I feel the human is boundless " This conviction that each man is everyman, and worth more than any impersonal system or cause, underlies both the rage and the tenderness evident in his work Over the years, Levine's style has become increasingly straightforward, spare, unadorned His poems are charged with emotion, yet are never sentimental He does not substitute literary reactions for actual feelings Material is often drawn from his own epiphanies and revelations A typical example, "You Can Have It," evokes the lives of two young brothers working in Detroit, the scene of Levine's childhood, and declares his conviction that "each man/has one brother who dies when he sleeps/and sleeps when he rises to face this life,/and that together they are only one man/sharing a heart that always labors, hands/yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps/for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it...

...In an interview published in Parnassus (Spring/Summer 1978), Levine castigated the "puny" tradition inherited by Keats, who never got closer to mourning the death of his brother, Tom, in verse than two impersonal lines in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," because classical themes were considered a proper subject for art, while the inhuman living conditions of early 19th-century London were not "You Can Have It" is obviously Levine's idea of the poem Keats would have written if he had had Whitman as a precursor, it synthesizes Keats' deeply-felt vulnerability with Whitman's broad-minded choice of subjects The poem attests to the "hard and furious' courage of the younger brother in a country whose National Economy is grinding out his life The poet prays to share the bitter resistance of the dying youth who can "look upon all creation and say, 'You can have it'" The heroism of defiance is often expressed in Levine's poetry through his obsession with the anarchist martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, especially Buenaventura Durruti, who told his followers shortly before his death, "We carry a new world here in our hearts That world is growing this very moment " In The Names of the Lost (1976), dedicated to Durruti, Levine explained how as a child he learned history less from his schoolbooks than from the anarchists m his working-class neighborhood who had such a large stake in the struggle taking place in Spain Levine was only eight years old at the time, but he wrote about the events with the authority of an eyewitness In the magnificent "On the Murder of Lieutenant Jose Del Castillo by the Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 12, 1936," the action was transposed from Madrid to Barcelona because the poet knew the latter city better When challenged, he merely said that he was allowed the same liberties as those medieval painters who placed the Crucifixion on a hill outside their own hometowns There is no question that the lives and deaths of his heroes inspire Levine with a religious passion In 7 Years, "Francisco, I'll Bring You Red Carnations" makes the witness of the anarchist Ascaso a brilliant symbol for man's unquenchable spirit Evoking the dream ot freedom "that goes on in spite of slums,inspite of death clouds,' the poet promises Ascaso, when we give it up with our last/breaths someone will gasp/it home to their lives " The red carnations of the title remind us that the flower's name derives from the same root as "carnal," and will "celebrate the unbroken promise" of lives that once were "frail and flesh,' but have become symbols of hope "The hammered little blade" of Francisco Ascaso's spirit proves to be a more obdurate object than all the "industrial filth and/the burning mists of gasoline" that defile modern Barcelona, or than the pollution of Franco's police state None of the many bouquets Levine has offered his spiritual comrades is more beautiful than this one In another sense, however, the martyrs are merely aspects of Levine's death-haunted imagination A character speaks for the poet when he complains during World War II that except for the dying/this would be heaven and I,/37 years old would be a man I could talk to " Paradoxically, this refusal to dissociate oneself from the suffering of others is an affirmation of as much wholeness as we can hope to achieve Levine doesn't ever want to forget his dead, often we catch him pouring salt in his wounds to insure the scar, "When the Day of Atonement came I did not/bow my head or bind myself at wrist and brow/because 1 knew 1 would atone," he insists, meaning that this life always exacts reparations, is, in tact, a perpetual Yom kippur Nevertheless, the movement of 7 Years from Somewhere is toward reconciliations, and the belief that one must "love his life because it is like no other Ashes (Atheneum, 66 pp , $4 95) reprints 13 poems from Levine's private press book...