Voices For the Voiceless
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing VOICES FOR THE VOICELESS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Emerson, that most democratic of Americans, was moved by the symbols of work and aspiration laborers invent for parades and...
...When I opened [my eyes] there was only/the blank door and beyond it I the hall...
...The poem lets us envision the child's pictures as well as their message: Here is a face for you who will not show your face...
...The poem develops into a kind of savage joy, invoking the racial tensions that boiled over into the 1967 Detroit riots...
...The poems of Red Dust (1911, reprinted 'mAshes'm 1979) employ the short syllabic lines Levine has made distinctive in examining the tension between America's dream of the good life and its natural violence...
...I cut a smile and give it to you, the rain gives you tears...
...No one believes that the lost breath of a man who died in 1821 is my breath and that I will live until I no longer want to, and then I will write my name in water, as he did, and pass this breath to anyone who can believe that life comes back again and again without end The dead man here is Keats, one of the volume's many manifestations of Levine's Keatsean persona...
...His Selected Poems (Atheneum, 234 pp., $ 18.95) provides a generous sampling of the diverse voices he has been fashioning for the voiceless over the last two decades...
...Writers & Writing VOICES FOR THE VOICELESS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Emerson, that most democratic of Americans, was moved by the symbols of work and aspiration laborers invent for parades and rallies...
...In "Silent in America," he prays, with a note of desperation, Let me have the courage to live as fictions live, proud, careless, unwilling to die...
...And his speaking over the years for those with scant chance to speak for themselves has made his own voice one of the most powerful and generous in poetry today...
...Flying over clouds of pollution, he experiences ambivalence: And so my mind closes around a square oil can crushed on the road one morning, startled it was not the usual cat...
...Finished, she endows it with defiance: "Spit your teeth/in the face of creation...
...Although Levine is frequently compared to Whitman, he often demonstrates why boundless optimism is impossible for many of us...
...Philip Le-vine has never lost sight of his own working-class background...
...Critics have often said he was hampered by the period's formal verse structures...
...Elsewhere, the volume jumps with the exuberance of "the true and earthy prayer of salami," and the funky "Angel Butcher"—a quite original transformation of Rilke's omnipresent poetic angels...
...The book slammed us with youthful anger and defiance (though Levine was then in his mid-30s, a late developer in the Whitmanian mode...
...In the same year as Red Dust came Pili 's Wall, an extended poem in the voice of a small Spanish girl who decorated stone surfaces with her drawings...
...Leaving behind such slightly self-conscious symbolism, Not This Pig (1968) describes a broad spectrum of victims...
...I think the control they exerted contributed to the power of his rage against injustice and sterility...
...Her own environment is hostile: "What can a child know,/says the moon/Look at her bones,/unbroken, and her teeth...
...At one point, he tries to imagine William Blake rousing America into apocalyptic poetry, then admits he can't...
...His burning outrage bursts forth through the Biblical cadences of Black speech in "They Feed They Lion," one of those unforgettable apocalypses reminiscent of Blake's "London," or Yeats' "The Second Coming...
...seen the snow covering it all...
...Inaplane above California's Fresno valley, where towns "smoke like thin pipes of the Chinese," he tries to sustain that pipe dream, but "the cold underside of my arm...
...This Poe, born "On the Edge" in Michigan in 1928 (as was Levine), is not a poet...
...I do not believe in sorrow," he asserts, because "it is not American...
...Levine evolves toward still another approach in One For The Rose (1981...
...I can hear their wings lifting them down, the feathers tipped with red dust, that dust which even here I taste, having eaten it all these years...
...A pig trotting to slaughter in "Animals Are Passing from our Lives...
...They Feed They Lion (1972) and 1933 (1974) mark Levine's transition from anger to elegy...
...There is, in addition, a charming reincarnation of his defiant one as an "unseen fox I whose breath sears the thick bushes / and whose eyes burn likeopals," who feels he "must proclaim/not ever ever ever/ to mounted ladies and their gentlemen...
...Levine is an anarchist, and he rejoices that "From 'Bow Down' come 'Rise Up.'" Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow...
...The hero of the title poem is Edgar Allan Poe, who was more remarkable for his nightmare vision of the psyche than for his jangly verse...
...I did not write, for I am Edgar Poe, Edgar the mad one, silly, drunk, unwise, But Edgar waiting on the edge of laughter, And there is nothing that he does not know Whose page is blanker than the raining skies...
...But their actions, indeed, their very presences sing to this poet...
...If eagles formed now in the shocked vegetation of my sight would they be friendly...
...Baby Villon," a universal street Arab —each enlarges Levine's sympathies, and ours, as he shows their resistance in the face of hopelessness...
...a little girl revolted by an inedible sandwich...
...In his next book he found it enough to remember The Names of the Lost (1976): not only his own private dead but also "The Rabbi of Auschwitz," and, most poignantly, the anarchist martyrs of the Spanish Civil War...
...But in " 193 3," the year Levine's father died, this energy has melted into an almost mystic acceptance...
...he is a spy, eavesdropper and judge: I heard you lie, even to your daughter...
...The historical focus is further developed \n Ashes (1979) and 7 Years from Somewhere (1979...
...No one better expresses how inarticulate and cut off from literature men and women can be: His subjects are trapped in dehumanizing jobs, unemployed, freaks, immigrants divorced from their native languages, or helpless and victimized children and animals...
...The sun is gone, the moon is a slice of hope the stars are burned eyes that see the wind is the breath of the ocean the death of the fish is the allegory you slice it open and spill the entrails you remove the spine the architecture of the breast you slap it home the oils snap and sizzle, you live in the world you eat all the unknown deeps the great sea oaks rise from the floor the bears dip their paws in clear streams they hug their great matted coats and laugh in the voices of girls a man drops slowly like brandy or glue From that point on Levine seems less concerned with forming speeches for the voiceless that are defiant...
...The poet claims not to be bound to an urbanite's experiences because, in his Swiss incarnation, he has "stared into the burning eyes of earth, I...
...The poems from Levine's first collection, On the Edge (1963), may shock readers who know him only through his more recent compassionate, free-flowing meditations...
...Levine was a mere eight years old in 1936, yet he seems to have imbibed the passion of the Spanish cause from his Detroit neighborhood and he writes about it with the authority of an eyewitness as well as the love of a disciple...
...sweats with fear / as though it lay along the edge/ of revelation...
...I Was Born in Lucern" breaks with "all the cliches I could have lived with" (for example, a Detroit birthplace...
...Like Levine, she speaks for those who cannot...
...a Spanish Midget in a bar...
...If a crow had come out of the air to choose its entrails could I have laughed...
...Unlike the Michigan Edgar Poe, or the stoic pig, Pili is a creative artist...
...Rather than pen verses that are the frustrated lives of its citizens, Levine evokes a nation that "calls for its soul...
...The people fancy they hate poetry," he observed, "and they are all poets and mystics...
...Philip Levine's wonderful, fresh identities ring true...
...To him they are akin to the thief-child, "My imaginary brother, my cousin, I Myself made otherwise by all his pain...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 17
