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Philip Levine obituary

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American poet whose work focused on working people and urban life

The American poet Philip Levine, who has died aged 87, focused on work, ordinary working people, and gritty urban life. His seemingly easygoing style was sometimes criticised as being merely prose with line-breaks, but Levine’s appeal lay primarily in his ability to look outward from personal experience to explore what it is that makes us human, what responsibilities the pressures of life place on those who live it.

In his poem The Simple Truth he wrote: “Some things / you know all your life. They are so simple and true / they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme.” The critic Helen Vendler infamously compared Levine to Rod McKuen, but she missed his sense of the rhythms of common speech, of the everyday drama of syntax, that allowed readers into his personal vision. As the British poet and critic Stephen Spender wrote: “His poems are personal, love poems, poems of horror, poems about the experiencing of America.”

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. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.

... You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

that any moment I’ll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife
discovering television,
or that I’ll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

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