Philip Levine Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Philip Levine:
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
~Philip Levine
Link:
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
~Philip Levine
Link:
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
~Philip Levine
Link:
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
Link:
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
Link:
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
~Philip Levine
Link:
I write what's given me to write.
~Philip Levine
Link:
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
~Philip Levine
Link:
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
Link:
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
~Philip Levine
Link:
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
~Philip Levine
Link:
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
~Philip Levine
Link:
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
~Philip Levine
Link:
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
Link:
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
Link:
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
Link:
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
~Philip Levine
Link:
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
~Philip Levine
Link:
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
~Philip Levine
Link:
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
Link:
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
~Philip Levine
Link:
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
~Philip Levine
Link:
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
~Philip Levine
Link:
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
Link:
Share:
Permalink:
Browse: