Ok, this will be a long, long ride. But there’s some bling at the end so hang in there.
So, it turns out Philip Levine is not my poet. Over the last few decades I’ve kept re-evaluating him occasionally in an attempt to get him to be my poet, the poet for whom I will feel compelled to be a completist. But although I appreciate his working-class poetics, his steely anger, his metal stanzas, his bloody, gut-riddled feels, his down-to-earthiness and his having the courage of his convictions (as my grandfather used to say… and I would like to think about how happy my socialist grandfather would be to know Levine was my socialist working-class poet), he is not my poet.
In light of that, what follows might seem like a surprising elegy, considering he is not my poet. But even though I appreciate many things about Levine, most of the poems can can be a bit…dry. And I’m not one to normally agree with Helen Vendler and Robert Pinsky, but I have to admit there was a watered-down feeling in much of what I read and I would often drift off in the middle of his poems.
But make no mistake, he has many, many defenders who appreciate just this kind of straight-spoken delivery, what I would call blandness. Maybe it’s his commitment to certain set of words or his syllabic lines that determine some arbitrary-seeming line breaks. More on all that later.
Over the last year I’ve four books of poems, two books of essays by Levine, one book of interviews, a book of essays from former mentees and students and a book explicating his long(ish) poems.
I connected with him most as a poet-person, as do many of his former students. Although the book of essays about him as a teacher, Coming Close, Forty Essays on Philip Levine (2013), was of little use to anyone beyond a kind of insiders roster of his friends and students. Although he was seemingly an amazing and life-changing teacher, the essays were very repetitive and a few could have stood in for the main points. There’s little to no commentary on his writing although many of his students do talk about their first encounter with his poems and how that led to them to pursue him as a teacher.
Some highlights:
Aaron Belz says, “Levine is an authentic skeptic, one who sees good things as bonuses and doesn’t take himself or other people too seriously. Failures and successes are to be expected in equal measure along the way.”
Xochiquetzal Candelaria mentions two poems, “The Simple Truth” and “In the Dark,” as particular poems that reflect the spirit of Philip Levine and goes on to say, “a great teacher can imbue an experience with something sacred, something mutual, so that you check your identity at the door, if you know what’s good for you.”
A Levine quote toward the end of the same essay talks about humor in poetry (which we will get back to at the end of this):
“Of course art is about sustaining contradiction. Of course you’re angry and laughing at the same time. Of course you come to language, history, and love with a skeptical heart. Poems should embody negative capability.”
Ishion Hutchinson captures Levine directly talking about humor, “You know Ishion, humor is one of the great universal conditions your work could benefit from.” Hutchinson goes on to quote Henri Bergson saying, “laugher always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity.”
Michael Collier identifies Levine with this paraphrase of Muriel Rukeyser from William Meredith, “that her life and art were seamless, ‘you couldn’t get a knife between those two things.’”
Mark Levine quotes Philip Levine as saying, “There’s only one reason to write poetry. To change the world.”
~ ~ ~
The interviews, Don’t Ask (1981), were bewilderingly crusty. “Who cares what I think,” he keeps asking. “I’ve changed my mind so many times about so many things that all that seems certain is that I’ll change it again.” His interviews are full of contradictions and stubbornness. Most people who comment on Levine mention how funny he was in person, but you couldn’t tell from these early interviews.
But one interviewer here does mentions that Levine is not all that serious despite the desolation in his poems. He quotes Levine as saying, “at times you must be prepared not to take me seriously.”
That said, there are a litter of ‘nos’ sprinkled in every interview. One interviewer picks up on this tendency in his poems and says, “There’s a resounding no in some of your poems. They don’t agree, of course, with anything. They disagree with everything.” Levine’s answer is predictably disagreeable, “I don’t feel that way about them.”
And he insists he’s not a philosopher. “My poems are not answers.” But sometimes his grouchiness feels really nice, like in this little screed:
“If you give prizes and you know how careless that awarding is and how accidental it is, it seems to me that when you get one and confuse it with genuine merit you’re just an idiot—you’re just a person who wants to be deluded. I’ve gotten a lot of awards and I take the money and I spend it. I have a car. I have this house…I have all this hair. But I don’t confuse that with a literary success that has any significance. I’m glad all those things happened, but I don’t confuse it with writing well.”
He’s also got the occasional wisdom to hurl out, like “I don’t think anyone ever found his own voice, it found him.”
Another one about writing the poem “Salami:” “It was one of those times you know you’re going to write a poem and it’s going to be a poem that’s going to carry a lot of yourself.”
He does, in fact, sound like he was an exceptionally good teacher. “I’m a different guy. I have to find the way in which I can write best and pursue it, and encourage other people to find their way, and not belabor them with my way.”
~ ~ ~
I loved best the two personal collections of essays, The Bread of Time, Toward an Autobiography (1993) and My Lost Poets, a Life in Poetry (2016). They are both funny and friendly, self-deprecating yet rock-sold with an underlying confidence.
The essay “Entering Poetry” is indicative of what kind of poet Levine was as he describes discovering the power of words at age 13. This is not a poet of fancy architecture and whirligig words. Levine describes the power of his early incantations (“transformative power” as Peter Everwine puts it). Poetry is a power-source, the whole thing, (reading, writing, honoring). The experience of it is as crucial to Levine as the craft or exploration of its mechanisms. One of the most famous essays in the book is “Mine Own John Berryman” (about his days as Berryman’s student at the Iowa Writing Workshop), but his “Holy Cities” essay and the one about the Yvor Winters years at Stanford were equally interesting.
Highlights:
“Walt Whitman, who over a hundred years ago created not only their own gigantic works but the beginnings of something worthy enough to be American poetry, and they did it out of their imaginations and their private studies and nothing more. But, then, they had the advantage of being geniuses.” (“Mine Own John Berryman”)
“I had hoped to make clear that our obsessions and concerns came to us and not we to them, and that whatever poets are given to write should be accepted as a gift they can only regard with awe and modesty.” (“The Holy Cities”)
“I am pleased I did not fulfill the expectations of my class…my years in the working class were merely a means of supporting my own. My life in the working class was intolerable only when I considered the future and what would become of me if nothing were to come of my writing. In once sense I was never working-class, for I owned the means of production, since what I hoped to produce were poems and fictions. In spite of my finances I believe I was then freer than anyone else in this chronicle.
In order to marry and plunder a beautiful and wealthy woman I did not have to deny I was a Jew; for the sake of my self-esteem I did not have to reign like a chancellor over my family and my servants; in order to maintain my empire I did not have to fuel it with years of stifling work; in order to insure my legacy I did not have to drive my sons into the hopelessness of imitating my life.
Of course it meant years of living badly, without security or certainty, what I have called elsewhere ‘living in the wind,’ but it also meant I could take my time, I could take what Sterling Brown called my ‘blessed time,’ because after all, along with myself, it was the only thing I had.” (from “Class with No Class”)
“He [John Keats] knew something that I wouldn’t learn for years: that beauty mattered, that it could transform our experience into something worthy, that like love it could redeem our lives. I wanted fire and I wanted gunfire, I wanted to burn down Chevrolet and waste the government of the United States of America.” (from “The Poet in New York in Detroit”)
“Not believing in the power of prayer, I had only one alternative: to learn what work is.” (from “The Bread of Time Revisited”)
The second book of essays is more of a mishmash of pieces Levine was working on before he died (in 2015) and found lectures and articles to fill in the gaps. Levine talks about his early experiences among poets in Detroit, a tribute to his favorite literary journal, kayak, and the power of finding compatriots. He talks about Detroit as a place and the idea of a city loving you back. There are essays about his love of William Carlos Williams, Roberta Spear, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Larry Levis. There’s an essay revisiting John Berryman later in his life, one about his love for Detroit jazz and the poems inspired by it.
His first essay connects his love of war poetry with his meeting of Detroit’s World War II vets at a monthly gathering at Wayne State University. These were some of the first, living poetry readers he had ever encountered. He gives us a primer in some of his favorite war poems:
Levine defends these poems as not “simply reportage” but pieces that required both nerve and craft. There’s a whole essay on the Spanish Civil War poets he loved and helped to translate including “How Much for Spain?” by Michael Quinn, (a poem he found in Cary Nelson’s anthology rediscovering socialist and Spanish Civil War poems, Revolutionary Memory). Another good poem in the essay was his own “The Return: Orihuela, 1965.”
Some other highlights:
“There are those rare times in my life when I know that what I’ve living is in a poem I’ve still to write. As we sat, I took in as much of the scene as I could until my eyes were filled with so much seeing I finally had to close them.” (from “Nobody’s Detroit”)
He talks about a Detroit motto, “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes” and how it connects to his own sensibilities: “…we Detroiters created self-destructs, while the trees…head straight skyward. I like to imagine the delicate leaves of those birch trees, each one bearing a poem to the heavens, an original poem, wise and stoic, from a sensibility that has seen it all.”
Some key Levine words there: stoic, seen it all.
In the essay on Keats and Wordworth, Levine talks about the lost opportunities of Wordsworth who tried to “revise the greatest work of his past,” namely “The Prelude.” Levine says, “The failure on Wordsworth’s part has become for me an emblem of how we lose what is most precious in the act of saving oneself from the expenditure of feeling and the uncertainty involved in the risking the self.” (from “Getting and Spending”)
~ ~ ~
Some good explication on Levine’s technique can be found in the book The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (2020) edited by Christopher Buckley.
The book clearly states how Levine is a specific kind of writer. Peter Everwine mentions that poet Yvor Winters taught Levine: “First, do not write in ‘the language of princes;’ second, a hope that no one would ever read one of his poems and say, ‘Wow! What a vocabulary!’ Words were meant to be transparent, a clarity through which the importance of the poem could be reached; if anything, to disappear rather than draw attention to themselves. Syllabics provided Phil with a ‘voice’ and a rhythm of speech…”
Glover Davis talks about the importance for Levine to “be a witness and a speaker, despite the inevitable failure to be heard” and this I think is where Levine was drawing power, not from the magic of the words and sentences. Like for other activist writers, for Levine clarity trumped glitter, “poems were ethical and moral teaching…one must never lie.”
These prescriptive “must” statements always try to set such small limits on what poetry should and can be and they inevitably fail to account for the motivations of all poets.
Glover expands on the idea of Levine’s syllabics. “In syllabic meter, no stresses would be counted as they are in accentual meter, no metrical accents…Levine would soon begin his transition to free verse with enumeration, phrasal repetitions and anaphora.”
Christopher Howell talks about Levine’s “great economy and tonal precision.”
Mark Jarman agrees, that “his style…tends toward minimalism” and he describes Levine’s style as one that “serves to create the tone of anger that runs through [his] poetry. Levine once said in an interview that he loves anger…so much of the anger of his poetry is occasioned by a sense of outrage at injustice…”
Kevin Clark calls it “an articulate, rhythmic, melodic snarl.”
It’s possible the simplified clarity is meant to offset the danger of his anger spinning-out his verse.
Jarman also says that “critics have complained that there is little or no ambiguity in Levine’s work, nothing of the imagination to nurture…such criticism comes from literal-minded readers who cannot fathom the complexities Levine creates with a few strokes.”
One thing to notice is how defensive Levine’s defenders are. I wonder if some of the nuances in Levine’s poetry are missed by certain readers (such as me) because we miss certain verbal cues. And so what reads as blandness springs open for other readers who understand these clues.
Like Kate Daniels, for example, who admits “his thematic content…resonated with my own background…feisty, working class, and occasionally profanely angry…tales of the ‘unpoetic’ lives of the underclass had been liberated at last into poetry. Reading him, I felt exultant and epic.”
My age might also be an issue here. By the 1990s, Sarah Lawrence was full of poets trying to capture the feisty working class, especially since New York City was allegedly full of feisty characters. This was no longer a novel subject by that time. In fact, it had become an affectation for every suburban writer to try to get into the head of more gritty subjects.
Daniels says she tried to emulate his “down-to-earth subject matter, plain-style diction and accessibility.” Later she says she didn’t want her writers to “gussie it up with extraneous language…stick to the meat and potatoes…why put fancy sauces on top of the good stuff?”
This is a great depiction of the differences in taste for both poems and suppers. Full disclosure, I am a sauce guy. You should see my potatoes? You should find my potatoes! All the things. And I like bling. So this is exactly where I find the toast of Levine a bit dry and in need of jam. But that’s just me.
I also wonder if you look for poets who reflect your peer and social group, just as most people select their music. This would explain my preference for more flamboyant poets, relatively speaking.
Kevin Clark calls what Levine does “psychological naturalism…deceptively complex.” Clark says, “critics have a mistaken tendency to find his oeuvre anti-modernist and thin on depth and originality” but that his poems are “both formally inventive and emotionally resonant.”
I agree that Levine’s poems are sometimes emotionally resonant but my feelings of blandness are not to do with any love of modernism, which can be just as academically and cerebrally bland.
Clark also takes issue with Helen Vendler’s “once infamous and erroneously asserted” review of Levine that stated she was “not convinced that Levine’s observations and reminiscences belong in lyric poems, since he seems so inept at what he thinks of as the obligatory hearts-and-flowers endings…”
Crusty Vendler, yes. But, to be honest, Levine doesn’t traffic in this kind of poetry and he is not one to cater to the magic trick of the big finish. He’s not wrong in that, but Vendler is probably suggesting there’s a vanishing point for poetry, where polemics and memoir cease to become poetry. I get her point.
Clark states that “Vendler’s assumption is a misguided as believing that Levine’s men and women are too simple to be of interest…I would guess that a critic like Vendler, who famously praises the intellectually dense constructions of poets such as [Wallace] Stevens and Jorie Graham, would find so much feeling suspect—and would fail to recognize Levine’s artfulness in the face of his passions. She’d also fail to see the very complexities of those passions. Modernism (and post-modernism) has always favored experiment over the everyday poles of human emotion.”
Really though?
It seems this is more an argument about genre than craft. Vendler may be a classist, but there are plenty of working-class poets who take working-class subjects and write very experimentally about them and with great fanfare. It’s a mix-and-match bag, subject and style.
And so the bitch-fight between activism and experimentalism continues, both sides feeling personally threatened by the other.
Clark insists that Levine is a “serious poet who captures the daily agonies of working life.”
Kathy Fagan takes aim at Robert Pinsky whom she says claimed that Levine “displayed a deficiency of thought” (her words) and a “monotony of feeling and repetitiousness of method, [producing] a dark, sleepy air.”
Well…I did drift off a little.
Christine Kitano has an interesting theory about how Levine uses autobiography to “elevate the personal to the level of mythic significance” and she quotes his poem “Late Night:”
….My father told
me this, he told me it ran
downtown and pilled into
the river, which in tern
emptied finally into the sea.
He said this only once
while I sat on the arm
of his chair and stared out
at the banks of gray snow.
(Levine’s father died in 1933 when Philip was 5 years old.)
“…All the rest
of that day passed on
into childhood, into nothing,
or perhaps some portion hung
on in a tiny corner of thought.
Perhaps a clot of cinders
that peppered the front yard
clung to a spar of old weed
or the concrete lip of the curb
and worked its way back under
the new growth spring brought
and is a part of that yard
still.”
Richard Jackson explains Levine’s humility, “a kind…that is rare in contemporary poetry.” I think he’s on to something there, too. James Harms may agree when he notes Levine’s poetry is a “return to this notion of a poetry that resists direct engagement, that strives for a little less.” Later in the essay he says, “the beauty of artifice, when it’s successful, is transparency.”
Harms also talks about the tension in the poems between “pushing back against the poetic traditions of the day” and how Levine also “learned at the knee of poets deeply schooled in that formalist tradition.” He references Levine’s classic poem about brotherhood, “You Can Have It” and it’s worth a stop here to read the poem in full.
The ending:
“Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.”
~ ~ ~
And then there are the poems themselves, the core of the machine as it were, some of which are undoubtedly classics of 1960s, 70s and 80s poetry, fully deserving of the literary canon, poems in Not This Pig, What Work Is, They Feed They Lion and The Names of the Lost.
The Publishers Weekly review for Not This Pig (1968) explains Levine well: “Here you will get no avant-garde pyrotechnics.”
In these early poems, Levine is already touching on his beloved cities: Detroit, Frescno and Barcelona. There are his moments of moving bleakness, like in “A New Day”
“And what we get is what we bring:
A grey light coming on at dawn,
No fresh start and no bird song
And no sea and no shore
That someone hasn’t seen before.”
Similarly bleak is the line in “The Everlasting Sunday” where Levine “bowed my head/into the cold grey.”
And from “Above it All:”
“where nothing moved, nothing breathed
except one lone steam engine
pulling nothing, and the waves
which came at the shore as though
they mattered, row after row.”
He writes from Spain in “The Cartridges”
“First you, my little American, you bring
reports of everything I left behind,
and you, the hope of middle age, the game
I play with when sleep is everything.
And you, stupid, are a black hole in the air
and nothing more. I refuse to explain.
And you, all of whose names are simply Spain,
are every pure act I don’t dare.
This one has no name and no nation
and has been with me from the start. And you,
finally, you have a name I will not name, a face
I cannot face, you could be music, you
could be the music of snow on the warm plain
of Michigan, you could be my voice
calling to me at last, calling me out of Spain,
calling me home, home, home, at any price.”
Other great poems in total:
“Heaven”
One of his most steely greatest hits, the canonized, “Animals Are Passing From Our Lives” which references the book’s title.
They Feed They Lion (1972) has some good stuff as well:
The expertly rendered, “Cry For Nothing”
“Coming Home, Detroit, 1968”
The infamous rage of “They Feed They Lion”
From “Autumn “
“I stand
in a circle of light, my heart
pounding and pounding at the door
of its own wilderness.
…
A small clearing
in the pins, the wind
talking through the high trees,
we have water, we
have air, we have bread, we have
a rough shack whitening,
we have snow on your eyelids,
on your hair.”
“How Much Can It Hurt”
From the “If He Ran” section of “Thistles”
“He feels the corners
of his mouth pull down,
his eyes vague.
Some old poet
would say, Bereft.
He thinks, Up Tight,
Fucked Over, trying to walk
inside my life.”
From “Dark Rings”
“The sun hangs
under the rim of night
waiting for the world.”
From “The Way Down”
“and now the tight rows of seed
bow to the earth
and hold on and hold on.”
From “Breath”
“you go
about your life one
more day. I give you
almond blossoms
for your hair, your hair
that will be white, I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.
In The Names of the Lost (1976), he revisits his great love poem with “Autumn Again.” “A Late Answer” is also good. Many of Levine’s poems were published in The New Yorker and anything published there is as good as lost to the sands of time, unless you have a subscription.
My favorite book was clearly What Work Is (1991) by how I dog-eared the pages and this is also the book that had just come out when I first discovered Philip Levine.
In “Coming Close” he compares the perilous factory machine with a woman:
“Is she a woman?…
You must come closer
to find out, you must hand your tie
and jacket in one of the lockers…
hauling off the metal tray of stick,
bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull,
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,”
“Fire” (another New Yorker poem, so good luck with that.)
“Every Blessed Day”
“Among Children”
“What Work Is” which ends,
“How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? 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.”
From “Snails”
“I was about to say something final
that would capture the meaning
of autumn’s arrival, something
suitable for bronzing,
Something immediately recognizable
and so large a truth it’s totally untrue,”
“My Grave” (video)
“Facts”
“Gin” (video)
“Burned” (see how Poetry magazine provides its classic poems online for free? New Yorker I’m talking to you)
“Soloing” (video)
“Coming of Age in Michigan”
“The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka”
“The Seventh Summer”
~ ~ ~
I want to close by saying that although there is much to love, there was one other thing I found disappointing in Levine’s poems, his lack of humor. And this is not because that is a requirement of my poets in any way. Anne Carson isn’t that much of a barrel of laughs, to be honest. Albert Goldbarth is very funny but he can be deadly serious too. Same with Kim Addonizio and any slew of poems I come across that are either funny or not so funny.
I can appreciate melodrama and tragedy just as much as the next reader, because I see tragedy and humor as essentially the same thing, one the flip-side of the other’s energy. I would argue the most tragic poets are also the funniest poets.
But the lack of humor poses two problems for me with Philip Levine. It’s on record that he was a funny guy (on video, with students, in essays and in interviews). He seems to withhold this from his poetry in large part. Which also indicates to me the second issue, his tragedy must be as muted as his humor. He’s taken the middle way.
So not only has part of his personality been eliminated from his poetic voice, but it feels like a necessary and lacking ingredient missing in the message itself. This might seem counterintuitive, but again I would argue that when we feel more deeply in one direction, we feel more deeply in them all.
You can see this in people who lived through traumatic situations, how they gravitate to gallows humor. They need it. It solves a problem in their despair. They use it to cope. And somehow, the more horrific things get, the funnier they get too. Absurdity is both heartbreaking and very funny. Because joy and despair move out into the spaces of our psyches in equal measures.
If I have missed some side-splitting Levine poems, please send them to me. I have already stated my inability to be a Levine completist. And if I have already read some funny poems in the books I’ve encountered, I’m more than willing to believe I could have missed some humorous nuance. Not an impossibility.
I could imagine Levin saying his poems aren’t funny because poetry to him is deadly serious and that his poems are deadly serious. Because life is serious. I don’t imagine him saying this about all funny poems that exist or about any particularly humorous poets. Maybe he would just say this about himself. He seems like a poet who felt he owed his past something serious, his people something serious, his Detroit. And maybe it wasn’t f**king funny.
There’s nothing is wrong with this point of view. It’s reasonable.
I just have happened to have thought about this funny thing for quite a long time. And I just can’t agree that there is no employment for comedy in a serious world, especially if humor is already an organic part of our personalities.
And undoubtedly things have become deadly serious. Could Levine even have imagined the circumstances we live in today? I have a feeling he saw all of this coming quite clearly.
And yes, current events have made me challenge and re-evaluate emotionally the ideas I’ve always had intellectually: is there a place for humor in a tragic world?
I’m under no delusion that comedy can fix the deadly seriousness anymore than poems can or paintings or music or any other kind of art could. But our job as jesters or artists or poets isn’t to do that anyway.
Part of our job is, no question, one of witness. But we have other jobs, too: to help ourselves cope and to help the people actually doing the fixing and the fighting cope with their own feelings. (And this might entail some sparkle and gravy from time to time.)
Artists often find themselves confused on this point. We find ourselves in a crisis of profession when we don’t see ourselves as the fixers, when we don’t see ourselves in the hero positions.
We may not be the heroes. We might be the silliness or the loveliness or the roughness or the absurdity that illustrates to everyone the value proposition of this tragic life, the joy and the woebegone we are fighting for and fighting over.
Anger and humor work in sympatico, I believe.
You don’t have to be funny to be my poet; but if you are funny and hold back, that’s really frustrating to me and kind of leaves me feeling empty. Because you never found a place for this part of your being in service of the fight.
All that said, read Philip Levine. He is an important poet, whether mine or not.
~ ~ ~
Incredible Postscript!
So something incredible happened after I finished this essay yesterday, March 23, but before I published it. I received a book from Amazon yesterday afternoon while I was finishing up three essays, (this one, the Proust piece and the Challenger essay). It was a crazy work day yesterday with Zoom meetings all day. A plumber was at the house fixing a toilet. The book came and I had no time to look at it and it sat on the dining room table until late evening.
As part of another long project on poetry history, I’ve been taking classes and reading American poetry anthologies and essays. Last week I started with the Harper American Anthology Vol. 1 and re-read Anne Bradstreet (America’s first poet). I decided it was probably time to read John Berryman’s long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. So I found an affordable copy on Amazon for $2.00, $6.00 with shipping.
Sometimes it’s great to get a used book because it has a history of its own, maybe library bindings or marginalia from a prior owner. You can try to trace a previous reader’s thoughts through their comments. Sometimes you even get an inscription at the front or some random bookmarked page.
In this book I received yesterday, there was a pretty incredible letter stuck inside between two interesting poets, but also information pertaining to this essay itself!
The incredible things about this letter numerated as follows:
- The letter was from John Berryman (squeal!)
- The letter was dated February 11, 1960, months after Berryman had published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
- The letter was addressed to the poet Henri Coulette.
- It’s hard to know but this copy of the Bradstreet book could be Henri Coulette’s which might explain why the letter was stuck inside the book.
- Henri Coulette was one of the poets in the amazing cohort at Berryman’s Iowa Writing Workshop (along with Philip Levine). Levine lists out the illustrious roster in his essay, “Mine Own John Berryman.”
- In the letter, Berryman mentions looking forward to a future visit with Coulette and also “that cut-up Phil Levine.”
- So there you have it, from John Berryman’s own mouth: Philip Levine was a funny mother-f**ker.
Two things about my mother: she was a stickler for grammar at the diner table. She made much ado over the difference between well and good. Which was well and good but like putting our elbows on the table, it seemed pretty strict at the time. She also kept a spotless house. I know this because I often cleaned it for money to buy record albums. (I also diverted my lunch money for that purpose, too.) To give you an idea of how particular my mother was, one time we were visiting a relative and she complained that the toilet-paper-roll holder hadn’t been dusted. I remember thinking, “you mean we have to dust that, too?!”
