Philip Levine: Detroit's "Prole" Poet

Levine (11 months my junior) and I grew up (1927-1951) together, when Detroit set a good example of mass production for the entire industrialized world. After the GM 1937 sitdown strike, newly strong unions created a rising middle class that could even afford a “summer place” Up North. As Michael Moore recently argued, Ronald Reagan initiated the destruction of this new middle class on that cruel day in August 1981 when he broke the flight supervisor’s union. Today, the elite 1% make 500 times the workers pay, and that nascent middle class has been cruelly destroyed offshore.

When Library of Congress chief James Billington recently declared Levine Poet Laureate (from October 2011 to May 2012) champions of the expanding underclasses cheered. Including me! But hoopla motivated me to read for the first time his not entirely successful autobiography, “The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography” (The University of Michigan Press, 1993), serendipitously( and astonishingly)accessible in the weak American collection of the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. Reading it substantially changed my estimation of his importance as a working class poet. His drawing room Anarchism that bloomed as he identified with the losers in Spain’s Civil War in a long visit to Barcelona struck me as an affectation rather than a philosophy of life.

And his post election suggestion that there be a competition for Ugliest Poem, and that he didn’t give a shit if The People didn’t “go” for Poetry with a Capital “P”, sounded to me as adolescent as Tea Party Twaddle. A Good Guy pose. The most interesting parts of “Bread” were his contempt for his Iowa instructor Robert Lowell and his complementary respect for his other professor, the Minnesota poet, John Berryman.

And when he finally lands on his feet at Stanford, his mentor Yvor Winters mindless fear of Robert Frost’s visit (he had recently criticized Frost) reminds of high school factions! Halfway through a public reading, Frost noted a student slobbing. He shouted “Sit up! Where were you raised?” Half the audience instantly improved their too casual postage. And when they left, no one said a word, and no one clapped. ”In my judgment, Levine is no Dorothy Day idealist, but an anarchical climber whose shtick is identifying with the abused workers.

Incidentally, simultaneously we did blue collar jobs to finance our doctorates. My takes included the night shift at the Wonderbread Bakery (“It’s a wonder anyone would want to eat it!”), where I monitored a fleet of giant wheeled vehicles in which the dough was rising, often overflowing onto the filthy floors, whereupon I scooped up the dirty dough and heisted it back into the vats.

Lincoln Mercury where I supervised the spot welding of the basic car frame, the first step in their mass production. Selling shoes to poor black women, in a downtown department store for workers. Midnight shift at Chrysler/Hamtramck where I monitored the noisiest stamping machine I have ever encountered. Squirting glue under the rubber floors of new Chevrolet station wagons at Fisher Body/Cleveland. Hoisting harvested peas for a shucking machine in Bay City. Janitor for East Lansing bank before I got my first teaching job. There were, alas, more boring things than correcting papers! Much more.

I must say, English Department meetings mainly turned out to be more mind blinding. Indeed, I relished the new experience of hobnobbing with blue collars, not to forget that there were quite a few graduate students there doing the same stint. I still remember the Italian fella in Cleveland who asked the newly married me, daily, "Have you dunnit in the bathtub yet?” Looking back sixty years, I learned more there about class and social aspiration than all of the sociology texts I ultimately labored through.

But back to Levine’s nomination. The London “Guardian” reported an astonishing run on his books at Amazon. None to sell. I can imagine an idiosyncratically illiterate literatus hurrying to find what the fuss was about! Felix culpa for Philip! He finally gets the reading he’s deserved all along. And one observant journalist noted that in spite of all the fuss, the two local Detroit dailies could only come up with a casual local comment and a wire service obit. Heh, who’s surprised? When we left Detroit, he for Fresno and me for Philly, there were two million Detroiters. Now I’ve heard it’s fast approaching 700,000. Over 80% black, not exactly Levine’s constituency. They could use some good poets, not investing all their energies into Rap and similarly evanescent, underliberating creations.

And one wonders about the short tenure of our PL’s. Tennyson’s tenure for Queen Victoria lasted for almost her entire reign!(At least our PL’s tenures end on Walt Whitman’s birthday, still our grandest guide to what becoming truly egalitarian truly involves.) And recent PL’s like Robert Pinsky and Kay Ryan have devised savvy schemes for involving the heretofore uninterested masses. In Weimar, they celebrate Goethe’s birthday, August 23—every year. I wish Phil would throw a party for Walt like the one we had at Harleigh Cemetery, Camden in 1974, to celebrate the English teachers of America’s raising the money to repair his crumbling mausoleum.

Another version of this essay is published by Broad Street Review.