Philip Levine's reading at Hopkins was a captivating event and also gave a glimpse into his core themes.

Born in 1928 in Detroit into an immigrant Jewish family, Philip Levine worked a number of industrial jobs before publishing his first book in 1963. His concern for his family's and friends' struggle to live a decent life remains a burning concern for Levine even after all these years. This is evident in his latest book of poetry "Breath," which has many poems set in Detriot, and also was evident during his reading. At the reading Levine's iron veracity, intense poems, and long funny verbal asides, showed his continuing burning passion for addressing and confronting these issues.

Working class life in Detroit and the lives of his family and neighbors have occupied a central theme connecting all of Levine's work. This is true even after he found success and began teaching at the University of California in Fresno. From this core thread, Levine always branches out toward social commentary, and plumbs confessionally within.

Philip Levine's "What Work Is" (1991)--possibly his best book--deploys an intermingled set of poems to explore the nature of work and working life in mid-twentieth century America. Levine opens the book with a portrait of a man who mixes chemicals in a protective suit, which he wears twice each work-day to descend into a chemical vat. In "Fear and Fame," Levine writes as the man descends for the second time:

Then to arise and dress again in the costume
of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened
by the knowledge that to descend and rise up
from the other world merely once in eight hours is half
what it takes to be known among women and men.

"What Work Is" (1991) won the National Book Award. His "The Simple Truth" (1994) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Levine's Detroit memories appear again in his latest, "Breath" (2004). Yet now in his mid-seventies, Levine uses most of the book to examine the issue of poetic breath and poetic inspiration and what it has meant to him. While the book does not present clear conclusions, it does offer a medley of moods and observations showing Levine wrestling and reckoning with this autumnal issue.

As an older man, Levine is listening not just to the wind of inspiration, but another, wintry wind:

Suddenly
at my back I feel
a new wind come on,
chilling, relentless,
with all the power
of loss, the meaning
unmistakable.

Caught in this, the inspirational wind of his youth sounds more tepid, shaking autumn leaves.

Yet despite his own questioning of poetic inspiration and its use, Levine throughout "Breath" seems to praise inspiration whether political, poetic, or communally, as a form of life-giving sustenance. Levine's poetry here contrasts the joys of inspiration with a more harsh view of his own life. He writes:

I'd come into the world
in a shower of industrial filth raining
from the bruised sky above Detroit.

As an adult, Levine concludes that the world has fallen short of his ideals, especially in terms of morality:

This world
as we have it, utterly unknowable,
utterly unacceptable, utterly unlovable,
the world we waken to each day
with or without bells.

Yet despite labeling the world "unlovable", Levine describes while walking in a field more recently:

I can see fields of wildflowers on fire until
I have to look away from so much life.

The picture is from the Academy of American Poets Web site. For more on Levine, visit:
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/19

Poem "Fear & Fame":
dmorgen.blogspot.com/2005/04/poem-day-philip-levine-fear-and-fame.html