Pulitzer Prize-winner visits Midd

Author: Grace Duggan

Jay Parini, D. E. Axinn Professor of English & Creative Writing, did not exaggerate by introducing Pulitzer Price-winning poet Phillip Levine last Thursday evening as a "permanent part of American literature." Levine, who was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1928, has written more than 16 books of poetry and has received significant recognition and numerous awards for his work. He was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994 for "The Simple Truth." His visit, sponsored by Atwater Commons, the Creative Writing Program and the English & American Literature Department, included a short question-and-answer session during which Levine mused on everything from the validity of labeling him a political poet to the work of Charles Bukowski.

Levine read a mixture of older poems and more recent ones, some of which have yet to be published. His poems were almost upstaged by his strong wit and modest, informal demeanor - he introduced several of his poems with humorous anecdotes or observations and made sure to thank Parini for his "generous and largely true introduction."

Before reading "Philosophy Lesson," Levine addressed the crowd on the theme of logical positivism integral to the piece: "Like critical theory in literature today, it was aimed at both boring and destroying us all." In the poem the speaker is recognized by a waitress in a roadside diner he does not remember having visited before. He compared one of his pieces to "Rilke with a mean streak" and made fun of the British versions of some of his books before quickly telling the crowd, "I don't hate the English. I don't know them." Levine kept the audience laughing frequently throughout the reading, but was also able to maintain a solemnity required in reading his darker poems, particularly those about war. As much as he incorporated humor into his speech and poetry, he moved the audience with his frank admission of the haunting effect his cousin's death has always had on his life before reading "Before the War" and "After the War," both about World War II. Toward the end of the reading, done with his enjoyable jokes and stories about life in Detroit, he rejected his classification as a political writer.

"Most of my political poems have no agenda whatsoever," he said. "When you see people you love and you see their lives come to so little because of the political system in which they live, and you write about it, you're considered a political poetÖBut I can't believe that America won't recover a little bit from the disasters it's in right now. I haven't lost hope yet."