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
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
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
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
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
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. – Philip Levine
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. – Philip Levine
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. – Philip Levine
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
I realized poetry’s the thing that I can do ’cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. – Philip Levine
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
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He’s just too much himself and not you. – Philip Levine
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
