My Lost Poets
A Life in Poetry
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him.
In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences--jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit--are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine--both the man and the poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The last completed book from the late Levine (News of the World), a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, collects original and previously published essays that revolve around artistic development the poems and poets that shaped Levine's distinct voice as well as the circumstances that eventually led to his celebrated vocation. Though there is a chronology to the organization of the chapters, they can just as easily stand on their own as individual works; for example, the final chapter, a reading of Keats and Whitman, reads more like a critical essay than a memoir. Unsurprisingly, Levine's prose is often poetic, from his earliest recollections of composing poems in the "double dark" to his reminiscence of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown and his music: "pure, free, clear, as water was in my early years." Levine writes at one point of how a poem hits first "in the gut" and then in the intellect, and his descriptions of his life, brimming with nostalgia and imagination, operate similarly. Like so many of Levine's poems, this book evinces a commitment to evoking hard-won experience and bringing it to lyric life.
