Philip Levine Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.”

“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.”

“My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.”

“No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.”

“I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.”