When you become mayor of a city that’s being attacked by sea level rise, there’s no book to buy, no course to take, no guide to follow, we had to literally write the book ourselves. We have learned as we went along. We, of course, realize that everything we did could have been better and everything we’ve done can certainly be improved.

Philip Levine

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Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.

Philip Levine

careers writing long

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

Philip Levine

saws surprise looks

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Philip Levine

writing joy giving

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Philip Levine

elegance naked simple

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Philip Levine

best-poetry irony going-to-work

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Philip Levine

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

Philip Levine

way-of-talking talking way

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

reconstruction voice alive

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

Philip Levine

destiny believe country

I write what's given me to write.

Philip Levine

given writing

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

Philip Levine

oblivion sea ordinary

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

Philip Levine

stills havens waiting

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

notion states conscious

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

Philip Levine

hype sound writing

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

Philip Levine

intensity causes sticks

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

Philip Levine

poet voice young

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Philip Levine

poetry memories people

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

home writing thinking

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

mercy

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

like-me parent feels