Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write. ↗

— Philip Levine

#i #i write #me #write

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

#attention #come #commonplace #eternity #eyes

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. ↗

— Philip Levine

#dramatic #dramatic change #hard #i #imagine

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

#crummy #detroit #doing #fact #going

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

#advice #care #doing #going #happens

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. ↗

— Philip Levine

#family #father #five #grew #i

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

— Philip Levine

#been #carried #had #her #mother

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

#get #how #intensely #into #notion

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. ↗

— Philip Levine

#novelist #temperament

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

— Philip Levine

#himself #just #like #much #sound