Philip Levine Quotes
27 Philip Levine quotes:
"The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry."
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"Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it."
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"For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion."
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"I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet."
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"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."
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"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."
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"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."
American Poet Quotes
Fraud Quotes
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"I write what's given me to write."
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"My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family."
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"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
American Poet Quotes
Temperament Quotes
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"But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet."
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"Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry."
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"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."
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"I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong."
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"There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory."
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"I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep."
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"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."
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"My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs."
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"I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home."
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"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."
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