Levine << luh VEEN >> , Philip (1928-2015), was appointed poet laureate of the United States for 2011-2012. Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection The Simple Truth (1994).
Levine grew up in Detroit and worked in its automobile factories during the 1950’s. He decided to devote himself as a poet to speaking for the men and women who work in industrial urban areas of the United States. Many of his poems deal with his sympathy for factory workers trapped by poverty and the boredom of laboring on assembly lines. His poems can be dark but they are not depressing. They emphasize strength, endurance, and united effort among people. Levine’s language is simple, concrete, and matter-of-fact, like the speech of the workers whose stories he told.
Levine’s collection What Work Is (1991) won the National Book Award. It is a powerful criticism of the harsh conditions endured by American industrial workers. The Simple Truth mixes this theme with Levine’s personal experiences and memories of his family. His other collections include Ashes: Poems New and Old and 7 Years from Somewhere (both 1972), The Names of the Lost (1976), The Mercy (1999), Breath (2004), Stranger to Nothing (2006), News of the World (2009), and Last Shift (published in 2016, after his death). Levine discussed the forces that influenced his life and poetry in nine essays published as The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994) and in My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry, published in 2016, after his death.
Levine was born on Jan. 10, 1928, in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit with an A.B. degree in 1950. He earned master’s degrees from Wayne State in 1954 and the University of Iowa in 1957. Levine’s first book of poetry was On the Edge (1963). He taught at several universities, notably California State University, Fresno, where he was a professor of English from 1958 until his retirement from teaching in 1992. Levine died on Feb. 14, 2015.
