The poet Philip Levine has died. Here’s an appreciation, written years ago at the Los Angeles Times, which began like this:
Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s. It took another nine before his first slim volume, On the Edge, appeared in 1963. But by then, at age 35, he’d emerged from his native Detroit with a dark vision unmistakably his own and a tuned-up voice as angry as it was tender.
I posted it in full here, in 2011, as Levine’s Factory Stiffs, Society’s Throw-Aways.
