On Philip Levine, the Workingman’s Poet

By Paul Berman

The late Philip Levine was officially appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011, but I prefer to think of him as the once and enduring Poet Laureate of something smaller, which is a particular and narrow strand of thought and emotion, old and traditional in American literature, and not widely understood. His broad narrative themes are, of course, industrial and proletarian. He sings of Detroit from its days of auto-factory glory:.

A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,

Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,

Chevy gray …

And he is the poet of workaday exhaustion and routine:

Under the blue

hesitant light another day

at Automotive

in the city of dreams ….

He seethes at the oppressive realities of factory life, and sometimes he waves an angry fist, which might lead you to suppose that, in bourgeois and snobby America, he must have been and must still be a major provocateur. But America is not really so bourgeois and snobby. Songs of Labor was Whittier’s book title in 1850. Proletarianism in poetry has always been the height of American respectability. I will grant that over the years it has sometimes been odd to discover Levine’s horny-handed odes to the nightshift laid out like pastries in the creamy columns of The New Yorker. But The New Yorker has never been as prissy as its page layout might lead you to suppose.

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