File: what work is poems philip levine.pdf. Download google earth pro. Get Instant Access To What Work Is Poems Philip Levine PDF Ebook Learning from Knowledge Engineering File: what work is poems philip levine.pdf. Title: What Work Is Poems Philip. We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. Levine's poem, 'What Work Is, ' should be read in this context. To work is to survive, and the details of how difficult or debased work can be are evoked in the title poem and the poem 'Growth' (each the book What Work Is). Levine was the man, he suffered, he was there.
Although they are rarely linked in anthologies or literary histories, a group of poets—a chronological cluster akin to a generation—who are rarely thought of as having very much in common have flowered at the same time and have been working steadily to create a distinguished, impressive individual oeuvre. What they share is a distinctive personal voice, an individual sense of language and form, a vision of society that permits a moral critique, and a resistance to trends and temporary fashions. Foremost among these attributes is the specificity of voice that each poet has achieved, so that a particular kind of poem is suggested when one thinks of Robert Creeley, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, or Gary Snyder. This is a formidable array of practicing poets, all born between 1926 and 1930, and the publication of Philip Levine’s What Work Is argues for his inclusion among them.
Levine’s poetry has had a low public profile partly because of the apparently prosaic lives of the laborers he writes about and partly because of the immediate clarity and directness of his work. There has been little for the academic world to dissect, and even when a critic such as Richard Gray attempts to praise Levine by pointing out that “simplicity of speech is not always synonymous with simplification of attitude,” there is an implication that “simple” speech is less likely to generate great (or complex) poetry than some form of literary language. As Charles Molesworth has observed in The Fierce Embrace: A study of Contemporary American Poetry (1979), Levine’s poetry is located in a “world built on unremarkable personal survival,” where the “singing victims” of modern blight—“rootless and condemned to limited living space”—are shown “looking hard at hard facts.” From his first books,On The Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968), Levine has taken as his central subject first- generation Americans employed in the great industrial tracts of the Detroit-area auto industry. They have been given direction by the stem of a recent European past, and they are pressed toward the rut of an unremitting future by economic necessity. Levine is able to discover and present surprising sources of strength, instances of unanticipated eloquence, and a resilient reaction to numbing drudgery in the lives of people he has known on the streets and in the factories of an industrial heartland. The poems he has written about them are “more threnody than complaint…more invocation than lament,” as Molesworth contends. Levine begins by looking hard at hard facts and then extends the range of his vision so that a quietly triumphant lyricism emerges amid the often laconic mode of a poetry that is essentially narrative in structure.
Part of the reason for this narrative form, which includes frequent reproductions of snatches of speech, is an inherent distrust on the part of the subjects of the poems for any version of “literary” discourse—the too-glib formulation of the visitor educated outside the working environment whose styles of expression might betray the experience. Because of this concern, Levine does not generally write particularly striking or separately quotable lines (although “not this pig” is almost an epigraph for an epoch). Levine is, however, capable of developing a mood of considerable intensity through the subtle manipulation of modes of speech, and when he wants to use a more rhetorical technique, he can match most of his peers.
In addition to What Work Is, Levine also published New Selected Poemsin 1991, and the retrospect this selection affords emphasizes the two dominant strains in his poetry. One is the accurate rendering of the lives of the local people of his neighborhood and working environment in Michigan. “I try to pay homage to the people who taught me my life was a holy thing,” Levine has said, and in writing about the world of work and about his attempt to find his own place there, Levine has created a strategy for demonstrating the dignity that preserves humanity in dehumanizing situations. The other strain might be traced to his 1974 collection 1933, a volume commemorating the year his father “entered the kingdom of roots.” While Levine has said that he prefers those poems best where “the speaker is clearly not me,” more and more of his most recent poems have been devoted to tracing the origins of consciousness, and in What Work Is, this tendency has reached a kind of fruition in which several long, autobiographical explorations stand among his strongest efforts.
What Work Is Philip Levine Pdf
The confident assertion contained in the title is a summary of the focus of his intentions, as well as an interesting echo of Gary Snyder’s “The Real Work.” Levine might be seen as an urban equivalent to Snyder’s role as a practioner of the wild—a laureate of American industrial labor. Like Synder, he is concerned with a larger conception of “work” beyond the waiting and repetition of many crushing jobs. As Richard Tillinghast expresses it, Levine’s task is to redefine work. “Real work involves the effort,” Tillinghast explains, “to become fully human.” This means that an attachment must be made to a larger conception of the universe than one’s own community, to.. Android software free download for mobile phone.
(The entire section is 2,179 words.) Jazz toni morrison pdf.
Unlock This Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this 4-page What Work Is study guide and get instant access to the following:
- Summary
- 4 Homework Help Questions with Expert Answers
Gwen Graham
You'll also get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and 300,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts.
Knopf
2
Read more
Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit and was formally educated there, in the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs, he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California, where he taught at the state university until his retirement. For twelve autumns he served as poet in residence at New York University. He has received many awards for his books of poems, including the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. He divides his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York.
Collapse
2 total
Knopf
Collapse
Aug 31, 2011
Collapse
96
Collapse
9780307761958
Collapse
Collapse
Collapse
English
Collapse
History / Social History
Poetry / American / General
Collapse
This content is DRM protected.
Collapse
Smartphones and Tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and Computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like the Sony eReader or Barnes & Noble Nook, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.