What Work Is Philip Levine Pdf
In between grading student papers, revising my department’s mission statement, taking my son to soccer games, and following the Occupy Wall Street protests, I’ve been thinking about Phil Levine being named Poet Laureate for 2011- 2012. It’s about time: at 83, he has been writing powerful poetry for five decades.
Philip Levine - Poet. After graduation, Levine worked a number of industrial jobs, including the night shift at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory, reading and.
Nevertheless, in the New York Times quotes the librarian of Congress who made the appointment as saying, “I find him an extraordinary discovery because he introduced me to a whole new world I hadn’t connected to in poetry before.” Clearly, those of us interested in bringing working-class literature into classrooms and to the forefront of the culture still have work to do. I’ve included Levine’s poems in three anthologies of working-class writing I have co-edited—two with Peter Oresick and one with Janet Zandy—and I teach them every chance I get.
So when I was asked recently to speak as part of a panel on working-class literature sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, I used Levine as one of my examples. I chose one of his best-known poems, Published in 1991 in the book of the same name, “What Work Is,” like many of Levine’s poems, evokes industrial Detroit where he grew up and worked in the auto plants, in the late 1940s and 1950s. It begins: We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. You know what work is–if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Queuing for work, the poem’s narrator thinks he sees his brother ahead of him in line. But it is another man, a worker whose grin shows the same “stubbornness,” the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants.
In the second half of the poem the narrator is flooded with love for his brother, who is not in line because he is home sleeping off “a miserable night shift / at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German”: “Works eight hours a night so he can sing / Wagner, the opera you hate most.” Looking back across the decades since that day, the poet asks: How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is. I admire the way the poem addresses its own question backwards. What work is gets revealed through what work is not: grinning, singing opera, loving your brother. Typically for a Levine poem, there’s a resistant dignity in the small acts that keep us human, even when there’s little of that in labor itself, and none at all in being denied work. You see this dignity in famous Levine poems like written in response to the Detroit riots of 1967, or with its classic conclusion: “Not this pig.” As it happened, my colleague Robin Clarke was on the same ISO panel and had chosen the same poem to illustrate her talk.
Robin also teaches composition and literature at Pitt, but unlike me, she is a poet and so has a different investment in the politics of poetic practice demonstrated by Levine. This became the subject of lively debate on the panel and with the audience. Robin finds “What Work Is” beautiful in its evocation of the feeling of standing in that line, but she does not see the poem as an example of working-class literature because it is not part of “a literature of revolution.” For her this is as much a matter of language as of political content or class position. That is, the poem speaks through lucid language and carefully wrought lines, from the position of a fully realized humanity that is in fact not possible for most people under capitalism.
In doing so, it betrays the reality of “what it means to be a member of the working class”: In a poem like Levine’s—which is the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry—the poet becomes the source of redemption, restoring dignity in ways the society itself cannot. A poetry of the working class—a revolutionary poetry—must demand that its reader demand system change, must show us the wound rather than seem to heal it. Robin went on to share excerpts from poems by and that enact this principle. They do this by staging a formal conflict in the poem itself, demonstrating that the poet is not more in control of language and images “than they or we are in control as citizen subjects.” This way the reader is not “lulled into submission” by the poem, but, in a sense, agitated by it.
I think a poetry that wants to attend to the reality of working class exploitation can only do so by challenging notions about language, for it is language that transmits the ideology of the 1% day after day on television, from the mouths of our elected officials and all their corporate sponsors. Our attitude toward language embodies a whole attitude toward reality, and it is this we need to differently imagine.
While we disagree about Levine, I agree with Robin that this is an important political discussion to stage with students in any classroom. Which is why I see the debate as more than a minor storm in a literary teacup. The market for poetry may be small—though writers like Levine have helped expand it. But even in today’s economy, roughly 50% of young people in the US attend college, and most of them will take required Humanities courses. In these writing or literature classrooms they may encounter poems through which they can critique everyday language and address fundamental social questions. Asking “what work is,” even in a time of mass unemployment, can lead to asking about how work is allocated, organized, and controlled.
For example, with a shorter workweek, everyone who needs or wants a job might have one—and still have time to learn German, play soccer, or write poetry. Or, in: “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind.” Perhaps Robin and I could agree that a good poem provokes a revolution in consciousness. Whether such movement in thinking and feeling contributes to larger social transformations will depend on the particular negotiation between reader and text, in the context of a particular historical moment. Today when I read “What Work Is,” my responses include gratitude for my relatively secure professional job, a resolution to head downtown for the next OWS event in solidarity with those whose security is being shredded, and a desire to hug my brother when I next see him. The Poet Laureate has few official duties. Some have created projects to promote the cultural work poetry can do.
Levine has jokingly proposed “a project in which people would be asked to name the ugliest poem they could think of.” Whatever he decides to do with his year as the nation’s top poet, I hope he enjoys himself. He’s earned it.
He knows what work is. Nick Coles Nick Coles teaches working-class literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the president of the. Thank you for writing this. II reminded me of an observation I made many years ago when I was thirteen and my mum was a cleaner in a wee village school in Scotland.
I noticed that the etiquette was that, at Christmas, the teachers gave the cleaner a box of chocolates. I remember noticing and knowing that it was not the deal that she gave them this gift. Aged thirteen, I also knew why. Re waiting in line, my mum when she was young used to wait in line for jobs outside the factory, If someone was ill you got their job until they got better. If they were dead, you got their job. It helped me understand why she was adamant I would become a teacher. I found my own way into something else, but I understood.
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The State of the Working Class.
What Work Is We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work You know what work is — if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants.
What Work Is Philip Levine Citation
You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.
— From “What Work Is,” by Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Fear and Fame Half an hour to dress, wide rubber hip boots, gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic helmet like a knight’s but with a little glass window that kept steaming over, and a respirator to save my smoke-stained lungs.
What Work Is Philip Levine Summary
I would descend step by slow step into the dim world of the pickling tank and there prepare the new solutions from the great carboys of acids lowered to me on ropes — all from a recipe I shared with nobody and learned from Frank O’Mera before he went off to the bars on Vernor Highway to drink himself to death. A gallon of hydrochloric steaming from the wide glass mouth, a dash of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm, metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts, until I knew the burning stew was done. Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer returned to the ordinary blinking lights of the swingshift at Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message from the kingdom of fire.
Oddly enough no one welcomed me back, and I'd stand fully armored as the downpour of cold water rained down on me and the smoking traces puddled at my feet like so much milk and melting snow. Then to disrobe down to my work pants and shirt, my black street shoes and white cotton socks, to reassume my nickname, strap on my Bulova, screw back my wedding ring, and with tap water gargle away the bitterness as best I could. For fifteen minutes or more I’d sit quietly off to the side of the world as the women polished the tubes and fixtures to a burnished purity hung like Christmas ornaments on the racks pulled steadily toward the tanks I’d cooked. Ahead lay the second cigarette, held in a shaking hand, as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat, a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie, and a third cigarette to kill the taste of the others. Then to arise and dress again in the costume of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened by the knowledge that to descend and rise up from the other world merely once in eight hours is half what it takes to be known among women and men.
— From “What Work Is,” by Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Belle Isle, 1949 We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave.
And the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone.
Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from. — From “They Feed They Lion and the Names of the Lost,” by Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). Salt and Oil Three young men in dirty work clothes on their way home or to a bar in the late morning. This is not a photograph, it is a moment in the daily life of the world, a moment that will pass into the unwritten biography of your city or my city unless it is frozen in the fine print of our eyes. I turn away to read the morning paper and lose the words. I go into the streets for an hour or more, walking slowly for even a man of my age.
I buy an apple but do not eat it. The old woman who sells it remarks on its texture and tartness, she laughs and the veins of her cheeks brown. I stare into the river while time refuses to move. Meanwhile the three begin to fade, giving up their names and voices, their auras of smoke and grease, their acrid bouquets. We shall name one to preserve him, we shall name him Salt, the tall blond whose wrists hurt, who is holding back something, curses or tears, and shaking out the exhaustion, his blue eyes swollen with sleeplessness, his words blasted on the horn of his breath.
We could go into the cathedral of his boyhood and recapture the voices that were his, we could reclaim him from the brink of fire, but then we would lose the other, the one we call Oil, for Oil broods in the tiny crevices between then and now, Oil survives in the locked archives of the clock. His one letter proclaims, “My Dear President, I would rather not.” One arm draped across the back of Salt, his mouth wide with laughter, the black hair blurring the forehead, he extends his right hand, open and filthy to take rusted chains, frozen bearings, the scarred hands of strangers, there is nothing he will not take. These two are not brothers, the one tall and solemn, the long Slavic nose, the pale eyes, the puffed mouth offended by the press of traffic, while the twin is glad to be with us on this late morning in paradise. If you asked him, “Do you calm the roiling waters?” he would smile and shake his great head, unsure of your meaning.
If you asked the sources of his glee he would shrug his thick shoulders and roll his eyes upward to where the turning leaves take the wind, and the gray city birds dart toward their prey, and flat clouds pencil their obscure testaments on the air. For a moment the energy that makes them who they are shatters the noon’s light into our eyes, and when we see again they are gone and the street is quiet, the day passing into evening, and this is autumn in the present year. “The third man,” you ask, “who was the third man in the photograph?” There is no photograph, no mystery, only Salt and Oil in the daily round of the world, three young men in dirty work clothes on their way under a halo of torn clouds and famished city birds. There is smoke and grease, there is the wrist’s exhaustion, there is laughter, there is the letter seized in the clock and the apple’s tang, the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — From “The Mercy,” by Philip Levine (Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999).