I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
- Philip Levine
Here, Eternity, Pay, Fragment
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
- Philip Levine
Doing, Fact, Ironic, Detroit
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
- Philip Levine
Voice, Alive, Carried, Reconstruct
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
- Philip Levine
Love, Hours, I Love, Louis
I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.
- Philip Levine
Find, Without, Maybe, Mercy
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
- Philip Levine
Thought, Sure, Would, Oblivion
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
- Philip Levine
Think, Will, I Think, Oblivion
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
- Philip Levine
Why, Sense, Wrote, Revise
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
- Philip Levine
Advice, Doing, Some, Readership
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
- Philip Levine
Temperament, Geared, Novelist
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
- Philip Levine
Mother, Been, Carried, Supported
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
- Philip Levine
Intensity, Most, Lot, Commonly
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
- Philip Levine
Year, Back, Left, Poem
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
- Philip Levine
Mother, Lucky, Very, Poet
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
- Philip Levine
Young, Old, Too, Poet
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
- Philip Levine
Memory, Poetry, Always, Poet
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
- Philip Levine
Change, Now, Imagine, Dramatic Change
I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
- Philip Levine
Feel, Like, Invent, European
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
- Philip Levine
Work, Realized, Cause, Intensity
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
- Philip Levine
Music, Listening, Wrote, Sons
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
- Philip Levine
Work, Going, Became, Irony
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
- Philip Levine
Father, Strong, Up, Died
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
- Philip Levine
Too Much, Sound, Like, Fraud
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