Philip Levine is what many describe as a poet of American urban working-class life. In much of his poetry is a voice that speaks simply, of simple things for those whose emotions and perhaps imaginations are restrained by a life of hard work. Librarian of Congress James Billington characterized the poet’s work as being ‘…about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.’ After studying at Wayne State University and the University of Iowa he worked at a string of factory jobs before starting to teach at colleges and universities. The 1991 collection, What Work Is won the National Book Award and the 1994 collection, The Simple Truth received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Mr Levine has published numerous collections of his work since 1963. Earlier this week he was named America’s Poet Laureate.
THE SIMPLE TRUTH
I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,
“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
I enjoyed today's post. The poem was written in such a way as I felt I was walking along the side of him as he walked the dried fields.
ReplyDeleteLanguage no doubt worked on and worked on that seems so simple conveying the simple truth of things. The secrets to good writing are always so obvious behind a jail-like door but not everyone can find the key within that unlocks that door and allows approach.
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