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All Quotes by author - Philip Levine
" Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. "
Then
Year
Back
" But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. "
About
Poet
Too
" But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. "
Intensity
Lot
Work
" For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. "
Myself
Poet
Save
" 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. "
Poem
Most
Alive
" 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. "
Me
Parents
Sense
" I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong. "
Three
Listen
Love
" 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. "
Find
Power
Others
" 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. "
Here
Saying
Moment
" I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. "
Imagine
Change
Dramatic
" I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. "
Stick
Work
Poetry
" I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home. "
Started
Three
Listening
" 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. "
Going
Me
Stop
" I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. "
Me
Lucky
Become
" I write what's given me to write. "
Given
Me
Write
" 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. "
Care
People
Keep Going
" My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. "
Five
Strong
Up
" My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. "
Her
Poetry
Mother
" 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. "
Poem
Where
Sense
" My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. "
Geared
Novelist
Temperament
" No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you. "
Like
Sound
You
" 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. "
Poetry
Now
Me
" The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry. "
Every Day
Best
Day
" There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. "
Poetry
Memory
People
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