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