My lost poets
Subtitle: a life in poetry
By: Philip Levine ; edited by Edward Hirsch
Contributors: Hirsch, Edward, editor
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 210
ISBN-13: 9780451493279
Subjects: Friends and associates; Authorship; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.); Influence; Poetry; Biography; American Poets
Description: "Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him. In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences--jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit--are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine--both the man and the poet"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: My lost poets --; title: Nobody's Detroit --; title: On finding William Carlos Williams and my poetry --; title: Detroit jazz in the late forties and early fifties --; title: A history of my befuddlement --; title: A day in May --; title: A means of transport: George Hitchcock and kayak --; title: The Spanish Civil War in poetry --; title: In the next world: the poetry of Roberta Spear --; title: Getting and spending.