Philip Levine

The American poet Philip Levine died this month. He was a graduate student of Yvor Winters's in the last years of Winters's life in the mid-1960s. Levine was published all over the place during his career. I read his work often in The New Yorker over several decades. I like some of Levine's "poems," if poems they are. He claimed that he wrote a lot of his poetry in syllabic verse, verse that has the same number of accented syllables in each line (and as many unaccented syllables as the poet wishes) in each variable stanza. To my moderately practiced reading eye and ear, I have seen syllabic verse, Levine's included, too often devolve into nothing distinguishable as verse at all. Levine, in my judgment, almost always wrote prose broken up into lines, what I call "prosetry." He wrote mostly descriptive poetry that was vaguely melancholy in the way of the modern artist. A lot of his work was "prosetic musing," a ubiquitous sort of poem that meanders about from topic to topic by association: "look at this, look at that, this happened, then that happened," and so on -- until the poet runs out of gas, which seems to the only acceptable kind of ending to this sort of prosetry, to run out of gas and roll slowly to a stop with two tires on the shoulder. I was naturally drawn to Levine's work because, as he did, I grew up in the Detroit area. His descriptions of various events and places of his early life are occasionally interesting, but nothing significant. He could turn a nice phrase a few times in every musing, but that was about it, which might be plenty for anyone. I never saw any influence of Winters in his work (except that claim about syllabics, which Winters was interested in as an experimental verse form) or read anything that helped me understand what he got from Winters.