Tuesday, August 16, 2011

News at Eleven: In a Paris Review interview in 1988,

Mr. [Philip] Levine was devastating--and devastatingly funny--about how unpeopled poetry has become. "Except for the speaker, no one is there," he said. "There's a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom."

When people do show up in poems, he added, they're Volvo-driving suburban mannequins. "Their greatest terror," Mr. Levine said, "is that they'll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine."

from The New York Times: Making Rare Appearance: People and Their Appetites
then The Washington Post: Profile of Philip Levine, poet laureate
then The Atlantic: The Works of Philip Levine, America's New Poet Laureate
then The New York Times: Arts Beat: A New York Poem by the New Poet Laureate
then The New York Times: A Selection of Poems by Philip Levine
then PBS NewsHour: Levine Named Next U.S. Poet Laureate
then WNYC: Philip Levine reads "Mingus at the Half Note"
then Slate: New Poet Laureate Philip Levine: Read and Hear His Poems in Slate
then NPR: Poet Laureate Philip Levine Reads From His 'Work'

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