R.I.P. Philip Levine

I only got the news the other day of Philip Levine's death.  I've been thinking about it whenever I have a quiet moment.

I have often had a hard time keeping up with all my poetry heroes, but while in school, Philip Levine was different.  I was hooked with his National Book Award winning What Work Is and absorbed as much as I could.   

A Walk With Tom Jefferson, its visceral "Dog Poem" still one of my favorites.

The Bread of Time, his collection of autobiographical essays, its style of prose I miserably tried to imitate as part of a class assignment.  His chapter on being taught by John Berryman still informs me today.

The Simple Truth, its seminal poems I read a year or two earlier in The New Yorker.  I continue to read "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" to open Stone Soup Poetry every now and again.

Don't Ask,  a collection of interviews with Levine, including accounts of wrestling with an angel (the only believable account I've ever read), his work ethic on each poem, and the craziest answer to a question about Adrienne Rich I've ever read.  In a perfect world, more frustrated poets in colleges across America would be passing their dogeared library copy around a college study hall.

The Mercy, it's family-focused poetry part of the reading he gave in Salem last year for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.  It was the first and only time I ever saw him live. 

I missed the opportunity to see him once at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop years ago.  It likely would have been a smaller audience than Salem's.  It could have also been a much better chance to speak one-on-one with the poet whose work was such an influence on me that I blamed his 1-2 pages of concise lines on my own verbosity (it took my thickheaded self years to understand the difference between long poems and rambling ones).

I was in attendance for his Salem reading.  I didn't want to purchase a book I already had just to talk with him.  I didn't want to risk spoiling my connection to him and his work by way of blubbering in front of him.  I had seen and heard my hero read, and that was enough.