August 2011 Archives

The tale I wrote at MSNBC.com back in 2002 on December 18, the day nine "visions of Ground Zero's future" were unveiled in a design competition to rebuild the site, has long since been deleted from cyberspace. I offer it here as a lost document for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. If you detect a skeptical tone, ignored by the headline, you aren't wrong.

Sometimes you get lucky. This was a long time ago. When the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were about to be announced, an editor assigned me to write an appreciation of the book that won the poetry prize: What Work Is, by Philip Levine. It would also win a National Book Award later that year. Now Levine has been appointed poet laureate by the Library of Congress, and suddenly, as you'd expect, everybody is writing about him.

There's a profile by Jessica Goldstein in The Washington Post; not one but two stories in The New York Times, one by Charles McGrath and another by Dwight Garner. NPR has taken note, of course, with a report by Bill Chappell. Even that bastion of culture, the Boston Herald, ran with a McClatchy wire story by Donald Munro, which has the distinction of a Fresno, Calif., dateline. (Fresno is Levine's adopted hometown.)

Although Levine is most closely associated with Detroit, where he was born and raised, the Detroit newspapers apparently didn't care much about the appointment. For whatever reason, notwithstanding the fact that the city has also served as a major subject of his poetry, neither paper went out of its way for the story. The Detroit News ran Munro's piece, which originated at The Fresno Bee, and the Detroit Free Press ran a wire-staff story without a byline.

Anyway, this is the appreciation I wrote a lifetime ago.

1991 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZES
POETRY: Of Purgatory, Redemption

November 3, 1991

By JAN HERMAN | Times Staff Writer

Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s. It took another nine before his first slim volume, On the Edge, appeared in 1963. But by then, at age 35, he'd emerged from his native Detroit with a dark vision unmistakably his own and a tuned-up voice as angry as it was tender:

Stand in the last moments of
The city, no more a child,
Only a man,--one who has
Looked upon his own nakedness
Without shame, and in defeat
Has seen nothing to bless.
(From "The Turning")

An admiring X. J. Kennedy, in a prescient review, noted that the book's virtues were "hard to make too much of"--though, in fact, few people did at the time. Even Levine's devoted small-press publisher lacked the sort of resources to make too much of them. The first edition of On the Edge came to just 220 hand-printed copies.

Things have changed since then. Levine--who moved to Fresno in 1957, where he continues to live--has gained wide notice with about 14 other volumes of poetry to date. His second, Not This Pig, got the ball rolling. By mid-career, The Names of the Lost, Ashes, and 7 Years From Somewhere racked up some of the most coveted prizes around.

And, it turns out, he has found much to bless--not in quiescent benediction but in eloquent requital of society's throw-aways, the voiceless legion of factory stiffs and others made marginal by various depredations of the 20th century.

Perhaps his friend, critic Edward Hirsch, put it best a couple of years ago when he called Levine "a poet of the night shift, a late ironic Whitman of our industrial heartland, a Romantic anarchist who repeatedly proclaims, 'Vivas for those who failed...' "

The description still applies. Levine's latest collection, What Work Is, illuminates that elegiac impulse with more vigor than ever in its continuing embrace of the people, places and themes that have always obsessed him. Its 25 poems, though dense with life's debris, are a passionate affirmation.

While all of Levine's poems are linked organically in a train of memories from book to book, What Work Is seems to complete a cycle begun in A Walk With Thomas Jefferson, the immediately preceding volume and very much a companion to this one. Work picks up where the long title poem of Walk left off like an unresolved musical chord amid the fiery images of the forge room at Chevy Gear & Axle.

Leave it to Jed Birmingham to make the connection between Mad Men and William S. Burroughs, via Minutes to Go, cut-ups, and Wilhelm Reich, with a bit of feminist name-dropping shoehorned in. The connection is complex and full of complications, a specialty of Birmingham's literary sleuthing.

And here's Eddie Woods offering some corrective history about the identity of Panama Rose, author of The Hashish Cookbook. Ira Cohen, it was not; he merely took the credit. To which a friend replies, "Given the clues -- the influence of Brion Gysin, the name that recalls Pantopon Rose, the publication in Gnaoua -- it seems obvious that the real and true author was that notorious hash head William Burroughs. I mean, there was a man with the dignity to publish a cookbook the right way, i.e. pseudonymously. Can you imagine being so low as to go around stealing credit for other folks' recipes? Fer cryin' out loud..."