Poet Philip Levine Dies at 87, 1928-2015

        Philip Levine was most noted for his poems about work and working class people who, he said, were hardly present in poetry.

        His obituary by Steve Chawkins in the L.A. Times today says that for years, Levine expressed bafflement over poetry without people in it:


       "There's a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens," Levine told a Paris Review interviewer in 1988.  "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 appear, he said, "their greatest terror is that they'll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine."


       That's a critique of certain poetry that reveals what room there was for poems of the kind Levine himself would and did create.