#philip levine

[firstfullmoon]

jane hirshfield / chen chen / philip levine

#w #poetry #comparatives #jane hirshfield #chen chen #philip levine

[merricatvance]

Philip Levine, 'Godspell' // Neon Genesis Evangelion, 'The Beginning and the End, or "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"'

#neon genesis evangelion #philip levine #poetry #kawoshin #web weaving #shinji ikari #kaworu nagisa #evangelion #my stuff #sorry folks

[sweatermuppet]

from godspell by philip levine, published in the last shift

[Text ID: A lifetime passes / in the blink of an eye. You look back and think, / That was heaven, so of course it had to end. /End ID]

#why did this make me so emotional 😐 #philip levine #poetry #currently reading #free epub #free pdf #the last shift poems #ID included

[undinesea]

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Philip Levine, from 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems

#philip levine #poetry

[typewriter-worries]

A lifetime passes in the blink of an eye. You look back and think, that was heaven, so of course it had to end.

Growing Season, Philip Levine 

#it's been heaven knowing you #philip levine #poetry #growing season #dark academia #classic academia #light academia #literature #literature quotes #quotations

[lunchboxpoems]

OUR VALLEY

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

PHILIP LEVINE

#philip levine #poem #poetry #valley #life

[dk-thrive]

wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life

You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

—  Philip Levine, from "Our Valley” in News of the World (Knopf, February 15, 2011)

#Philip Levine #own #land #earth #conservation #ecology

[6peaches]

Philip Levine - The Second Going

Again the day begins, only no one wants its sanity or its blinding clarity. Daylight is not what we came all this way for. A pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.

#poem #poet #Philip Levine #The Second Going

[manwalksintobar]

The Unknowable // Philip Levine

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge hour after hour, "woodshedding" the musicians called it, but his woodshed was the world. The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins that could fill a club to overflowing blown into tatters by the sea winds teaching him humility, which he carries with him at all times, not as an amulet against the powers of animals and men that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace. No, a quality of the gaze downward on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan. Hold his hand and you'll see it, hold his eyes in yours and you'll hear the wind singing through the cables of the bridge that was home, singing through his breath--no rarer than yours, though his became the music of the world thirty years ago. Today I ask myself how he knew the time had come to inhabit the voice of the air and how later he decided the time had come for silence, for the world to speak any way it could? He wouldn't answer because he'd find the question pompous. He plays for money. The years pass, and like the rest of us he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great shoulders narrow. He is merely a man-- after all--a man who stared for years into the breathy, unknowable voice of silence and captured the music.

#poetry #Philip Levine #American poetry #jazz #music #unknowable #ageing #glory #art #woodshedding #New York City #Manhattan #Brooklyn #tenor saxophone #Sonny Rollins #homage

[sophieeeikli]

Ghosts Are Real: Poets And Their Voices by Sophie E. Eikli

What is a ghost? Is it a figure; an apparition moored by grief and trauma, unable to move on from a battlefield or house? Or is it a feeling within us, a nonlinear emotion that arises within us upon interaction with an environment. My suggestion of a definition is this- a ghost is the concentrated substance of a person who is no longer there. A ghost is the continuation of someone or something who has ceased to exist on the physical plane.

                                                      ---------

Read my essay on poets’ voices, discussing such figures as Philip Levine and Sylvia Plath, here!

#ghosts #paranormal #creative writing #poetry #sylvia plath #philip levine #my writing

[writerystuff]

PITFALL FOR POETS

"It is the imagination that gives us poetry. When you sit down to write a poem, you really don't know where you're going. If you know where you're going, the poem stinks, you probably already wrote it, and you're imitating yourself."

– Philip Levine

#poets #poetry #imagination #self-imitation #originality #inspiration #Philip Levine

[iwritewhatilike]

philip levine - what work is

#this made me want to #… #yeah #philip levine #what work is

[seasunandstar]

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop   one by one. You can have it, he says. The moonlight streams in the window   and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone. Thirty years will pass before I remember   that moment when suddenly I knew each man   has one brother who dies when he sleeps   and sleeps when he rises to face this life, and that together they are only one man   sharing a heart that always labors, hands   yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps   for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it? All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I   stacked cases of orange soda for the children   of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time with always two more waiting. We were twenty   for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty. In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes   of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,   no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace, for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,   wedding certificates, drivers licenses. The city slept. The snow turned to ice.   The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose   between the thousands of cracked squares, and that grass died. I give you back 1948.   I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon   with its frail light falling across a face. Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse   for God and burning eyes that look upon   all creation and say, You can have it. -- Philip Levine

#poetry #philip levine #theme: love #theme: family #theme: work #theme: depression #theme: anger #theme: labor #all time favorite poems

[undinesea]

Wherever you are now there is earth somewhere beneath you waiting to take the little you leave. This morning I rose before dawn, dressed in the cold, washed my face, ran a comb through my hair and felt my skull underneath, unrelenting, soon the home of nothing. The wind that swirled the sand that day years ago had a name that will outlast mine by a thousand years, though made of air, which is what I too shall become, hopefully, air that says quietly in your ear, “I’m dust and memory, your two neighbors on this cold star.”

Philip Levine, from Dust and Memory

#philip levine #poetry

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 29

Today and Two Thousand Years from Now The job is over. We stand under the trees waiting to be told what to do, but the job is over. The darkness pours between the branches above, but the moon’s not yet on its walk through the night sky trailed by stars. Suddenly a match flares, I see there are only us two, you and me, alone together in the great room of the night world, two laborers with nothing to do, so I lean to the little flame and light my Lucky and thank you, comrade, and again we are in the dark. Let me now predict the future. Two thousand years from now we two will be older, wiser, having escaped the fleeting incarnations of workingmen. We will have risen from the earth of southern Michigan through the tangled roots of Chinese elms or ancient rosebushes to take the tainted air into our leaves and send it back, purified, down the same trail we took to escape the dark. Two thousand years passed in a flash to shed no more light than a wooden match gave under the trees when you and I were lost kids, more scared than now, but warm, useless, with names and different faces. —Philip Levine

#philip levine #today and two thousand years from now #poetry #national poetry month #npm2023

[gendzl]

—Philip Levine, By Bus to Fresno

#¶ #poetry #philip levine