Philip Levine's Breath [US]:
Not being "a thing" is a concern that animates Levine's entire body of work. He is famously a working-class poet, having often drawn on his unprivileged youth in industrial Detroit for the material of his work. Breath, like all his books since the early '70s, makes room for several little elegies - anecdotal, seemingly casual, but profoundly respectful - for the non-high and the not-mighty, including people he met on the dehumanizing jobs he endured before turning, in his mid-20s, to the essential occupation of making poems. "I am now a kind of archive of people, places and things that no longer exist," Levine said not too long ago. "I carry them around with me, and if I get them on paper, I give them at least some kind of existence."
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on Wednesday, December 01, 2004 at 3:03 PM.
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