Sunday, November 18, 2007
Philip Levine at 80
Dear Poetry Lovers,
If you're in New York City on Thursday, November 28th, 2007, don't miss a special 80th birthday tribute and reading featuring Philip Levine with Kate Daniels, E.L. Doctorow, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Malena Mörling, Sharon Olds, Tom Sleigh, Gerald Stern, Jean Valentine and Charles Wright.
Philip Levine was born in Detroit and is the author of 16 collections of poetry, most recently Breath. His other books include The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is, which won the National Book Award; The Names of the Lost; Ashes: Poems New and Old and 7 Years From Somewhere, both of which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the distinguished Poet-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Co-sponsored with the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem Foundation, Cooper Union, Knopf, Poets House, Society of America and Poets & Writers.
Hope to see you there!
Philip Levine 80th Birthday TributeThursday, November 29th, 7:00pmGreat Hall, Cooper Union, East 7th StreetFree and Open to the Publichttp://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/levine_tribute/
If you're in New York City on Thursday, November 28th, 2007, don't miss a special 80th birthday tribute and reading featuring Philip Levine with Kate Daniels, E.L. Doctorow, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Malena Mörling, Sharon Olds, Tom Sleigh, Gerald Stern, Jean Valentine and Charles Wright.
Philip Levine was born in Detroit and is the author of 16 collections of poetry, most recently Breath. His other books include The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is, which won the National Book Award; The Names of the Lost; Ashes: Poems New and Old and 7 Years From Somewhere, both of which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the distinguished Poet-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Co-sponsored with the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center, the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem Foundation, Cooper Union, Knopf, Poets House, Society of America and Poets & Writers.
Hope to see you there!
Philip Levine 80th Birthday TributeThursday, November 29th, 7:00pmGreat Hall, Cooper Union, East 7th StreetFree and Open to the Publichttp://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/levine_tribute/
Gospel
The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there's
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don't
ask myself what I'm looking for.
I didn't come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I've said to myself,
although it greets me with last year's
dead thistles and this year's
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider's cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I've never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. "Soughing" we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.
-- Philip Levine . Breath. Knopf, 2004.
The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there's
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don't
ask myself what I'm looking for.
I didn't come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I've said to myself,
although it greets me with last year's
dead thistles and this year's
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider's cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I've never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. "Soughing" we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.
-- Philip Levine . Breath. Knopf, 2004.
