The last time I saw Philip Levine he was—characteristically, it seems to me—laughing as he walked off the stage of Cubberley Auditorium at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This was April 2013, two years before his death from pancreatic cancer; he had come that night as part of a roundtable discussion on the history of creative writing at Stanford, where, in 1957, after receiving his MFA from the University of Iowa, Levine had been a Jones Fellow under Yvor Winters. Levine would go on, over the course of his career, to win virtually every major award available to American poets, including two Guggenheims, three NEAs, two National Book Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 collection The Simple Truth. He is more often remembered, however, for a period of his life a good deal prior to all this, a period—the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was in his teens and twenties—during which he attended Wayne State University as an undergraduate while also working as a laborer in Detroit’s then booming automotive industry. It is this experience, forged in places like Chevrolet Gear and Axle and Detroit Transmission, that informs nearly all—and, I think, the best—of Levine’s significant body of work, and it is this experience to which he fittingly returns in his latest and final collection, The Last Shift (Penguin Random House, 2018). “I believed even then,” Levine has said of these formative years, “that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own.” A powerful culmination of a singular career, The Last Shift is just such a transformation: a dignified, human testament from a writer whose equal we are not likely to see anytime soon.
Organized and edited by Edward Hirsch, Levine’s longtime friend, The Last Shift takes up many of the ideas that have come to define Levine’s career, including the exploration of writing itself as a form of work; the work of making, out of local materials, a self and culture; the effects of work on those who do it; and the ways in which nearly every aspect of our shared existence is determined, ultimately, by the work that we do. The strongest poems in The Last Shift, however, concern themselves with the relationship between working-class life and its romanticization in poetry—the question, that is, of how one properly poeticizes or mythologizes or waxes nostalgic about such traditionally “unpoetic” material as tool and die factories or, as Levine puts it, “Chevy Gear & Axle / grinding the night-shift workers / into antiquity.” In the poem “Urban Myths,” for instance, Levine writes that “In Detroit no one walks under the moon / much less talks to it or to the unseen stars / that years ago we stopped believing were there.” Yet such resistance to lyricism—the implication that there will be, in Detroit, no moons or stars or gods or love or light—is counterbalanced by the poem’s redemptive close:
Everything I’ve written here is true,
and the cities—Brooklyn and Detroit—
are actual, and people still live in them,
people you might love were you to venture
east, like the Magi on their mad quest
to touch a star and pass into history.
I still go back each year to Detroit
to relive my long childhood in the houses
that burned down ages ago, to walk alone
the streets paved with gold and to get wet.
That wetness is the wetness of Robert Creeley’s “decent happiness,” and the Christ-like “people you might love” are, in large part, the working-class immigrant families that have populated Levine’s work from the beginning. Time and again throughout this work Levine figures working-class life as pinned, restlessly, between divine radiance and brute reality: “in this world the actual / occurs,” he writes in “The Angel Bernard.” “In November the rain / streams skyward in cold sheets, / the fires burn unseen, the houses / bear down, separate and scared.”
As even so cursory a sample as the above suggests, Levine possesses a powerful sense of line and rhythm, as well as a keen understanding of how a poem moves through its various scenes and registers and emotions; his poems begin, often, with a tight narrative focus, widening out to larger ideas—or to more lyrical and rhetorically complex language—before returning, hero-like, to their original home. Because of this strong rootedness in narrative and in autobiography, Levine has often been unfashionable among critics and writers with more “experimental” sensibilities. Yet his writing, as Hirsch describes it, is “a fundamentally human-centered poetry,” and, much more than an easily epiphanic narrative poet, Levine is a careful witness to a wide range of human experience, as evidenced, among other places, in this collection’s many poems about travel in Europe and South America. In an age like the present, moreover, when poetic language is often valued less for its referentiality than for its opaque texture or playful lyricism, Levine’s language is transparent without being simple—clean, crisp, elegant, all without calling attention to itself as language. I can’t think of a more unfashionable poet by contemporary standards, but I can think of very few poets better. To be sure, the endings in The Last Shift sometimes feel flat and unsurprising—three poems end on the word “nothing”—and Levine’s tone is often too light or jocular for my taste, relying heavily on the dark irony that characterized many other poets of his generation. But there is, behind this, a profound wisdom and quiet reverence for life, a sense of unpretentious care for people and for places easily overlooked in the bulk of contemporary poetry.
Indeed, there exists throughout The Last Shift a sense that Levine is engaged in the crucial and life-sustaining work of salvage, dredging up and restoring moments and memories that might otherwise pass into oblivion. This idea is literalized in the poem “1934,” one of many in which Levine recalls his immigrant ancestors with, simultaneously, mythic grandeur and frank realism. “My mother’ s family was in junk,” Levine writes. “The men / were huge, thick-chested, with long arms / and great scarred hands. My uncle Leo / could embrace a barrel of scrap metal, / laugh out his huge laugh, and lift it up / just for the joy.” The image—an ecstatic redemption of the past—is also a description of Levine’ s poetics, one in which people, objects, and sometimes whole cultures are saved from vanishing, held in the amber of memory by the simple, joyful act of poetic perception. The collection’ s final and titular poem, however, complicates this idea of salvage. Stalled in traffic as a train passes, Levine’ s speaker imagines the world carrying on without him. “Soon the kids / would descend from these lightless houses,” he writes, “gloved and scarved, on their way to school / with tin boxes of sandwiches and cookies.” As the train in front of him slows and then stops, Levine’ s collection turns, for the last time, to its powerful culmination: “Around me / the engines began to die, and then / my own went.” Then, the poem’ s conclusion:
I knew
these tiny glazed pictures—a car hood,
my own speedometer, the steering wheel,
the windshield fogging over—were the last
I’ d ever see. These places where I had lived
all the days of my life were giving up
their hold on me and not a moment too soon.
One of the finest “last poems” I have ever read, “The Last Shift” employs Levine’ s dark irony to tremendous effect, suggesting that it is he, now, who is salvaged from this world “not a moment too soon.” It is a defiant acceptance of death, heartbreaking in its simplicity, yet those “tiny glazed pictures” are nothing less, it seems to me, than Levine’ s sharp, unforgettable poems—poems which glisten, still, like the chrome of a speedometer, and with which we will, I think, long live.
July 2018
This review will appear in issue 61.3/4