for Phil Levine, RIP
They are writing about you Phil — you know
good stuff — the prizes Detroit and that
poem where you said in past lives you
were that wild sun-crested fox being chased
by “ladies and gentlemen on horseback” —
you said you would wake up with the poem
ready that it slipped untangled from a dream
all you had to do was sit up and write
the stage was a poem too — even though
most of us were too prepared you
preferred to joke before we went on
before the poetry light hit us on the face
it did not matter to you — you just carved
chiseled punctured rotated danced
and whirred past a distant gate
¤
Philip Levine was Juan Felipe Herrera’s long-time friend, colleague, and mentor.
LARB Contributor
LARB Staff Recommendations
And if the man with the choke-hold
And if the man with the choke-hold pulls the standing man down...
Anthropoetry
IN RENATO ROSALDO’s The Day of Shelly’s Death, the inner and outer elements of the poem — that is, the poetics of eyes, notes, hearts, bodies, and voices, and the whispers, murmurs, shouts, grief-howls, and body-mind-word implosions — trace out, like ...
Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Please consider supporting our work and helping to keep LARB free.