Philip Levine
From Infoshop OpenWiki
Philip Levine, an American anarchist poet, was born in 1928 in Detroit, Michigan. Growing up, his parents told him he was Spanish; "Why my parents, both born in a little shtetl in western Russia, would tell me this, I have no idea. But it may have had something to do with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492." As a youth, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin. He was educated at Wayne University, now Wayne State University, and held a series of industrial jobs before he left Detroit. He was an anarchist who claimed that "property is theft" until he bought his first house. He eventually settled in Fresno, California to teach and write.
Levine's poetry frequently features animals, the factory workers of Detroit and the revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War. In 1995 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, one of his many awards.
Levine's best known poem is probably "They Feed They Lion" (1972). "They" may refer to the rich men who parasitically prey on the honest-working lower class and cynically claim to be helping the downtrodden. On the other hand, "they" may refer to workers who are getting "fed up" and are "lying in wait" for their opportunity to strike back.
Another one of his popular poems is "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives" (1968). Written from the point of view of an unperturbed pig facing slaughter, it mixes human and animal behavior to comical effect. In the swine's opinion, a human about to be butchered would lack his iron control, and would instead "squeal and shit like a new housewife discovering television." The pig may be a symbol for the exploited worker who is unafraid to die since he has nothing else to lose...or it may represent the false machismo espoused by the same worker who is too afraid to rebel.
Some of Levine's other poems include "Belle Isle, 1949," "The Horse," "Rain Downriver," "Saturday Sweeping," "Sweet Will," "What Work Is" and "You Can Have It."
[edit] Citations
[edit] External links
- Biography of Philip Levine - looking in detail at his politics and his anarchism
The page was seeded with material from Wikipedia
