Philip Levine, Working Class Proud

It really is perfect that Phil Levine has been named the U.S. Poet Laureate in this year of Occupy Wall Street, the lingering economic meltdown/jobs catastrophe, Scott Walker-style attacks on public workers, "austerity measures" across Europe, and other bullshit that's been foisted onto working people to bear the brunt of the recklessness brought on us all by the elite 1% and the financial industry's outrageous behavior since the 1980s. A year of too much and a year of fighting back. Definitely a time to turn to a poet like Phil Levine.

All along, there have been those who've known this was coming, who have plodded along documenting the severe toll Reaganomics and de-regulated industry have taken on the environment and the common people. Phil Levine is such a poet.

Still, it is a surprise that Levine has been so honored, given the lack of posturing in his work. Levine's poems are firmly rooted in life, in the real people mauled by the capitalist system. No caricatures here, nor labyrinthine masks of identity work. No posing, no theoretical discourse, no glib detachment. Substance and style are present and go hand in hand to craft compelling human songs of suffering and discovery, an amassed body of evidence of the failure of capitalism to be a human system and of the perseverance of people even in the face of hopeless conditions. As this New York Times writer reminds us, Levine's poetry is full of people, which has become all-too-rare in contemporary poetry, where the overly self-conscious speaker is often the only human presence in a poem.

For further reading, my friend Alex Long co-wrote a damned good piece (with Devin Harner) in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall, shortly after the Poet Laureate appointment. They get into the radical choice of Phil as Poet Laureate, as well as the metaphysics behind the labor-centric physicality of his poems.

Levine's earlier works are alive with a fiery anger and the politics of witness. His later poems are full of tenderness and humility in which, while still enthralled by poetry, he hesitates to make too great claims for it. His poem, “He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do,” ends:

Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words.

 

As someone from a working class family, and as a resident of a string of crippled, post-industrial towns (and who takes these both on in subject matter), I've been aware of the importance of Levine's work for years--like since I started reading poetry. But it wasn't until recently that I've actually really sat down to read his work, poring over They Feed, They Lion (1972); What Work Is (1991, National Book Award Winner), and his recent collection News of the World (2009). These are astonishingly good poetry collections.

Here's one poem to savor and, I hope, to lead you to more. It is the opening poem of What Work Is:

FEAR AND FAME

Half an hour to dress, wide rubber hip boots,

gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic helmet

like a knight's but with a little glass window

that kept steaming over, and a respirator

to save my smoke-stained lungs. I would descend

step by slow step into the dim world

of the pickling tank and there prepare

the new solutions from the great carboys

of acids lowered to me on ropes--all from a recipe

I shared with nobody and learned from Frank O'Mera

before he went off to the bars on Vernor Highway

to drink himself to death. A gallon of hydrochloric

steaming from the wide glass mouth, a dash

of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm,

metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts,

until I knew the burning stew was done.

Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer

returned to the ordinary blinking lights

of the swingshift at Feinberg and Breslin's

First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message

from the kingdom of fire. Oddly enough

no one welcomed me back, and I'd stand

fully armored as the downpour of cold water

rained down on me and the smoking traces puddled

at my feet like so much milk and melting snow.

Then to disrobe down to my work pants and shirt,

my black street shoes and white cotton socks,

to reassume my nickname, strap on my Bulova,

screw back my wedding ring, and with tap water

gargle away the bitterness as best I could.

For fifteen minutes or more I'd sit quietly

off to the side of the world as the women

polished the tubes and fixtures to a burnished purity

hung like Christmas ornaments on the racks

pulled steadily toward the tanks I'd cooked.

Ahead lay the second cigarette, held in a shaking hand,

as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat,

a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese

on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie,

and a third cigarette to kill the taste of the others.

Then to arise and dress again in the costume

of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened

by the knowledge that to descend and rise up

from the other world merely once in eight hours is half

what it takes to be known among women and men.

M+H Zinc, Spelter, West Virginia

The smelter plant before its demise.

This time last year (when I was in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and had no inkling that I would be returning to work full time within a matter of months), I began to write about the zinc-smelting plant in Spelter, WV. I grew up there in the plant's shadow, though it had been derelict for years. My grandfather John Walsh worked there for more than 20 years before the factory abruptly closed in 1971 when so many zinc operations in the U.S. were outsourced overseas.

DuPont demolished the factory in Spelter and capped the site in 2002-03. And in 2007 a group of residents successfully sued DuPont for corporate negligence that had exposed thousands of area residents to dangerous levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium. For decades factory waste had been dumped in a towering pile, seeping into the soil and the West Fork River. Because of the court settlement, most of my family and I will receive medical monitoring for the next 40 years for particular cancers and other conditions that may be linked with this prolonged heavy metal contamination in the water table.

It's an issue that hits close to home with me on many levels (environmental degradation, corporate barbarism in Appalachia, grassroots resistance, family history, labor, etc). And it presents the all too common challenge of making the political personal, the personal political, and making both into art.

For several months, I have flailed about looking for a structure, the right form, for this work that centers on the zinc plant. The current draft occupies some dozen pages in my yellow legal pad. Will it be a long poem of many parts? A linked sequence? A series of related poems? Right now I am taking my cues from Diego Rivera's mind-blowing Detroit Industry fresco cycle in Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Art. I've spent many hours in that room lost in the machinations and colors, the play between nature and industry and indigenous and industrial myth.  Here's a piece of the North Wall's largest section:

I appreciate the feeling that my eye is directed within each segment of the mural but that I am also free to perceive the whole of the composition in any order. The segments each stand alone and work together to form a grander narrative. Here then is the first panel in this assembled cycle I am continuing to work on:

On the splasher floor no one spoke. We worked together by the smidgy light of furnace vents, the molten metal and cherry tips of cigarettes. Each day a choreography of shadows: break the clay, pour the zinc, haul the chains, dam the trough in time. Hoist the bucket, don’t get burnt. Pour each ingot down the line. The heat was suffocating. Clouds rose from each soiled man—the stink of caged animals sweating through their bars. The dust of the floor became greasy with fat. A body is ¾ water and we evaporated one cupful at a time.The rivets in our jeans burning like hornets. And the old guys had it worse, hauling the extra   pounds those extra years darkly, tasting zinc at the back of the throat, half choking, they’d say, “Made in Hell, more like it.” Leering and half-proud of simply surviving the shift, dangling out the 4^th floor window breathing dead light between smokes. And what did I know of hell then, all of twenty wet behind the ears working the college summer break for beers? Those men had given years, hefted Vulcan loads in sync, exhaled heat and steam and hope of anything, any other life. And still they danced circles around me on the slippery floor.  Perspiration mingling in the air—Gonzalez, Menendez, Shingleton and the rest—was what we breathed for three and a quarter an hour.