Arthur E. Smith
POETRY AND POLITICS:
An Interview with Philip Levine
Int;
In judging a poem, do
you
take into consideration the poet's
attempt, along with his finished product, or is it simply a matter of the best
achieved poetry? Does ambition come into the picture at all?
Levine;
Of course . That goes without saying . One of the most attractive
qualities about a poem is its ambition. And I think that people rise to the
occasion and that the best writing is really in the most ambitious poems.
Int ;
How do politics fit into a poem? I know that you're a political person , and
yet your strongest poems are not concerned with politics at all. They are
about people, individual persons who are lonely, depressed, on the verge of
giving up-and yet holding on with a stubborn tenacity. This isn't politics,
is it?
Levine ;
Sure.
Int;
How so?
Levine ;
You 're defining politics in a very narrow sense, as having to do with
political parties . I think the writing ofa poem is a political act . We now exist
in the kind ofa world that Orwell was predicting, and the simple insistence
upon accurate language has become a political act. Nothing is more obvious
than what our politicians are doing to our language, so that ifpoets insist on
the truth, or on an accurate rendition , or on a faithful use of language, if
they for instance, insist on an accurate depiction ofpeople's lives as they are
actually lived-this is a political act. You couldn't possibly make a movie
about the way people live in the United States and show it to the
Republican Party and find them liking it. They would find it an intensely
political movie. And they'd be right , it would be a political movie. The fact
that a poem deals with the kinds of . .. I mean, what are the sources of
anger in a lot of the poems that I write and a lot of other people write? The
sources ofanger are frequently social, and they have to do with the fact that
people's lives are frustrated, they're lied to, they're cheated , that there is no
equitable handing out of the goods of this world. A lot of the rage that one
encounters in contemporary poetry has to do with the political facts of our
