Philip Levine in Conversation with Grace Cavalieri

Phil Levine by David Shankbone

"It required daily decisions. 

This is what I am going to do."

Philip Levine on The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress from 2011:

Listen to the AUDIO PODCAST (56:33 minutes) Transcript. 

Philip Levine was the 18th U.S. Poet Laureate. He was born in Detroit in 1928, and educated at Wayne State, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. He is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry, and his honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and two National Book Critic Circle Awards. Levine's first book of poems, On the Edge (1963), won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Levine's other prizes include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, an award of merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award, and the Golden Rose from the New England Poetry Society. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997, elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Levine taught Literature and Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno from 1958-1992. In 1970, Levine was chosen Outstanding Professor at the University, and the following year he was chosen Outstanding Professor for the California State University System. He also taught or served as a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley; Vassar College; Vanderbilt University; Princeton University; Tufts University; Columbia University; the University of Houston; New York University; and elsewhere. He divided his time between Fresno, California, and Brooklyn, New York.