#poe

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. ↗

— Philip Levine

#i #intensity #lot #most #poem

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. ↗

— Philip Levine

#encouraged #i #lucky #me #mother

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. ↗

— Philip Levine

#carried #created #destroy #dominant #i

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice. ↗

— Philip Levine

#advice #care #doing #going #happens

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. ↗

— Philip Levine

#been #carried #had #her #mother

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. ↗

— Philip Levine

#get #how #intensely #into #notion

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home. ↗

— Philip Levine

#because #extraordinary #home #i #i think

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry. ↗

— Philip Levine

#best #day #every #every day #going

A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet. ↗

— George Henry Lewes

#feeble #man #may #poet #variously

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? ↗

— C. Day Lewis

#earth #expresses #good #however #just