Poetry icon Philip Levine inspired thousands of student writers

by Jefferson Beavers

It would be easy to pay tribute to Mr. Philip Levine by listing his many accomplishments in poetry:

A year as United States poet laureate, a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, a Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and many others.

But for Mr. Levine — the professor emeritus of English at Fresno State who died Feb. 14 from pancreatic cancer at age 87 — the list of accomplishments can only begin to describe his work.

Mr. Levine’s poems often gave voice to the lives of working-class Americans. Born in Detroit to immigrant parents, he worked in factory jobs while attending high school. He was a first-generation college student, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University.

His factory work deeply influenced his plainspoken poetry. Peter Everwine, a longtime friend and classmate of Mr. Levine’s in the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, says Levine loved for a poem to speak directly to the reader.

“He was sometimes very angry, very intense, which drew him toward social injustices and disparities,” says Everwine, also a professor emeritus of English at Fresno State. “He had an immense sense of focus and form in his work.”

Mr. Levine taught at Fresno State from 1958 to 1992. With Everwine and Chuck Hanzlicek, the three formed the pillars of the University’s creative writing program, which in its earliest days produced such distinguished writers as Lawson Fusao Inada, Sherley Anne Williams, Gary Soto, Larry Levis and Luis Omar Salinas.

Students sought out Mr. Levine as a tough but well-respected teacher. Described by The New York Times as a “moral comedian,” he loved to poke holes in authority, but he also nurtured young writers.

Kathy Fagan Grandinetti, a first-generation college student of Mr. Levine’s who now teaches at The Ohio State University, says Mr. Levine was indeed tough. “He was also an incredibly inspiring and gentle teacher,” she says. “As he said about his own mentor, John Berryman, he could somehow manage to devastate the student’s poems without devastating the student’s spirit.”

Brian Turner, another first-generation college student of Mr. Levine’s who now directs the creative writing program at Sierra Nevada College, says Levine brought “great power, mystery, beauty and rage” into the language of both his poetry and his teaching. He acknowledges Mr. Levine’s poem “They Feed They Lion” as a powerful influence on his own first book.

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts,
wooden dollies, They Lion grow.

“More than a decade