The Simple Truth
‘A poem for such a day as this’
a poem for such a day as this
— is a column where I share my favourite poems and their creators, some of whom might be familiar and some not.
Whatever the case, I hope they elicit a smile, a grin, a tear, a smirk … or, in Kafka’s words — be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
As always — it would be great to hear your thoughts.
A poem for such a day as today is:
The Simple Truth
by Philip Levine
I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,
“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
Philip Levine was one of the leading poetic voices of his generation, “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” according to Edward Hirsch.
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine was born and raised in industrial Detroit, where he began working in the auto factories at the age of 14. As a young boy in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he was fascinated by the events of the Spanish Civil War. His heroes were not only those individuals who struggled against fascism but also ordinary folks who worked at hopeless jobs simply to stave off poverty.
Noted for his interest in the grim reality of blue-collar work and workers, Levine resolved “to find a voice for the voiceless” while working in the auto plants of Detroit during the 1950s.
“I saw that the people that I was working with … were voiceless in a way,” he explained in Detroit Magazine. “In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard. Nobody was speaking for them. And as young people will, you know, I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be. And sure enough I’ve gone and done it. Or I’ve tried anyway.”
Levine earned his BA from Wayne State University in 1950 and began attending writing workshops at the University of Iowa, as an unregistered student, in 1953. He took classes with Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and would later pay tribute to Berryman’s teaching influence on his development as a poet.
Levine officially earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1957, and later that year won a Jones Fellowship at Stanford University. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching at the California State University, Fresno, where he would remain until 1992. Levine also taught at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Tufts.
Though Levine did not return to live in Detroit, its people and economy would remain central concerns of his poetry.
Critics have described Levine’s work as dark and unflinching. Time contributor Paul Gray called Levine’s speakers “guerrillas, trapped in an endless battle long after the war is lost.”
Several critics faulted Levine for his reliance on narrative descriptions of realistic situations. However, Thomas Hackett, in his review of A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988), argued that, rather than being a weakness, Levine’s “strength is the declarative, practically journalistic sentence. He is most visual and precise when he roots his voice in hard, earthy nouns.”
Levine’s ability to craft deeply affecting poems has long been his hallmark.
“His poems are personal, love poems, poems of horror, poems about the experiencing of America,” Stephen Spender wrote in the New York Review of Books.
Levine retired from teaching at the California State University, Fresno in 1992. He split his time between Fresno and Brooklyn in his later years, before his death in early 2015.
A collection of poetry, The Last Shift (2016), was published posthumously.
Thank you for reading.
