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Philip Levine

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

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

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Asa Don Brown

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

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"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

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"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

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"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

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Asa Don Brown

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

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Asa Don Brown

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

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"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

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Asa Don Brown

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

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Asa Don Brown

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

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Asa Don Brown

"True poetry is the fragrance of the heart in the house of peace."

Explore more quotes by Philip Levine

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Philip Levine
"There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory."
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Philip Levine
"It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work."
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Philip Levine
"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
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Philip Levine
"My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs."
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Philip Levine
"My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family."
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Philip Levine
"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."
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Philip Levine
"I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home."
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Philip Levine
"I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others."
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Philip Levine
"I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves."
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Philip Levine
"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."
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