US poet laureate and Pulitzer winner Philip Levine, who celebrated workers, dies at age 87

FRESNO, Calif. – Philip Levine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose intimate portraits of blue-collar life were grounded in personal experience and political conscience, died Saturday. Levine was 87.

Levine, the country’s poet laureate in 2011-2012, died at his home in California of pancreatic and liver cancer, his wife said Sunday.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Levine was profoundly shaped by his working-class childhood and years spent in jobs ranging from driving a truck to assembling parts at a Chevrolet plant.

Although he taught in several colleges, he had little in common with the academic poets of his time. He consciously modeled himself after Walt Whitman as a poet of everyday experience and cosmic wonder, writing conversational poems about his childhood, living in Spain, marriage and parenting and poetry itself.

“We’ve lost a great presence in American poetry,” said Edward Hirsch, a friend of Levine and president of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Levine captured the ways “ordinary people are extraordinary,” while writing poems that are accessible to readers, Hirsch said Sunday. “They move between the most ordinary diction and high romantic heights.”

Levine came to be identified with poems about work and workers. In “What Work Is,” the title piece of his celebrated 1991 collection, he offers a grim sketch of standing on line in the rain, hoping for a job:

This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

He was among the country’s most decorated poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1995 for “The Simple Truth” and National Book Awards for the 1979 collection “Ashes” and for “What Work Is.” In naming Levine poet laureate in 2011, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington cited his gift for expressing “the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”

Exhausting factory hours made Levine so determined to write that he showed up in 1953 at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop even though a planned fellowship had fallen through. One of his teachers, the poet John Berryman, became a mentor.

“He seemed to feel I had something genuine,” Levine told The Paris Review in 1988, “but that I wasn’t doing enough with it, wasn’t demanding enough from my work.”

Levine joined the faculty of California State in Fresno and remained there for more than 30 years. He also taught at Princeton University, Columbia University and several other colleges.

His debut collection, “On the Edge,” came out in 1963. Other books included “Not This Pig,” ”They Feed the Lion” and “1933.” For a time in the 1960s, he lived in Spain, still under the rule of Francisco Franco. Levine developed a deep bond to the country and to its people, especially those who had fought Franco during the country’s civil war of the 1930s. He wrote poems about Spain and helped translate works by the Spanish poets Gloria Fuertes and James Sabines.

Back in the U.S., Levine was an opponent of the Vietnam War and defender of civil rights and the rights of working people. In 1968, he also was among the writers who vowed not to pay taxes until the Vietnam War ended.

Levine was married twice, to Patty Kanterman and to Frances J. Artley, his wife since 1954.

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AP National Writer Hillel Italie reported from New York. AP Correspondent Scott Smith reported from Fresno.