What “What Work Is” Is: The Importance of Philip Levine

I met Philip Levine only twice, and both times thought he was a son of a bitch and really liked him for it.  But that’s not what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about why he was an important poet.  He was often called “the poet of work,” and in a sense he was: his imagination was formed by a decade and a half of hard manual labor in industrial Detroit.  But it’s not just that he understood the look and feel and sound and smell and hurt of work and found words for those things.  He understood something about what modernity demands from us, the kind of work beyond ‘work’ in the conventional sense that our culture leaves to us, and he understood how difficult, how close to impossible, that kind of work has become.  This, for me, is why he is an important poet.

When I say ‘modernity,’ I mean the world that emerged in the wake of the wars of religion that wracked Europe in the 17th century.  Much of the vehemence with which these wars were fought came from the depth of the convictions held by both Protestants and Catholics that what was at stake was not merely realpolitik, but something much greater: ideals, ultimate beliefs, salvation.  The fate of the state was also the fate of the soul, since the state was entwined with religion, and was justified by its adherence to particular views of the good and the holy.  It was Hobbes who taught the civil-war weary English to step away from the idea of the state as the guardian of high ideals of the good and sacred (he taught the similarly weary French the same, almost at the same time—he wrote Leviathan in Paris, and its pages were translated before the printer’s ink had dried).  Instead of looking upwards, to whatever shining ideal the state could embody, he looked down, at the bare minimum people needed—basic protection of one’s life and property—and asked that the state provide this and leave ideals, salvation, and ultimate goods alone.  What is the intrinsic purpose of mankind, and how can the state guide us to it?  That, for Hobbes, was a question that could only lead—and had demonstrably led—to bloodshed.  Let’s let the state limit itself, he suggested, to keeping us from killing and stealing, and the rest can take care of itself.  Much of classical liberalism proceeds from Hobbes’ assumptions: John Locke, for example, maintained that the state should provide security from foreign and domestic violence, but that it should have nothing to do with guiding us, collectively, to some higher ideal: instead, it leaves us all to pursue the goals that seem highest to us.  The pursuit of happiness, we call it, in America.

Philip Levine understood that this modern charge to define and pursue our own sense of purpose and our own kind of fulfillment wasn’t a simple thing.  Indeed, it was a task we might not be up for, a necessity for which we, as isolated individuals with all kinds of more immediate needs and only our own feeble resources to fall back on, may never achieve.  He saw the quiet heroism required to live the way the modern world demands we live.  The recognition of this quiet heroism, and the fact that we may fail to achieve it, is what he greatest and best-loved poem, “What Work Is,” is about.

The poem beings with a fairly conventional sense of work, and the work that is required just to get it:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. 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.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants.

There, quietly and clearly, we have the alienating world of modern labor, the impersonality of it—and set against such alienation, the idea of brotherhood, even when the brother you see is not your own.  But there’s more:

You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

We thought we knew what work was: the grind of it, the humiliation of seeking it, the powerlessness, the way it turns brothers into a crowd of anonymous rivals.  But it turns out that knowing those things is not knowing what work really is after all.  And what’s that, then? It’s what the speaker’s brother does: he survives labor and pushes himself further, to do something that, for him, is not alienating.  It may not be your idea of the good or of salvation: you may think the music for which your brother lives is the worst ever invented.  But you can see what the real work is: defining for oneself, in the absence of collective guidance, some notion of fulfillment or meaning, and pushing oneself to rise above mere survival in the pursuit of that saving idea of the good.  There’s a kind of sublimity in the brother pushing himself to define and pursue the good—a dark-sky, raining, sad-slouched doggedness utterly uncaptured by the breezy sunshine of a phrase like “the pursuit of happiness.”  Levine sees how this pursuit, a burden the modern world places on our broad or narrow shoulders, is just like the pursuit of the other kind of work, and that it involves:

...a sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No…”

After Miłosz: Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski Talk Poetry in Chicago

So two American poets laureate, a Polish poet, and a Harvard professor walk into an emergency room. It sounds like the set-up for some kind of literary joke, but in actuality it was how things began last weekend when Philip Levine, Charles Simic, and Adam Zagajewski sat down for a discussion moderated by Steve Burt downstairs at Chicago's Chopin Theater (for reasons I never discovered, the downstairs part of the Chopin is called "The Emergency Room," and looks the part: painted bright white with teal accents, it features a harshly-lit stage with a gurney in the background). I wanted to make some joke about the gurney and the advanced age of the laureates, but would have had to tear Chicu Reddy, who was seated next to me, away from his discussion with Oren Izenberg and others from the University of Chicago English department, so I let it pass.


The gathering was part of a two-day event called "After Miłosz," one of about 200 celebrations of the Miłosz centenary worldwide—Adam Zagajewski mentioned that this was the tenth such event at which he had spoken this year. There were three parts to the evening's events: readings of Miłosz's works by the participants, an open discussion among the panelists, and then a brief period in which Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski reading from their own works. Here's what I took note of in my battered Moleskine (direct quotes are approximate, from memory and quickly-taken notes—I regret any inaccuracies).


The Priest and the Jester


Philip Levine began by speaking of Miłosz as a great lyric poet of landscapes, and of water, reading poems that demonstrated this. Charles Simic then read Miłosz's poem "Encounter":


We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.


And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.


That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.


O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


One of the great achievements of Miłosz, said Simic, was to make us more conscious of the world around us, this being "the essence of the lyric poem," which comes to us trying to be disinterested, hoping (perhaps impossibly) to gaze at the world as it really is, making us see it again as if for the first time. This was not the Miłosz of The Captive Mind, the anti-communist writer welcomed by Americans during the Cold War. This was Miłosz as a someone both simpler and more profound than the writer of ideological works.


Adam Zagajewski's recollections of how he first came to Miłosz soon complicated the emerging picture of the Miłosz the lyricist. Zagajewski read the first stanza of "Throughout Our Land," which he'd had been very hard to find when he was a student in Poland. He'd had to lie to a Dean about being a graduate student writing a thesis on Miłosz to be admitted to a special reading room where he was allowed to see the poem: whatever the lyrical qualities of the poems may have been, they didn't prevent the Polish authorities from seeing them as potentially ideological, and they were kept out of general circulation.


Despite the allure inherent in all things forbidden, Zagajewski confessed to not having much liked Miłosz, at least initially. "There was an essay by Leszek Kolakowski, quite famous in Poland," said Zagajewski, "called 'The Priest and the Jester.'" In this essay, he went on to say, Kolakowski distinguishes between two different types of writer: the priest, who is a guardian of tradition and absolutes, and the jester, who doubts all things. "It was then not popular to be a priest in Poland," said Zagajewski. "We liked Zbigniew Herbert, who was a jester. I wanted to be a jester. Wisława Szymborska was a jester. To us, Miłosz seemed like a priest. But we were wrong." Instead of a priest, Miłosz was a poet in which the priest and the jester wrestled. There was a constant dialogue, sometimes a war, between the two, and this made for a rich and complex body of work. It also made Miłosz a more difficult poet to love than most others. “We love a poet for his voice,” said Zagajewski, “but Miłosz had two voices, always.” After a brief scuffle among the poets on stage about whether Miłosz had two voices, or one voice with different modes, or simply offered different points of view, things settled down. The room, I thought, had taken Zagajewski’s point.


Truth, Beauty, and Exile


After the initial readings, Steve Burt led a wide-ranging conversation, which kept circling back to the question of the poet as craftsman (Levine’s statement that “craft may not be enough, but it’s presumptuous to say that it’s somehow secondary” drew a great deal of applause). At one point Burt began to reframe the question by saying “there’s a difference between being a bricklayer, which is an applied art, and being an arranger of Japanese cherry blossoms…” but before he could finish, someone (I think it was Simic) was quoting Miłosz’s poem “What Once Was Great”:


What once was great, now appeared small.
Kingdoms were fading like snow-covered bronze.


What once could smite, now smites no more.
Celestial earths roll on and shine.


Streched on the grass by the bank of a river,
As long, long ago, I launch my boats of bark.


I’m not sure where Simic was going to go with this, because Zagajewski jumped in, sparks flying in his mind between “What Once Was Great” and the image of the Japanese cherry blossoms. “Once Miłosz chose exile,” said Zagajewski, “he became a Japanese poet, an arranger of cherry blossoms, because exile was so different from the environment in which he read his poems in Poland under the Nazis, and then under Stalin.” There was an underground poetry scene even under Hitler, he explained, and people gathered, at some risk, in private apartments to hear Miłosz read. His poems spoke to their condition as occupied and oppressed people, offering a truth not available in public places. “His poems helped people to live under Stalinism,” said Zagajewski, “they needed and adored him, and he liked it, because, like all poets, he was a little vain.” When he read in Poland there was an echo, a resonance of the poem with the needs of the broad public. “But in exile, that echo went away. Now in exile there was silence, and he became increasingly a self-deprecating craftsman.” Where he had written poems devoted to speaking truths that people needed to hear (“What Once Was Great” to be a poem in this mode), he became more a poet of beauty and spiritual yearning (I take “Encounter” to be closer to this sort of thing).


I see what Zagajewski means.  It’s common for people in oppressive situations to turn to poetry as a source for the articulation of values and needs that go unarticulated elsewhere. And in most contemporary Western societies, much of poetry’s marginality relative to other modes of expression has to do with our good fortune in having a great deal of freedom to express our views and needs through other means. A recent article in the satirical newspaper The Onion made some comic mileage out of the notion that Americans were turning to the works of one of the panel’s participants, Philip Levine, to see them through our current economic crisis: there was no similar opportunity for humor when Miłosz read in occupied Poland. And if Americans truly hungered for poetry en masse, would a reading in which a current laureate, a former laureate, and one of Europe’s most prominent poets, draw a crowd of about 75, the number present in the Chopin theater? 


American History, American Landscapes


Toward the end of the evening’s events, readings and discussions flowed into one another more-or-less seamlessly, and the readings of works by Simic, Levine, and Zagajewski turned into something of a discussion of the role of history and landscape for American poets. “History,” Levine remarked, “should only be read in a funeral home, next to a coffin, preferably the poet’s own,” since the nature of the material is so very often dire. But still, one ought not to write without a sense of history, he maintained. “I was just talking to Robert Hass and Jane Hirschfield, and they told me American poets have no sense of history. Well: Simic was born in Belgrade, my parents fled from Europe: we know history.” As, of course, did Miłosz—how could it be otherwise for him, the Polish twentieth century being what it was?


Talk then ranged to the topic of landscape, particularly the Californian landscapes of Miłosz’s poetry. “You can love California landscapes, and be ecstatic in them” said Simic, “but I’ve lived in New Hampshire for decades, which is more of a Robert Frost country—dark, cold, suspicious, miserable: of course Miłosz hated Robert Frost.” Levine chimed in to say that he, too, had become a Californian poet, but his California was the inland valley, not a wild landscape, nor even an agricultural landscape. “It’s an agribusiness landscape, in which whole classes of people are sub-people, and the few have got everything sewn up so tight they’ll never share.” In this, it reminded him of the Detroit of his youth, he said. “But don’t get me wrong—I loved Detroit. I’d probably still love it… if it were still there.”


As the things wound down, I noticed they’d run longer than I expected, and I was unable to stick around and see if I could drag Steve Burt or any of the poets a few blocks uptown to the tiny upstairs room at Myopic Books, where Larry Sawyer was hosting readings by Ann Shaw and Roger Reeves. I’m sure those reading went well, though: if there’s one thing the current American poetry scene makes clear, it’s that you don’t need huge crowds to have an excellent event.