What follows is an adapted version of an essay I contributed to Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, edited by Mari L'Esperance and Tomas Q. Morin and published by Prairie Lights Books earlier this year. The book collects accounts of Philip Levine as a teacher and mentor, and it was a real thrill to be included in the book, alongside some great writers.
Strictly speaking, Levine wasn't a mentor as much of a professor I had one semester. As I hope I explain here, he is much more than that, but the process of wanting a mentor, and accepting one, and seeking one, at least in my experience, is a complicated one, at least if you're me in your mid-twenties.
I'm hoping to include this essay as well as its companion piece on another person I now call my mentor, Afaa M. Weaver, in a collection next year tentatively called Shader: 99 Notes on Grief, Puberty, and Making Out in Church, from 99: The Press.
***
When was the first time I saw Philip
Levine? I’m pretty sure it was the first day of classes at New York University in
the fall of 1995, out in the lounge with ratty couches, on the second floor of
19 University Place. He sat next to Gerald Stern. They talked about the food in
New York and the great poets of Cleveland. Who? Hart Crane and…where in Ohio is
Rita Dove from? Some of us joined naming names. Who else? d. a. levy? Yes, d.
a. levy, I threw in his name. The desire to impress fogs my memory. Later, Levine
sat at the end of the seminar table as we walked in, dressed in a sweater and
collared shirt, nice jacket.
I had been in the city for a year,
had committed to making something of myself as a poet, and assumed Levine and I
would be simpatico, fellow blue-collar travelers. I might have even thought
that I had “outgrown” Levine’s poems, fancying myself a more experimental type.
The sequence of different disguises I wore in those days is still unclear.
What is clear is I was at once
worshipful and ambivalent about being in the same room as the poet who redefined,
for me, what was acceptable subject matter in a contemporary poem and how to go
about writing about work. Here I was, 26, old by grad student standards, with
this 67-year-old poet, in the flesh, about to read our poems for the next 15
weeks.
***
I do remember the first time I read
Levine’s poems. It was the fall of 1991, my first poetry workshop, led by
Michael S. Weaver (now Afaa M. Weaver) at Rutgers University in Camden, New
Jersey. I was a non-matriculated student who had limped through undergrad.
We’re talking figuratively, but I also wore a polio brace on my right leg from
a landscaping job accident. The figure I struck then was Dickensian. My leg
clacked as I walked.
Weaver assigned several poets who
remain favorites—Li-YoungLee, Sharon Olds—but the one who stood out for me was Philip
Levine. You know the poem: “You know what work is—if you’re/old enough to read
this you know what/work is, although you may not do it.”
His poems woke me up because I knew
what work was. My grandfather, Curt Little, worked 20 years at a printer where
he cut holes through green Turnpike tickets. When the owner went out of
business, my grandfather lost his pension. I never heard him complain. My
father, Mike Nester, worked nights as a truck driver, dead-lifted 40-pound
boxes off the docks, rolled metal drums onto forklifts. My sister walked on his
back, cracking verterbae into place. Through high school, I worked at a car
wash, where I scrubbed white walls with wire brushes and dried off bumpers. I
didn’t have proper work boots or gloves. I put plastic bags over my sneakears
with rubber bands.
Philip Levine introduced the idea
to me t hat blue-collar work is worthy of making it
into a poem, of being poetic. Poetry was no longer just a rich person’s game. And
so when Afaa Weaver, who worked in a factory for 15 years before entering the
world of poetry, asked me, “What are you going to do with all these poems?” it changed
my world. I sat up straight. He suggested this absurd thing called creative
writing school.
***
As long as I can remember, I’ve had
a conflicted relationship with the word “mentor.” It suggests to me a
patrilineal passing of the torch or priestly rite of worship. I’m sure this
started for me when poetry took the place of faith in God. I was about 19, and
it was a welcome change. Still, I was skeptical of poetry. I wasn’t ready, to
paraphrase T.S. Eliot to ‘surrender wholly to the work.’
Back then I was a nervous wretch,
in most ways unmentorable; I was outgoing and social, but also insecure and
rude and still hurting from a father who left us. If I wasn’t writing poems
with empty driveways and union jackets left on the hanger, I was writing about
nosehair-picking. There was no time to be genteel; a poem had to reflect the
brute significance of the oppressed reality of the human spirit, what William
Carlos Williams calls the “human particulars.” My particulars didn’t involve
paintings, animals, or allusions to philosophy, which seemed to appear in every
poem I read in literary journals. I’m tired just explaining it to you now, but
back then, that was the credo.
I was needy. Sometimes, it was all
I could do to blurt out, all at once, my life story, so that Levine understood
me completely, knew why I was sitting in that chair completely, in that room,
with these poems, with him. That temptation to confess sat at the tip of my
tongue, lapsed Catholic that I was. At other times, I assumed he’d divine I was
part of his blue-collar tribe, that we shared this common drudgery between us.
The assumptions varied, but it
became evident that Levine just wanted to read and discuss our poems. He was
going to read poems, mark them with a pencil, underline words, cross out others.
And that, to me, is where the real mentorship began.
***
That first class, Levine addressed
a rumor about his teaching methods.
“You might’ve heard,” he said,
“some story where I tore up somebody’s poem in front of everybody, and this
made many people upset, including the writer of that poem. That’s not true.”
I’d heard the story, as had
everyone else, and we were surprised he met the story head-on. We knew Levine
was a tough customer, or at least had a different communication style, from,
say, Sharon Olds, who maintained a yogic calm as we picked each other’s poems
apart. I think some of us would have worn it like a badge of honor if Levine tore
up one of our poems; I know I would have.
It wasn’t all Kumbaya. Levine did
confront us in class.
“What was the greatest book of ‘New
York poetry’ ever written?” he asked us one night.
A pause hung in the air. My friend
Christopher Connelly sat across the table from me. He said one word under his
breath—“Lorca?”—so low it sounded like a cough.
“What was that?” he asked. “Did someone
say Lorca?”
Connelly later said he thought he
was wrong and should take back what he said. And just when he was about to, Levine
pounced.
“Right!” he said. “You are
absolutely right. Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet
in New York.”
This was a rare moment when someone
got the right anwswer, or had any answer. A class with Philip Levine was more
about finding the questions to ask.
***
Levine said he liked teaching at
NYU because we “didn’t act like we were the anointed.” This was true. Our group
of 12 were serious about work and gave each other, as we say, great feedback,
as great as any class I’d been in, before or since. There were no alliances or payback
pools, all of which I’ve seen and some I’ve participated in.
We were also not very sophisticated
in the ways of the po-biz. In the years after NYU, I wished we’d been debriefed
in navigating the confidence games every poet must play. I may sound like an
old man who walked barefoot uphill to school, but back in our day, our program
didn’t have much in the way of career advice besides a stack of Writer’s Chronicles and a bulletin board
for crappy contests. Writing programs are more adept at faking these things
now.
In recent years I have come to
think it is good we focused on our poems and poetry in that room. It was a far more
pure process, for one, to see our professor take each line of ours, pencil in
hand, and match each individual talent to a tradition. Besides, what were we
going to do, ask Philip Fucking Levine about what to put on cover letters, or how
many poems you send with a SASE to Kenyon
Review?
***
I am looking at a WordPerfect file
of poems I wrote that semester: 47 poems, along with 40 drafts of others. One,
“Parade,” a stanza-by-stanza imitation of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” swaps
Fats Domino’s “Careless Love” with Journey’s power ballad “Open Arms” and ends with
oversexed MTV videos instead of a family of skunks.
Another poem is so shamelessly
imitative of Levine’s I dare not mention its title, only that it involves
chalk, an homage to his “The Poem of Chalk,” and frying potatoes, an allusion
to his “The Simple Truth.” I know I was not the only one who cribbed words and
allusions to spark up an interest in the old man. Imagine collecting these
derivative poems from these souls week after week! Imagine the reticence
required not to say, Knock it off, brown-noser.
Stop imitating me, and write your own damn poems.
***
It is not uncommon for poets to
send work to teachers after the semester is over, to keep in touch. It doesn’t
make sense now, but back then I made a conscious decision not to do this. Levine
offered me encouragement and direction, some direct advice. We talked about
William Carlos Williams, about “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” and marriage.
I never attempted to keep up a correspondence
with Levine. I don’t think he would have wanted to, but that’s not the point. I’m
not sure what such a correspondence would have consisted of. Would I have kept
on sending him poems, and he’d offer mild encouragement? It didn’t make sense,
at least to me, to do such a thing, and to be honest, I saw it as kissing up or
striving. Other people don’t feel that way, I know, but back then, that’s how
it felt. There were people who bragged about “still talking” to their old
teachers. Or maybe they weren’t bragging. Maybe these things simply happen.
Regardless, my thought on this matter was always, and still is: Why bother
them?
I worked as a secretary at NYU
after graduate school, and occasionally I would see Levine in the gym locker
room. There he was, Philip Levine, taking off his pants, or putting his towel in
a gym bag. I think he swam. I did say hello to him once. It was awkward. We
were both half-naked. He was nice, but I don’t think he remembered me, or
remembered me in the way I would have wanted him to, which would have been as
some poetic genius. It didn’t matter. We had spent our time together and that time
was over. I read his poems, he read mine, and then we got back to work doing
what we did before.
***
Although I have had many excellent
teachers in my lifetime, I never thought I had enjoyed the benefits of having a
mentor. My thoughts on these matters have changed. Maybe it’s because I am now
a father twice over. Maybe I’ve gotten soft in middle age. What I’ve learned is
it’s best to acknowledge one’s mentors, and, two decades later, that’s better than
not doing anything at all. I look back with a terrible regret for not being
open to having mentors or acknowledging them. I think of Afaa Weaver, my first
mentor, as well as Philip Levine, because of their work backgrounds, sure; but
also, frankly, that they take on a paternal glow in my rear-view mirror. They feel
like my fathers.
I think back to years beneath that
goddamn car wash blower, how I could scream along with it and no one could hear
me. How it’s muffled my hearing to this day. Whenever I shift one foot to
another, I know I don’t have to limp around anymore. I can stand straight up.
