Philip Levine Poems Quotations

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.

In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.