"Not This Pig," Says Our New Poet Laureate

In celebration of Philip Levine, poet of the factory and slaughterhouse.

August 10, 2011 at 8:21PM by Dan Shapley | comment

I can't let a long day at work pass without celebrating the naming of Philip Levine as our new Poet Laureate. He's one of my favorite poets, and even though I work in a cluttered cubicle and not a factory, I think he'd appreciate my too-late night at the office tonight, and maybe even this spare tribute. Levine is, after all, a poet — sometimes bitter, always honest — of Detroit, of the blue-collar worker, and he's one of my favorites.

Just this weekend I had to relocate a book shelf to make way for the baby that's soon to be joining us in the house, and in the process had to make some hard decisions about which books to keep, and which to trade in at the used book store or store in a box in the attic. The Levine poems stayed. My son might need them some day.

For those of you who don't know his poetry, I urge you to buy his books of course. (Start with New Selected Poems and What Work Is, both from 1992.) But because poetry is a spoken art first, anyway, you can get more than a taste at the Poetry Foundation's website, which features no fewer than 10 audio recordings of Levine reading is work, including his classic "What Work Is". For The Daily Green readers, though, you can't do better than to start with "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives", in which he embodies a hog going to slaughter "suffering the consumers who won't meet their steady eyes for fear they could see," and evokes our own desire for dignity and defiance against mortality. The last line is one of those lines that makes you ... well, at the very least, it makes you shut down your computer, rise from your cubicle, and head out.

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