Dear judih:
Thanks for your finely wrought poem, for its power and for its clarity.
I append to this brief message a poem by Philip Levine, a Jewish-American poet whom I feel is one of the finest American poets of the twentieth ( and now, 21st) century.
Philip Levine lives in Fresno, California, a singularly unpromising location for a poet.
But PL has made it his world, and made a world within it. I have heard him read poems about Fresno and its environs that would make your hair stand on end, they are so beautiful.
He often writes on the subject of work, of hard times, of his hard childhood and his love for his brother, for hard-time adventurers and laborers, for boxers, for those who spend their lives getting pounded.
Here is a link to some other poems by Philip Levine, but buy his collection, "Ashes", if you can, and read the amazing poem of that name, "Ashes", contained therein. It treats of the farm laborers in the Fresno area, the San Joaquin Valley. It is probably the most powerful poem on labor and laborers ( a neglected subject) I have ever read.
Information on Philip Levine:
(paste)
Philip Levine
Philip Levine, a Jewish American poet, was born in 1928 in Detriot, Michigan. Growing up, his parents told him he was Spanish; "Why my parents, both born in a little shtetl in western Russia, would tell me this, I have no idea. But it may have had something to do with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492." As a youth, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin. He was educated at Wayne University, now Wayne State University, and held a series of industrial jobs before he left Detroit. He was an anarchist who claimed that "property is theft" until he bought his first house. He eventually settled in Fresno, California to teach and write.
Levine's poetry frequently features animals, the factory workers of Detroit and the revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War. In 1995 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, one of his many awards.
Levine's best known poem is probably "They Feed They Lion" (1972). The title is a pun ("lion" = "lying"). "They" may refer to the rich men who parasitically prey on the honest-working lower class and cynically claim to be helping the downtrodden. On the other hand, "they" may refer to workers who are getting "fed up" and are "lying in wait" for their opportunity to strike back.
Another one of his popular poems is "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives" (1968). Written from the point of view of an unperturbed pig facing slaughter, it mixes human and animal behavior to comical effect. In the swine's opinion, a human about to be butchered would lack his iron control, and would instead "squeal and shit like a new housewife discovering television." The pig may be a symbol for the exploited worker who is unafraid to die since he has nothing else to lose...or it might just be a pig.
Some of Levine's other poems include "Belle Isle, 1949," "The Horse," "Rain Downriver," "Saturday Sweeping," "Sweet Will," "What Work Is" and "You Can Have It."
( more poems by Philip Levine:)
http://capa.conncoll.edu/levine.sweetwill.htm
(still more--- earlier poems)
http://www.poemhunter.com/philip-levine/poet-8952/
FINALLY--- a poem about work by Philip Levine:
What Work Is
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 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. 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.
Good reading,
Zlatko
(N.)
