Poet Philip Levine

For kids attending public schools in the city, the last day of school is here. Although it's been over 50 years since he was in school, WNYC poet in residence Phil Levine remembers vividly what it feels like to be heading into summer.

Levine: One of the great joys of the year when I was a kid... was the arrival of June and the knowledge that quite soon school would be over and I would be left to my own devices to make mischief, or discover things in the city, wander where i wanted... I yearned for summer and then, when it came, this is what I was released from (as Theodre Roethke tells us in his astonishing poem). The poem is called "Doler". Sadness. Doler.

Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

-Theodore Roethke

Well, summer is here and that's over with. Do the best you can children and forget about September!

For more from WNYC's Poet in Residence, click here.

Poetry Links

Theodore Roethke
from Poetry Exhibits

William Matthews LINKS
from Poets.org

Mingus at the Half Note is in a WIlliams' Collection, Time & Money: New Poems (1995)

Read an interview with Matthews from the Atlantic Monthly
It was the last interview conducted with him before his sudden death (of a heart attack,) on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, at his home in New York City.

The Alun Lewis Page
For information on Alun Lewis
War Poetry
Alun Lewis' War Poems
Alfred A Knopf on Philip Levine
Information on many of Levine's books
Galway Kinnell Reads Walt Whitman
Kinnell reads Whitman's "To The States" and comments on it
Philip Levine on the Internet Poetry Archive.
Read Levine's poetry and listen to Levine read his poetry
The Leonard Lopate Show: Poetry Magazine
Hear Mr. Lopate talk about the 100 million-dollar donation from Ruth Lilly to Poetry Magazine
The Next Big Thing: Poetry Lives
Alice Quinn, poetry editor for the New Yorker and executive director of the Poetry Society of America, sorts through some entries to the Poetry in Motion Contest
e-poets Network Book of Voices
a list of poets and poems from the Chicago area-- you can listen to poets read their work
The Poetry Project
is at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, since 1966
Bartleby.com
A collection of books online, including a bounty of verse
An Audible Anthology
A collection of poems printed in the Atlantic Montly to read or listen to
Gumball Poetry
It's a zine, it's a website, it's a gumball machine that dispenses poetry!

A selection of Philip Levine's books

A New Selected Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Simple Truth
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Mercy
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
What Work Is: Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com