First, here’s part of an interview from the US National Book Foundation Archives conducted by Diane Osen.
“Born in Detroit, Michigan on January 10, 1928, two-time National Book Award winner Philip Levine first began composing poetry at the age of 14, inspired by the flowering of a mock orange bush he had purchased with money he had earned washing windows.
“’I looked on the work my hands had wrought’, he recalled later, ‘then I said in my heart, as it happened to the gardener, so it happened to me, for we all go into one place; we are all earth and return to earth. The dark was everywhere, and as my voice went out I was sure it reached the edges of creation’.”
Unsurprisingly, in 1954 Levine went on to marry Frances Artley - a gardener! The couple had three children but Levine dedicated his professional life to writing -
"for people for whom there is no poetry ... the people I grew up with who brothered, sistered, fathered, and mothered me and lived and worked beside me. Their presence seemed utterly lacking in the poetry I inherited at age 20, so I've spent the last 40-some years trying to add to our poetry what wasn't there”.
Levine, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his collection The Simple Truth, served as US poet laureate 2011-2012 and died in Fresno, California on Saturday aged 87.
I found the poem below published in a blog by Michael Schiavo in August 2004.
“The Horse
“They spoke of the horse alive
without skin, naked, hairless,
without eyes and ears, searching
for the stable boy’s caress.
Shoot it, someone said, but they
let him go on colliding with
tattered walls, butting his long
skull to pulp, finding no path
where iron fences corkscrewed in
the street and bicycles turned
like question marks.“Some fled and
some sat down. The river burned
all that day and into the
night, the stones sighed a moment
and were still, and the shadow
of a man’s hand entered
a leaf.“The white horse never
returned, and later they found
the stable boy, his back crushed
by a hoof, his mouth opened
around a cry that no one heard.“They spoke of the horse again
and again; their mouths opened
like the gills of a fish caught
above water.“Mountain flowers
burst from the red clay walls, and
they said a new life was here.
Raw grass sprouted from the cobbles
like hair from a deafened ear.
The horse would never return.“There had been no horse. I could
tell from the way they walked
testing the ground for some cold
that the rage had gone out of
their bones in one mad dance”.
© Natalie Wood (15 February 2015)
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