Working Class Poetry by a Working Class Poet

Former U.S Poet Laureate, Philip Levine: “A Voice For the Voiceless” by Charles Simic (New York Review of Books)

Philip Levine never forgot the past. He was born in 1928 and grew up in Detroit when that city was a car-manufacturing capital and the global symbol of the ambition and ingenuity of American industry. With factories operating around the clock and its railyards busy with freight trains hauling in raw materials that were unloaded into trucks at all hours, the city’s frenzied activity required a huge labor force. They’d hire anybody, people used to say. And they did. Midwesterners, poor whites from Appalachia, African-Americans from the rural South, and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe worked side by side on assembly lines, in stamping and tool-and-die plants, foundries, and smaller plants that made everything cars needed from spark plugs to hood ornaments. Ford Motor’s enormous Rouge complex in Dearborn, a self-contained industrial city, employed almost 100,000 people at its peak. It could convert hundreds of parts into a finished product in twenty-eight hours.

Detroit may have resembled other grimy cities in the industrial heartland, but what emerged out of its dirt and smoke was a shiny car with a sleek hood and a noiseless engine sought after by millions of people. In some parts of this now shrunken city, the abandoned factories and boarded-sup houses that have no visitors in recent years evoke a lost world. In an essay in My Lost Poets about a trip to his former hometown, Levine describes his astonishment on discovering that the neighborhoods where he once lived and worked had been reduced to miles of mostly vacant lots. “Nothing lasts” is how an old black man he got to talking to while passing by his garden summed up their generation’s experience of this country.

In that once-bustling city, Levine’s father owned a used auto parts business with his maternal grandfather. Though an immigrant from tsarist Russia and a deserter from the British army during World War I, he prospered in America. Just as he and his family were starting to think of themselves as middle-class, he died suddenly. Philip, who was the second of three sons and the first of identical twins, was five years old at the time. His mother, who like his father came from an immigrant Jewish family, had no choice but to go to work, starting as a stenographer and eventually becoming an office manager. Although she always provided for the family, they were forced to move from the house where they lived to a series of ever-smaller apartments. Worry about money and the lack of it, he said, became the main topic of their conversations at mealtime.

From the age of fourteen until he graduated from high school in 1946, Levine worked summers and after school, first at part-time jobs in the neighborhood and then in factories. Even after he got his bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in 1950, he continued working the same type of jobs. As his witty mother used to joke, “Philip set out to prove there is social mobility in America, so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as an adult joined the working class.”