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Ask poets where their poems come from, and
you will get as wide a range of answers as
there are poems. For some, the ideas
start to flow when simple experience becomes
complicated by the natural arrival of richly
evocative association patterns.
For others, it starts with an ambiguous event
which suggests some ironic
possibilities. Some poets start with an
emotion, some with a sound or smell, some
with a word.
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Many poets, perhaps most, eventually get
around to mentioning the power of dreams in
the creative process. Anthony
Hecht, Edward Hirsch, Maxine Kumin, Denise
Levertov, Philip Levine, and Richard Wilbur,
amongst many others, attribute to the
operation of the unconscious the unique
ability to deepen and extend their
work. It feels to them as if
poetry and dreams are parallel languages
which bespeak compressed emotional-laden
messages across confused seas of
experience. In dreams, as in
poetry, ideas take on a physical
manifestation. They assume symbolic
significance and give rise to deep
imagery. Sometimes the best poems
emerge from what seems at first to be pure
ambiguity. In the midst of all
this chaos, a clear shining vision arises
that compels the words off the tip of the
pen.
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It makes sense that there might be a
correlation between dreams and poems.
Both create representations of truth based on
deeply-held emotions. Many poets
write in images, because their dreams begin
as pictures which slowly reveal themselves as
feelings in disguise as people, objects, or
events. Some people dream in pictures,
some in color.
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Sometimes, I dream in words. The sound
of the word floats around in my dreams like a
pure idea. Each word takes on phrases
as it floats through an emotional soup and
slowly it turns into whole sentences, with
rhythms and even rhymes attaching themselves
along the way. Not infrequently,
I wake up with entire poems completely
written sitting at the tip of my conscious
mind. This usually follows a period
during which I have been thinking about
writing a poem on a certain subject. It
takes the power of dreams to assemble it for
me. Over the years, I have learned to
keep a pen and paper by my bed so I can
capture these words exactly as I strike
consciousness. Any interruption can jar
my mind enough that the whole poem
evaporates.
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In a 1998 essay later published in a book
entitled Night Errands: How Poets Use
Dreams, edited by Roderick Townley,
Philip Levine reported having similar
experiences. He was reading Thomas
Hardy day and night to try to break the
thrall Hart Crane had over his style.
It was going badly until one morning he woke
up with a whole new poem which he composed in
his sleep, a perfect little redaction of
Thomas Hardys essence. The
poem was not one of his best, but the method
stuck.
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The importance of dreams in the construction
of poetry is not so hard to understand
really. We all need the help of our
unconscious minds to overcome the settled
tendencies of our conscious minds to resist
necessary new directions. Levine
was trying to find a more authentic voice for
his poetry and needed the power of his
subconscious mind to help him discover what
was genuinely his own.
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Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit to a
working class family. His father
died when he was five, and his mother worked
a full-time job to support her family.
Levine was an ungovernable child, who roamed
the streets and learned the ways of the world
from the bottom of the social ladder.
His family is Jewish, and at age 14, he
discovered that Detroit could be the
most anti-Semitic city west of
Munich. He attended public
schools and Wayne University, which was later
renamed Wayne State University. He
envisioned himself a tiny Walt Whitman
going among powerful, uneducated
people. When he
graduated, he yearned to write poetry, but
economic realities forced him into the auto
factories and onto the line.
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He wondered how he could possibly compete
writing odd scraps of poems in stolen moments
with the pampered elite of the Ivy Leagues
who had nothing better to do than critique
each others ideas and bounce their
rough drafts off the best minds in the
nation. So, he decided to run
away and learn from the best at the Ames
Writing Center at the University of
Iowa. When his scholarship fell
through, he went anyway and just dodged his
professors questions about why his name
never appeared on the official list of
students. He went on through a number of fine
teachers to study Shakespeare, W. H. Auden,
and William Carlos Williams.
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At one point, he had a dream in which he
received a phone call for help from an old
Detroit buddy. He was all but begging
him for an invitation to visit, but Levine
steadfastly refused. This dream
haunted him for years, almost ten years,
until he came to realize that the work-a-day
world he hated in Detroit was really his
natural carrot patch. In
his rush to be accepted by his fellow poets,
he had drifted away from the working men he
admired and knew.
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I felt I had betrayed him, Levine
recalled of his imaginary caller in the dream
in an interview with Guy Shahar, editor of The
Cortland Review. It
probably was a warning that I should welcome
back into myself all those people that had
meant so much to me, and write about
them. He did and it mattered.
The irony is, going to work every day
became the subject of probably my best
poetry. Here is an example.
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The Two
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- When he gets off work at
Packard, they meet
- outside a diner on Grand
Boulevard. He's tired,
- a bit depressed, and
smelling the exhaustion
- on his own breath, he
kisses her carefully
- on her left cheek. Early
April, and the weather
- has not decided if this is
spring, winter, or what.
- The two gaze upwards at
the sky which gives
- nothing away: the low
clouds break here and there
- and let in tiny slices of
a pure blue heaven.
- The day is like us, she
thinks; it hasn't decided
- what to become. The
traffic light at Linwood
- goes from red to green
and the trucks start up,
- so that when he says,
"Would you like to eat?"
- she hears a jumble of
words that mean nothing,
- though spiced with things
she cannot believe,
- "wooden Jew"
and "lucky meat." He's been up
- late, she thinks, he's
tired of the job, perhaps tired
- of their morning meetings,
but when he bows
- from the waist and holds
the door open
- for her to enter the
diner, and the thick
- odor of bacon frying and
new potatoes
- greets them both, and
taking heart she enters
- to peer through the thick
cloud of tobacco smoke
- to see if "their
booth" is available.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote
that there were no
- second acts in America,
but he knew neither
- this man nor this woman
and no one else
- like them unless he
stayed late at the office
- to test his famous one
liner, "We keep you clean
- Muscatine," on the
woman emptying
- his waste basket.
Fitzgerald never wrote
- with someone present,
except for this woman
- in a gray uniform whose
comings and goings
- went unnoticed even on
those December evenings
- she worked late while the
snow fell silently
- on the window sills and
the new fluorescent lights
- blinked on and off. Get
back to the two, you say.
- Not who ordered poached
eggs, who ordered
- only toast and coffee,
who shared the bacon
- with the other, but what
became of the two
- when this poem ended,
whose arms held whom,
- who first said "I
love you" and truly meant it,
- and who misunderstood the
words, so longed
- for, and yet still so
unexpected, and began
- suddenly to scream and
curse until the waitress
- asked them both to leave.
The Packard plant closed
- years before I left
Detroit, the diner was burned
- to the ground in '67, two
years before my oldest son
- fled to Sweden to escape
the American dream.
- "And the
lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about
lovers.
- Take a look. Clouds,
trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
- a wooden shoe, East
Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
- of frying bacon, the chaos
of language, the spices
- of spent breath after
eight hours of night work.
- Can you hear all I feared
and never dared to write?
- Why the two are more real
than either you or me,
- why I never returned to
keep them in my life,
- how little I now mean to
myself or anyone else,
- what any of this could
mean, where you found
- the patience to endure
these truths and confessions?
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In 1953, Levine was back in Detroit working
in a grease shop with a tall, thin black man
named Lemon Still Jr. They were sorting
out defective parts and stuffing them into
bags marked Detroit Municipal
Zoo. Just for fun, Lemon
said They feed they lion they meal in
they sacks. He was just
playing around with words, but the sentence
stuck in Levines mind.
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In a dream sometime later, he recounts seeing
himself guarding the perimeter of the grease
shop, which was being menaced by angry male
teenagers. Keeping them at bay was a
lion and an
elephant.
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Again sometime later, he attended a wedding
with lots of drinking and dancing. That
night he slept until six in the
morning. When he awoke, the whole poem
came into his mind at once. He
did not write it out immediately, but let it
ruminate in his mind for two more
days.
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On Tuesday, he arose early. This
time, the poem was ready. He wrote the
whole thing out at once. Only the first
lines of the final stanza needed subsequent
revisions.
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They Feed They Lion
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- Out of
burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
- Out of
black bean and wet slate bread,
- Out of
the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
- Out of
creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden
dollies,
- They
Lion grow.
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- Out of
the gray hills
- Of
industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus
ride,
- West
Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried
aunties,
- Mothers
hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
- Out of
the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles'
to stretch,
- They
Lion grow.
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- Earth
is eating trees, fence posts,
- Gutted
cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
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"Come home, Come home!" From pig
balls,
- From
the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
- From
the furred ear and the full jowl come
- The
repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
- They
Lion grow.
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- From
the sweet glues of the trotters
- Come
the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full
flower
- Of the
hams the thorax of caves,
- From
"Bow Down" come "Rise
Up,"
- Come
they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
- The
grained arm that pulls the hands,
- They
Lion grow.
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- From my
five arms and all my hands,
- From
all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
- From my
car passing under the stars,
- They
Lion, from my children inherit,
- From
the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
- From
they sack and they belly opened
- And all
that was hidden burning on the oil-stained
earth
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They feed they Lion and he
comes.
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Knowing some of the sources of the imagery of
the poem doesnt exactly explain it, but
it puts us in the right direction. You
feel the anger of the man still saddled with
boys work. You feel the anger
against his industry which rapes and
desecrates the land, its trees, and
animals. You feel that the lion is
growing like Blakes tyger
into something fearful and
vengeful. A very pissed-off
Mother Nature is rising up. She has
sucked all the rage from the gang of jeering
teenagers that appeared in his dream and
transformed it into a five armed beast,
drooling and showing its fangs with an open
belly.
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This is not a picture poem or a sound poem,
exactly, but a direct transcription of Philip
Levines most deeply held
emotions. In The Cortland
Review interview, Levine confessed that
he often felt in childhood like an
orphan. His father died young; his
mother was never around. I have a
sense that many Americans, especially those
like me with European or foreign parents,
feel they have to invent their families just
as they have to invent
themselves. What is a hog
belly, but bacon. To bring home the
bacon one has to kill a perfectly innocent
pig.
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In They Feed They Lion we get the
sense that Levine is finally casting off his
teachers, and his favorite poets, and
embracing his own emotional and cultural past
to create a unique language which only he
fully understands. However much
you want to blame this poem for not making
sense of itself for us, it does at least have
the merit of being 100% genuine Philip
Levine. In the cool aftermath,
Levine went back to writing poems other
people could read more easily, but from this
point on, he knew in his own heart --
what it meant to be Philip Levine in print.
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That lesson he never lost, and its not
a bad one for any of us to try to
achieve. Dreams work differently
for different poets. Today, Levine
confesses that he feels lucky that he dreams
almost every night. For a poet
that is the emotional equivalent of having a
permanently assigned chair in the Library of
Congress Reading
Room. It may be more
important than all the research in the world,
a deeper source of inspiration than a
photographic memory, a better listening post
than all the Ivy League classrooms in New
England -- which he so much coveted.
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In 1995, Philip Levine was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In his
poem Salt and Oil" we glimpse why.
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[This] . . . is a moment
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in the daily life of the world,
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a moment that will pass into
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the unwritten biography
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of your city or my city
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unless it is frozen into the fine print
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of our eyes. . . .
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