Public Employee Press

Connecting poetry and working-class Americans

Philip Levine, renowned for his poems about working-class life, became U.S. poet laureate in August. Announcing the honor, Librarian of Congress James Billington said Levine had shown him "a whole new world I hadn't connected to poetry before. He's the laureate of the industrial heartland."

People who know what it's like to punch a time clock, wait on line with other laid-off workers in hopes of a job and barely get by inhabit Levine's award-winning book, "What Work Is."

In "Coming Home from the Post Office," he writes: "When I closed/my eyes I saw cards, letters,/small packages, each bearing/a particular name and some/burden of grief or tidings/of loss. Names like my own/passed moment by moment/into the gray sacks that slumped/open mouthed."

His "Among Children" is a masterpiece that captures the future of the children of Flint, Mich., toiling like their parents: "How dear the gift of laughter in the face/of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings/without coffee and oranges, the long lines/of mothers in old coats waiting silently/where the gates have closed."

In "Smoke" he asks, "Why/is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work./Work was something that thrived on fire, that without/fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life."

Born and raised in Detroit, Levine also identifies with his time in Brooklyn. Now that manufacturing in America is an endangered species, and even postal workers and public employees are threatened with extinction, the nation has a poet laureate who has spent his life writing about ordinary working people. Look for his books and find your own lives in their pages.

"What Work Is" is available for members in the DC 37 Ed Fund Library, Room 211.

—Jane LaTour