For someone unread in poetry, a poet perishing on Valentine’s Day would seem incredibly ironic. Of course, this is an immature sense of irony, and could only be taken seriously by someone only acquainted with the carpe diem tradition and romantic verse. As serious poetry readers know, poetry often captures the ugliest facets of our existence and helps to bring them to our awareness to wrangle with. While poems can be written beautifully, they need not necessarily be on beautiful or welcoming subjects.
Former poet laureate Philip Levine, who perished in Fresno, Calif. on Feb. 14, was a poet most known for dealing with the callous and unsavory aspects of American capitalism and it’s degrading effects on workers.
This is most palpable in a favorite of his titled “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit,” when an anonymous narrator stands outside an empty factory that has gone out of out of business. Levine, who was raised in Detroit, began working in car factories at 14 up to when he unofficially attended the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, had ample experience of factory life. He wrote, “The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,/ An iron authority against the snow,/ And this grey monument to common sense/ Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands, Of protest, men in league, and of the slow/ Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.”
The “common sense” represented by the factory isn’t a praiseworthy common sense used in the vernacular; it’s a chide. It speaks of the unthinking institution of the factory responsible for the “slow/ Corrosion of their minds.” And it’s still this unconscious force that animates the factory in the mind of the narrator.
He ends the poem in the same pathos: “The cast iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes/ Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought/ And estimates the loss of human power,/ Experience and slow, the loss of years,/ The gradual decay of dignity./ Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;/ Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears/ Which might have served to grind their eulogy.”
The narrator who sees the lifeless factory standing at a halt, begins to measure “the loss of human power,” the loss of freedom, individuality and the capacity for creativity in self-directed labor. This constant thwarting of the will, “the gradual decay of dignity,” that is the life blood of the factory, lead the workers into a near meaningless death where nothing they’ve created supersedes the mechanical process of decay, “the rusted gears.” Unlike, for example, the creative work of a studied poet that last immemorial.
I think Philip Levine’s poetry is of this character. His work will not be forgotten like the outputs of the workers who toiled out of the factory. He will be a poet that is loved and revered for as long as poetry is read.
