In Honor of Philip Levine 1928–2015

Our Valley Philip Levine

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn’t your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Philip Levine was born and raised in Detroit. He was 14 when he began working in auto factories, a formative experience that would inspire his work even after he left Detroit in the 1950s to pursue writing. With a BA degree from Wayne State, he began attending writing workshops at the University of Iowa, as an unregistered student, in 1953. He earned an MFA from the school in 1957. His first book of poetry, "On the Edge," was published in 1961.

Levine served as poet laureate from 2011 to 2012. He won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Simple Truth" in 1995 and two National Book Awards for "What Work Is" (1991) and "Ashes: Poems New and Old" (1980).

He taught at the University of California, Irvine, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Tufts.