Philip Levine: Lake Forest

from “Ode for Mrs. William Settle”

In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
17 years ago in a high school class
in Providence. She sighs, and the sigh
smells of mouth wash and tobacco.
If she were writing by candlelight
she would now be in the dark, for the man
she’s about to address in her odd prose
had a life span of 125th of a second
in the eye of a Nikon and then he
politely asked the photographer to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding…

About the Author

Philip Levine

Prize winner, 1995

Philip Levine was born and raised in industrial Detroit, where he began working in the auto factories at the age of 14. As a young boy in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he was fascinated by the events of the Spanish Civil War. Levine earned his BA from Wayne State University in 1950 and began attending writing workshops at the University of Iowa, as an unregistered student, in 1953. He took classes with Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and would later pay tribute to Berryman’s teaching influence on his development as a poet. Levine officially earned an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1957, and later that year won a Jones Fellowship at Stanford University. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching at the California State University, Fresno, where he would remain until 1992. Levine also taught at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Tufts. The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.