Analysis of The Poem What Work Is by Philip Levine

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1928, poet Laureate Phillip Levine’s work traverses a wide range of diction and syntax, while he epitomizes dark, brooding, and grim poetry. Levine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He has been noted by some that in his poetry there is “a recurring specificity of time (days, months, years) and of place”(The Atlantic, interview 2000) having been deemed to have the past, present, and future in his poems all at once. In 1999, Phillip Levine told an Atlantic interviewer after being asked about performance versus poetry, where he said, “I don't think that performance has helped American poetry. I really don't. I think a number of American poets have almost ruined their careers by going out and getting that kind of attention -- going from campus to campus and being sort of awe-inspiring for an hour and a half, and feeding on the adulation.” (Atlantic, 1999). Over the next 5 years Phillip worked on his new collection The Mercy that is dedicated to his mothers passing at ninety-four. So what has this “dark and grim poet”, this time mixing, and mysterious poet, contributed to American poetry? He has brought American poetry into the realm of the surreal, the forbidden-which is questioning others tried and true poetry methods, and formulating his own. His own backbreaking work and unemployment difficulties he faced in Detroit are the quintessence of success in lots of his work. Phillip Levine has successfully noted that for the process of poetry, it essentially must be being alone, and not over exaggerating the typical performance. This process both defines his work, why he does it, and has definitely brought a new dimension to postmodern American poetr...

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