Philip Levine

_ the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. _ Excerpt from the poem __he Mercy

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life__r at least the part my work played in it__ could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.