Philip Levine

Continuing the theme of my J.G. Ballard post, Philip Levine (my favorite poet) talks to NPR's Marketplace about how working on an assembly line prepared him for his long career in poetry.

At the time that I was doing it, I thought this will prevent me from becoming a poet. I will never have the time or the energy to write poetry because it was sapping to me to such a degree. And later on, when I was in my 40s, I realized, no Phil, that was the school you went to. And my whole attitude toward those years changed, so there was a way in which I realized that I had had an irreplaceable experience of brotherhood and sisterhood in those years that I was an industrial worker. And I wouldn't give them up for anything.

Levine also reads his poem "What Work Is." Quite good.