The Simple Truth: Poems (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Philip Levine writes in the title poem of this collection: "Some things/you know all your life. They are so simple and true/they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,/they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,/the glass of water, the absence of light gathering/ in the shadows of picture frames, they must be/ naked and alone, they must stand for themselves."These lines capture many of the themes of this Pulitzer-prize winning book. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple, "naked and alone". They generally involve an incident or person, recollected by the poet from his past. The incident is recounted in bare unrhymed lines, without hyperbole or judgment. We are encouraged to see the incident, as we see the still life reproduced on the cover of the volume and to let it "stand for itself". The poems are elegaic in tone and the effect of the memory is generally one of deep sadness.Many of the poems have a deliberately pictorial quality, as reflected in their titles, that remind one of a photo or of a painting in a museum. In many cases, the reader is tempted to conceive in the mind's eye a painting to accompany the poem. This is true, particularly, as the book progresses into its final section with its descriptions of the poet's mother ("My Mother with Purse, the Summer they Murdered the Spanish Poet"), father ("My Father with Cigarette Twelve Years before the Nazis could Break his Heart"), and others ("Edward Lieberman, Entrepreneur, four years after the Burnings on Okinawa") One of the poems of the collection is title simply "Photography". Ironically, this poem is less pictorial than many others. It relates a sad incident from the poet's childhood involving his Aunt, and others, and focuses on the ravages of time and memory.The poems also focus on the role imagination plays in constituting our reality. The first poem of the collection "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane" relates a meeting between these two romantic 20th Century poets and alludes to Crane's apparent suicide in jumping from a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York. Crane's tragic but romantic death is juxtaposed with the vision coming "to an ordinary man staring/ at a filthy river" as he contemplates not only Crane and Lorca but his son falling to his death "from/the roof of a building he works on." With a voice of irony, the poet asks us to "bless the imagination. It gives/ us the myths we live by. Let's bless/ the visionary power of the human-- the only animal that's got it--"These poems have a multi-layered simplicity realized through an understated voice of sadness and illuminated by imagination.

Philip Levine once vowed to be the voice of the poor, the simple, those without voice--a vow he has not broken in his sixty-plus years of writing poetry. In 1995, Levine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection of poems, "the Simple Truth". That prize would mean less to him than the knowledge that thousands of people have found enjoyment and comfort from reading his poems--that from his work, they came to better understand our common vulnerabilty to the state of being human. Levine's poems are an echo of the emotions trapped in the reader's heart; they are a friendly voice giving substance to what has been lived, but not spoken. Levine's title poem "The Simple Truth" invites the reader to recognize and celebrate the stark beauty of simple things. Each poem in this collection builds on the other to introduce the reader to the poet, who in turn introduces readers to perfect poetic expression, so personal that they will stop and say "Yes!! That IS how it is!" Anyone who cannot relate to or reconginze themself in at least half of the poems in this fine book, have not read it. That's "the simple truth."

Levine's poetry often moves me. In my opinion, this is his best book. His poems strike me as being very honest; they make me accept the complicated mess of joys and disappointments that it means to be human. The title poem, "The Simple Truth," explains exactly what I mean (and in a better way than I'm doing here). Please read this book.

Poetry, to many, brings to mind names like Shakespeare, Eliot, Milton, Yeats--figures of artistic genius who crafted intricate texts laden with complex (sometimes private) imagery and embodied in a nearly-inaccessible form. To them, the interpretation of poetry is best left to career academics who spend lifetimes working out such complex systems of words and images. Philip Levine to the rescue! That is, for those resigned to avoid poetry he rescues the immense pleasure it is capable of giving regardless of literary background. His prosaic verse-columns give themselves up to the reader with no fight, laying bare and accessible the truth Levine hopes to convey. Setting is given usually within the first line, as Levine constructs an everyday scene animated with very human characters who live life day by day--trying to make it from this one to the next. From this the poem (often a narrative) builds piece by piece using bits of conversation, natural observations, personal thoughts, and other snippets of life through whatever drama is present to end as simply as it started--sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a raised voice, but always with simplicity. Without complex formal elements, Levine's poems are forced to rely on their simplicity, their commonality for what is not an ornate beauty but a simple one. Such verse shows its Americanness with every word, with every image as it articulates simply the truth it lays open--there for the taking. In The Simple Truth is an artist at the zenith of his poetic genius--an artist who is, at the same time, true to his self and to his roots as an American. This is what poetry should be and is meant to be.