Born in Detroit, Mich., on Jan. 10, 1928, [Philip] Levine received degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and in 1957 was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. As a student, he worked a number of industrial jobs at Detroit’s auto-manufacturing plants, including Detroit Transmission””a branch of Cadillac””and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory. Levine has said about writing poems in his mid-20s during his factory days: “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””or at least the part my work played in it””I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”
–from the announcement that the Librarian of Congress has appointed Philip Levine Poet Laureate (my emphasis)