Philip Levine Is Awarded $100,000 Poetry Prize By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER Philip Levine, the former United States poet laureate who spent his early years writing verse between shifts as a Detroit autoworker, has been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement. Philip Levine in 2011. Jim Wilson/The New York Times Philip Levine in 2011. The prize, which comes with a $100,000 award, is given annually for “outstanding and proven mastery of the art of poetry.” Mr. Levine’s collections include “What Work Is,” which won the 1991 National Book Award; “The Simple Truth,” which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize; and, in 2009, “News of the World.” In an essay quoted on the academy’s Web site, Mr. Levine, now 85, described the impulse to put his experiences on the assembly line into verse. “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,” he wrote. “I thought too 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.”
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 17:07:07 +0000
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