This October, Philip Levine will become the 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding W. S. Merwin. In the words of Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, Mr. Levine “is one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’ — about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”
In poetry, the Detroit native and son of Russian Jewish emigrants found “a voice within myself that I didn’t know was there. A joy in my being, in creation, in the physical world that surrounded me.”
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