Thanks to the online digital archive of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, you can listen to a recording of former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine reading his early poetry. The link below will take you to their website.

Philip Levine Reading from On The Edge (February 20, 1962)

Levine’s early work is more formal than the poems for which he is mostly remembered. These poems are written in rhyme and meter or syllabics. The recording is a fascinating listen. I’ve included the text for a few of the poems below.

The Drunkard

from St. Ambrose

He fears the tiger standing in his way.
The tiger takes its time, it smiles and growls.
Like moons, the two blank eyes tug at his bowels.
“God help me now,” is all that he can say.

“God help me now, how close I’ve come to God.
To love and to be loved, I’ve drunk for love.
Send me the faith of Paul, or send a dove.”
The tiger hears and stiffens like a rod.

At last the tiger leaps, and when it hits
A putrid surf breaks in the drunkard’s soul.
The tiger, done, returns to its patrol.
The world takes up its trades; the man his wits,
And, bottom up, he mumbles from the deep,
“Life was a dream, Oh, may this death be sleep.”

On The Edge

My name is Edgar Poe and I was born
In 1928 in Michigan.
Nobody gave a damn. The gruel I ate
Kept me alive, nothing kept me warm,
But I grew up, almost to five foot ten,
And nothing in the world can change my weight.

I have been watching you these many years,
There in the office, pencil poised and ready,
Or on the highway when you went ahead.
I did not write; I watched you watch the stars
Believing that the wheel of fate was steady;
I saw you rise from love and go to bed;

I heard you lie, even to your daughter.
I did not write, for I am Edgar Poe,
Edgar the mad one, silly, drunk, unwise,
But Edgar waiting on the edge of laughter,
And there is nothing that he does not know
Whose page is blanker than the raining skies.

My Poets

One was put in the lockup
in Toledo, Ohio
for ever and ever. One
took up country banjo
and teamed with an over-sexed
inarticulate midget
on harmonica. One writes
from Memphis that the whole weight
of the South is killing him
and the gangrenous Baptists
won’t let him piss in peace.

Another I loved has three
tailors– the bad Baudelaire
of South Pasadena, he
can’t scream for fear of waking
the neighbors and watches TV
without sound and writes nothing.
And the nation calls for its soul,
calls for its blood and belly,
and we, we number the five
fingers of our fists and try
anything to stay alive
without poems.
Today on the
eve of Thanksgiving I said
I will close my eyes, girl like,
and when I open them there
will be something here to love
and to celebrate. When I
opened them there was only
the blank door and beyond it
the hall, and I did not see
William Blake as a dark child
crying: “Without a Poet
dreamless you slept on the blue
floor of Atlantis till I
came with 27 words
& a hand opened by the
waters of the Ohio
& made you America.”