Buy This Book: "News of the World" by freshly anointed US Poet Laureate Philip Levine

The Library of Congress announced yesterday that 83-year-old Philip Levine will succeed W.S. Merwin as US Poet Laureate this fall. Levine won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth.

After WWII, Levine worked the graveyard shift at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory in Detroit and wrote during the day. "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."

Read the work of past PoLaus in The Poets Laureate Anthology and click on NAPOMO in the label cloud (below left) to revisit Jerusha's National Poetry Month series on the Poet Laureates Greatest Hits.