The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (Poets on Poetry)
by Philip Levine
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From one of our most celebrated poets - winner of two National Book Awards and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle - an extraordinary memoir that has dictated its own thrust and shape. Philip Levine's The Bread of Time is an amalgam of celebration and quest. It celebrates the poets who were his teachers - particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, whose lives and work, Levine believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. As the book progressed to include an account not show more only of his own childhood and young manhood in Detroit but also of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine realized that he was also striving to discover "how I became the particular person and poet I am." The resulting memoir is a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty, elegantly rendered in a prose as characteristically Levine's as his verse, it is superb - and essential - reading for everyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets. show lessTags
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He is one of my favorite poets and yet I found myself surprised and delighted by his homage to his mentor John Berryman and his portrait of Yvor Winters. Also the history of his days in Spain on Sabbatical from Fresno State where he taught for many years. There are few that can manage such honesty, the voice is direct, humble, vulnerable and yet strong as the heartland. Must read
I've read a few Philip Levine poems and know he was a Detroit poet who did some time working in the auto plants there, so I had high hopes for this "autobiography." But nope, and mostly ho-hum. After skimming through more than half its nearly 300 pages, I'd had enough. Because as an autobiography, THE BREAD OF TIME (2001) just isn't. Aside from a fairly interesting segment about his working as a tutor for a dimwitted son of a wealthy Detroit family during his senior year of high school, Levine's stories of his childhood, time teaching at UC Fresno or his student days at Wayne or the Iowa Writers Workshop, or his travels in Europe, I found precious little that interested me. So on to something that will. Not recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, show more author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
- Tim Bazzett, show more author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less
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55+ Works 1,904 Members
Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan on January 10, 1928. Starting at the age of 14, he held a series of industrial jobs including working in a soap factory, hefting cases of soft drinks at a bottling plant, manning a punch press at Chevrolet Gear and Axle, and operating a jackhammer at Detroit Transmission. He received bachelor's and show more master's degrees in English from Wayne State University and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first collection of poetry, On the Edge, was published in 1961. His other poetry collections included 1933, Not This Pig, They Feed They Lion, A Walk with Tom Jefferson, The Mercy, and Breath. He won numerous awards during his lifetime including the 1977 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Names of the Lost, the 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award for Ashes: Poems New and Old and 7 Years from Somewhere, the 1987 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his body of work, the National Book Award for Ashes: Poems New and Old in 1980 and for What Work Is in 1991, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He was appointed the Library of Congress 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry from 2011 to 2012. His poetry appeared in several publications including The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. He also published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Bread of Time and edited an anthology entitled The Essential Keats. He died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2015 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Poetry, Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 811.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999
- LCC
- PS3562 .E9 .Z462 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
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- English
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