Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Philip Levine (57MFA), “best known for his big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit” was named the new U.S. Poet Laureate today.
“I find him an extraordinary discovery because he introduced me to a whole new world I hadn’t connected to in poetry before,” James Billington, the librarian of Congress, told the New York Times on Monday. “He’s the laureate, if you like, of the industrial heartland. It’s a very, very American voice. I don’t know that in other countries you get poetry of that quality about the ordinary workingman.”
Please enjoy these Levine readings from the Virtual Writing University Archive:
—Nicole Saylor
Head, Digital Library Services