Image: Philip Levine, circa 1999 (credit to Chris Felver/Getty Images).
The former American Poet Laureate Philip Levine (1928-2015) was, and is, a towering figure for me, from my college years onwards. Frequently dubbed the ‘laureate of the working class’, Levine wrote mainly about his native Detroit and the various socio-political troubles his city faced, and always with a humanity and compassion that I still find very affecting.
After discovering his work, I certainly wasn’t above writing in pale imitation of him for a good while after; poems such as ‘They Feed They Lion’, “What Work Is’, ‘The Right Cross’, ‘The Helmet’ , ‘The Simple Truth’, and ‘Let Me Begin Again’ all boast a timeless and volcanic quality. ‘They Feed They Lion’ hit especially hard when I first read it.
Originally published in his 1972 collection of the same name, I believe this is a poem requiring multiple readings in order to be fully appreciated. As a singular work of art and seething indictment of racism, it focuses on the race riots of Detroit, also known as ‘The Great Rebellion’, occurring in July 1967. In the current era, I will hazard to say it has lost none of its relevance.
Levine is often perceived as a Whitmanesque (if more grounded) champion of the struggles endured by America’s manual workers. While this perception is largely true, his actual poetic scope is far wider, extending across the range of social divides in American society, in all their septic injuriousness. He described ‘They Feed They Lion’ as a “celebration of anger”, and indeed the poem is a harrowing depiction of gathering doom, of apocalypse, of a chaos that is unwittingly sown by ignorant and unthinking hands.
Levine’s words throb with an irate physicality, and yet he lists such portentous details as “the acids of rage, the candor of tar”, or “the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower/Of the hams the thorax of caves,” with the keen, cool eye of a court stenographer. For me, what makes ‘They Feed They Lion’ so effective is its lack of moralisation, its refusal to proffer a unified and cut-down solution to such a complex crisis. The words themselves and the horrors they describe are enough for a conclusion to be drawn.
Levine often accuses himself as being, through the lens of his own privilege and social standing, partially to blame for the cause of such unrest. Especially striking to me is the line: “From my five arms and all my hands,/From all my white sins forgiven, they feed”. He is not alone bearing witness to injustice but also admitting complicity, however unwittingly. He too has fed an encouraged fed the growth of the eponymous lion, a signifier not of progress or a brighter future, but of self-fulfilling chaos.
Nor is the poem to be read as simply a curious artefact from the literary and political past. ‘They Feed They Lion’ resonates as strongly as ever in 2021 – consider the refugee crisis, the multitudes fleeing from all manner of political turmoil seeking a better existence abroad, only to be met by drowning, traffickers, and reprehensible xenophobia of both official and unofficial hues, the death of George Floyd (amongst many others) last year and the renewed awareness of racial divides such a tragedy has induced.
The sense of gathering disaster in Levine’s poem, deployed in the rich vernacular of black America as well as the incantatory tempo of the Biblical prophets (“They lion, from my children inherit”), is, to me, one of Levine’s finest accomplishments as both a poet and a man with his eyes open wide to the injustices of the world.
They Feed They Lion by Philip Levine
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Levine’s death from pancreatic cancer in February of 2015 was truly a sad one for poetry. For myself, this poem is in his honour:
Goodnight, Philip
i.m. Philip Levine (1928-2015)
Now in Detroit, wind has scalped all trace
of summer away. Frost whispers through
barbed wire and chain-link, with seasonal poise.
Right before your eyes, a tremble of streetlights
drip titanium lambency into the night’s alcove,
like the rust that darkens every railing.
In this sulphurous foundry, where sweat
oxidised flesh, the heated blasts of labour,
every drab wheel, lever and dust-coated hard hat,
every forge room and smoke-warped tong,
a jackhammer’s rusty punch, the clank of casks
laden with Pabst bottles, the daily fume of work
dampening men to sullen apathy
until they no longer care to look at the finished finery
of their task, vanished with the city’s taken time,
along with the ash from your ageing cigarette.
Neither those flames, nor that arid heat,
lent your words their commiserative warmth.
At the ferry landing in Fulton, Whitman’s stanza
inscribed on the stainless rail, you watched the sun
burn itself to the ground, delighting in the city’s
mercury heights, an old, sparrow-like man
in a frayed baseball cap. Fifty years it took you,
you said, to make this place your home.
In all that time and afterward, your poems thrived
as mountains do, as gridirons do.
Strong-armed by the insomniac city, you slept
in a bed that forgot your shape and scent,
living always for the scribbled bulk of your words.
Ah, it had been your calefactor, your crucible,
smelting your stern love for all who are fated
to die obscurely, without tears or tribute.
Benign labourer, let us take it from here,
the self-taught gradient you would have us scale,
ink tunnelling the earth’s core in a black pipeline,
your mettle guiding us to a storeroom of mercy.
Copyright © 2015 Daniel Wade.