This is Episode 19 of the Fresno Poets Archive Project. It is a reading by Philip Levine, recorded August 25, 1985 at the Wild Blue Yonder nightclub in the Tower District. Background research and closed captioning for this video was conducted by student Aidan Castro in the fall of 2018. Aidan studied poetry at Fresno State, earning his MFA degree in May 2022. He writes about his experiences being a transgender man, and his childhood while growing up in the Dinuba countryside.
Editor’s notes:
This episode was originally scheduled to debut in March 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic delayed its publication more than two years. Student researcher Aidan Castro was an undergraduate at the time the initial work was done, still a full year away from starting his graduate studies. The blog post he wrote then, we agreed recently, sounded like it came from a different student. So these notes appear in its place.
Here’s one note from Aidan’s reflection at that time that I’d like to preserve. He wrote: “As an aspiring poet, it was amazing to see Levine read before he knew what bigger accomplishments were heading his way — larger than what he had already achieved.” Aidan is talking, of course, about the Pulitzer Prize that Levine would go on to win in 1995, and Levine’s selection as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2011, among other honors. This 1985 reading, then, is a sort of mid-career reading on our beloved poet’s substantial awards timeline.
For me as series editor, the most enjoyable part of this recording is Levine’s reading of an early (shorter) draft of his epic poem “A Walk with Tom Jefferson.” The version here is only about two-thirds the length of the full published version, and it crackles with the specifics of his working life in Detroit. Aidan puts it best when he wrote: “Levine’s stylistic precision has me paying closer attention to the small details of a room, of daily events, and even my own body.” Those details, preserved here, still feel urgent.
—Jefferson Beavers
We Grow Writers 