Philip Levine, “Fear and Fame”

September 5, 2016

On Labor Day, a poem by Philip Levine from his book What Work Is.  It stuns me every time I read it.  Feel free to comment on this or to add one of your favorite work poems.

 

Fear and Fame

Half an hour to dress, wide rubber hip boots,
gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic helmet
like a knight’s but with a little glass window
that kept steaming over, and a respirator
to save my smoke-stained lungs. I would descend
step by slow step into the dim world
of the pickling tank and there prepare
the new solutions from the great carboys
of acids lowered to me on ropes — all from a recipe
I shared with nobody and learned from Frank O’Mera
before he went off to the bars on Vernor Highway
to drink himself to death. A gallon of hydrochloric
steaming from the wide glass mouth, a dash
of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm,
metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts,
until I knew the burning stew was done.
Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer
returned to the ordinary blinking lights
of the swingshift at Feinberg and Breslin’s
First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message
from the kingdom of fire. Oddly enough
no one welcomed me back, and I’d stand
fully armored as the downpour of cold water
rained down on me and the smoking traces puddled
at my feet like so much milk and melting snow.
Then to disrobe down to my work pants and shirt,
my black street shoes and white cotton socks,
to reassume my nickname, strap on my Bulova,
screw back my wedding ring, and with tap water
gargle away the bitterness as best I could.
For fifteen minutes or more I’d sit quietly
off to the side of the world as the women
polished the tubes and fixtures to a burnished purity
hung like Christmas ornaments on the racks
pulled steadily toward the tanks I’d cooked.
Ahead lay the second cigarette, held in a shaking hand,
as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat,
a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese
on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie,
and a third cigarette to kill the taste of the others.
Then to arise and dress again in the costume
of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened
by the knowledge that to descend and rise up
from the other world merely once in eight hours is half
what it takes to be known among women and men.

Share the word

You Might Also Like

14 Comments

  • Reply Mary Jane White September 5, 2016 at 11:31 am

    Sharon, What a fine choice for the day! Love this new blog of yours — to visit nearly every day. Mary Jane White

    • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 11:42 am

      Thanks, Mary Jane. I’m really enjoying the conversation here myself. This is one of my favorite poems, the precision and deliberateness and power of it.

  • Reply Robbie Gamble September 5, 2016 at 1:10 pm

    A perfect poem for Labor Day! And Philip Levine is extraordinary– you are right, he always speaks with precision and power, pulling such vividness out of the ordinary. If I had a Mount Rushmore of poems, “They Feed They Lion” would be prominent upon it:

    They Feed They Lion

    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.

  • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 1:17 pm

    Another great favorite. I remember people quoting parts of this to each other when I was a grad student, feeling the power of it down to the bone.

  • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 1:22 pm

    Lloyd Schwartz posted another apt Labor Day poem on facebook:

    Shirt
    Robert Pinsky

    The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
    The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
    Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

    Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
    Or talking money or politics while one fitted
    This armpiece with its overseam to the band

    Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
    The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
    The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

    At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
    One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
    On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

    The witness in a building across the street
    Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
    Up to the windowsill, then held her out

    Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
    And then another. As if he were helping them up
    To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

    A third before he dropped her put her arms
    Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
    Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

    He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
    And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
    Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

    Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
    Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
    Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

    Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
    Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
    Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

    Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
    To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
    By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

    Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
    To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
    Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

    The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
    Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
    As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

    George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
    Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
    And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

    And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
    Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
    Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

    The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
    Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
    The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt

  • Reply Anne Pitkin September 5, 2016 at 3:42 pm

    Thanks for all these, Sharon!

  • Reply eileen cleary September 5, 2016 at 3:51 pm

    Find Work
    by Rhina P Espaillat

    I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
    Life’s little duties do—precisely
    As the very least
    Were infinite—to me—
    —Emily Dickinson, #443

    My mother’s mother, widowed very young
    of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
    moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
    and country heart anaesthetized and mute
    with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
    “Find work,” she would reply to every grief—
    and her one dictum, whether false or true,
    tolled heavy with her passionate belief.
    Widowed again, with children, in her prime,
    she spoke so little it was hard to bear
    so much composure, such a truce with time
    spent in the lifelong practice of despair.
    But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
    her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

    • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 5:05 pm

      This is really beautiful. Thanks for posting it.

      • Reply eileen cleary September 5, 2016 at 7:18 pm

        I love Rhina Espaillat’s work. Last year, she published a translation of Frost into Spanish in iambic pentameter. This had never been previously done and only a poet so well versed in formal poetry and Spanish could ever have achieved it. Amazing.

        • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 8:15 pm

          I’m so happy to know about her.

  • Reply Jeffrey Skinner September 5, 2016 at 4:57 pm

    The dignity of physical work; who believes in that anymore? My father’s gone, and so is Phil. God bless them both.

    • Reply sharonbryanpoet September 5, 2016 at 5:04 pm

      My guess is a lot of people still believe in it, but can’t find the opportunities to do it, thanks to greedy employers, among other things.

  • Reply Michelle Boisseau September 5, 2016 at 10:07 pm

    I’m very glad to have these poems today that dignify hard work and to learn about Rhina. Here’s a poem from Amy Lowell that Al Young posted earlier today. I didn’t know this poem, and it strikes me as exquisite in how it dignified the man with the couplets. It’s from the Academy of American Poets site.

    About this Poem
    “The Coal Picker” was published in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914).

    The Coal Picker
    Amy Lowell, 1874 – 1925

    He perches in the slime, inert,
    Bedaubed with iridescent dirt.
    The oil upon the puddles dries
    To colours like a peacock’s eyes,
    And half-submerged tomato-cans
    Shine scaly, as leviathans
    Oozily crawling through the mud.
    The ground is here and there bestud
    With lumps of only part-burned coal.
    His duty is to glean the whole,
    To pick them from the filth, each one,
    To hoard them for the hidden sun
    Which glows within each fiery core
    And waits to be made free once more.
    Their sharp and glistening edges cut
    His stiffened fingers. Through the smut
    Gleam red the wounds which will not shut.
    Wet through and shivering he kneels
    And digs the slippery coals; like eels
    They slide about. His force all spent,
    He counts his small accomplishment.
    A half-a-dozen clinker-coals
    Which still have fire in their souls.
    Fire! And in his thought there burns
    The topaz fire of votive urns.
    He sees it fling from hill to hill,
    And still consumed, is burning still.
    Higher and higher leaps the flame,
    The smoke an ever-shifting frame.
    He sees a Spanish Castle old,
    With silver steps and paths of gold.
    From myrtle bowers comes the plash
    Of fountains, and the emerald flash
    Of parrots in the orange trees,
    Whose blossoms pasture humming bees.
    He knows he feeds the urns whose smoke
    Bears visions, that his master-stroke
    Is out of dirt and misery
    To light the fire of poesy.
    He sees the glory, yet he knows
    That others cannot see his shows.
    To them his smoke is sightless, black,
    His votive vessels but a pack
    Of old discarded shards, his fire
    A peddler’s; still to him the pyre
    Is incensed, an enduring goal!
    He sighs and grubs another coal.

  • Reply Joyce James September 7, 2016 at 11:49 pm

    These poems are a treasure. I know both of the Levine poems. I like his work because it is about working people, the kind of people who worked until they died like my parents who were farmers. I’m anxious to read the other two poems. Amy Lowell was an interest of mine in high school.

  • Leave a Reply