ENTERTAINMENT
August 12, 2011 | By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
Philip Levine, the Pulitzer Prize winner who was named the nation's next poet laureate Wednesday, has spent much of his career listening and reflecting on the voices of America. In his new job he said he has one main goal. "I want to bring poetry to people who have no idea how relevant poetry is to their lives," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Fresno, where he is a professor emeritus at Cal State Fresno while continuing to write poetry. He also hopes to bring some less known poets into the limelight — although as of Wednesday morning, he said, simply answering phone calls was taking up his time.
NEWS
October 21, 1987 | From Times Wire Services
Philip Levine, the research scientist who discovered the Rh factor in human blood, has died at age 87. Levine, who received numerous awards for his discovery of key blood factors, for greatly increasing the safety of blood transfusions and for identifying the Rh hemolytic disease, died Sunday at a nursing home in Manhattan. Hemolytic disease can cause fetal death in pregnancies in which the blood of the father and the infant is Rh positive while the mother's is negative.
BOOKS
January 16, 1994 | RICHARD EDER
"I don't understand. I don't understand," Federico Garcia Lorca exclaimed when he arrived in New York. Out of the bewildered encounter between the finely surreal singer of slain gypsies and flowers that bleed, and Manhattan's stink and clangor, came "Poet in New York." A poet can write out of any state of spirit as long as he trusts it. Lorca trusted his dismay. And he taught Philip Levine to trust his.
NEWS
December 28, 1994 | RUSSELL FRANK, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Mornings, Levine zips himself into a warm-up suit, grabs coffee, pops old jazz in the tape player, hefts a fat fountain pen and a yellow pad, and settles into his armchair to write some of the best poetry in America. Fifty years ago, the same guy, "in a dirty work shirt that says 'Phil,' " would have been punching in at Chevy Gear & Axle, Detroit Transmission or the Mavis Nu Icy Bottling Co., would have been running jackhammer, muscling cases of soda pop, polishing flexible plumbing tube.
NEWS
May 16, 1995 | MARIA L. La GANGA, TIMES STAFF WRITER
The second-loneliest job in the Central Valley is toiling over the land, 15 million fertile acres alternately seared by sun and shrouded in fog, ringed with mountains and crisscrossed by irrigation canals. The loneliest job is turning heat, dust and poverty into poetry.
NEWS
June 15, 1989 | RICHARD EDER, Times Book Critic
Forty-Seventeen by Frank Moorhouse (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $16.95; 175 pages) Middle age is a hilltop from which the shapes of life past and life to come turn dismayingly visible. We name this dismay the mid-life crisis; a detonation like a star-shell that bathes the hilltop vantage in dead-white light. "Forty-Seventeen" by the Australian novelist Frank Moorhouse is about one man's view from his shell-lit hill. It is a landscape of wreckage and hope, of breakdown and renewal, of lives and loves disintegrating and re-forming.