Philip Levine

When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she'd reach one sudden black foreleg down and paw at the moving hand, the offensive one. The first time she drew blood I learned it was poetic to end a line anywhere to keep her quiet. After all, many morn- ings she'd gotten to the chair long before I was even up. Those nights I couldn't sleep she'd come and sit in my lap to calm me.

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.

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.

DEEP in his wondrous journals, Thoreau wrote that an "old poet comes to watch his moods as closely as the cat does a mouse." So he or she must, though it's probably too often forgotten that even the most profound introspection is simply an extension of writerly observation. Poetry is most satisfying -- and magical in that ancient sense -- when it becomes a window through which we simultaneously gaze out and inward.

She calls Chicago, but no one is home. The operator asks for another number but still no one answers. Together they try twenty-one numbers, and at each no one is ever home. "Can I call Baltimore?" she asks. She can, but she knows no one in Baltimore, no one in St. Louis, Boston, Washington. She imagines herself standing before the glass wall high over Lake Shore Drive, the cars below fanning into the city.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she'd reach one sudden black foreleg down and paw at the moving hand, the offensive one. The first time she drew blood I learned it was poetic to end a line anywhere to keep her quiet. After all, many morn- ings she'd gotten to the chair long before I was even up. Those nights I couldn't sleep she'd come and sit in my lap to calm me.

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.

She calls Chicago, but no one is home. The operator asks for another number but still no one answers. Together they try twenty-one numbers, and at each no one is ever home. "Can I call Baltimore?" she asks. She can, but she knows no one in Baltimore, no one in St. Louis, Boston, Washington. She imagines herself standing before the glass wall high over Lake Shore Drive, the cars below fanning into the city.

DEEP in his wondrous journals, Thoreau wrote that an "old poet comes to watch his moods as closely as the cat does a mouse." So he or she must, though it's probably too often forgotten that even the most profound introspection is simply an extension of writerly observation. Poetry is most satisfying -- and magical in that ancient sense -- when it becomes a window through which we simultaneously gaze out and inward.

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.