What Work Is

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Biographical Context

When Philip Levine writes about “What Work Is,” about “miserable night shift[s] / at Cadillac” (Lines 27, 28) and “hours of wasted waiting” (Line 18) in an employment line, he writes from personal experience. Levine styled himself as a poet giving a voice to the American working class, but he did not try to give this voice as an outsider. Instead, Levine was born to working-class parents: his father owned a used auto parts shop while his mother worked as a bookseller. When Levine was fourteen and still a high school student, he was already working night shifts in auto factories. Even after earning his B.A. in 1950, Levine still went back to work for both Chevrolet and Cadillac (like the aforementioned lines in “What Work Is”) as a factory worker.

Despite moving on to a successful literary and academic career, Levine never forgot the working-class world in which he was raised. In fact, Levine’s style and thematic concerns always stayed established in the working-class struggles that preoccupied him as an artist. Levine’s viewpoint kept his poetry grounded and without unnecessary frills, as well as suspicious of mainstream American ideals. While the American imagination of the 1950s and 1960s celebrated the American dream and middle-class mores, Levine’s work continued to foreground the unheard struggles of lower-class workers under the prevailing economic system.

Literary Context

Philip Levine never explicitly aligned himself with a literary movement, and his work is rarely read as an example of any particular school of poetry. This is not to say that there were not literary movements surrounding Levine. On the contrary, Levine came into his literary powers during decades (especially the 1950s and 1960s) rife with important American poetry movements: the Beats, Confessional poetry, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance, among others. While at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Levine studied under both Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who are both major figures of Confessionalism.

While Levine’s poetry does investigate everyday life in an unflinching way like the work of the Confessional poets, it is not characterized by intimately personal details. Additionally, Levine eschews the experimentation of many of the other movements to which he was coeval. Instead, his bare-bones, narrative-forward poetics function as a counterpoint to much of the American poetry with which he was surrounded. Instead of responding to post-structural ideas of language, innovating with imagery, or working with surrealism, Levine writes straightforward poems that clearly express the American struggles with which he was concerned.