It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

Philip Levine

Being Detroit Doing Fact Going Ironic Left Me Poet Sense Six Stop Thing Twenty Which While Work Worker

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Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

— Philip Levine

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Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

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To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty: to be a poet at forty is to be a poet

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The Bus stops here. The last stop is here in Detroit.

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My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

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