Working Poets for Lennon & Levine Philip Levine assembled lines about working Detroit assembly lines, narratives he lived and heard while spending more time sitting behind a desk, that hard-labor blind, and lecturing on iambs or Whitman, certainly Negative Capability. Now and then he'd reassemble a few Lions to feed Ford or Chevy, Cadillac or Dodge, elevate their expectations— avant-garde-rail rhymes. A few critics called him out mostly behind his back for a lack of horsepower and often in print to maintain that safe distance just in case he still packed the gripper and temper most shift-workers carried well into old age. Some claimed What Work Is had no authenticity. Most of us raised in a union family agreed with Lennon that A Working Class Hero was something to be. But they usually didn't last too long before they wound up being carried by their brothers and buried in the ground. The stories and myths penned by everyday people doing everyday chores for potatoes, eggs, and bread in order to feed their family and sing their songs are sparse on library shelves, let alone being sung or read in schools by their kids. Those like Levine who escape the routine of sweating through overtime years allow the mass of us to elbow in, sit up and grin eye to eye with those clean-cut white guys holding the strings, and tug back hard enough to get them to see us—recognize we're gals and guys like Phil. Mark Gibbons
Mr. Gibbons stays close to earth with his images of regular people, enough cleverness to engage, not too much. Not too much; it would distract from this superb poem.