Philip Levine

from They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
                                Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion Grow. …

— Philip Levine

Read the rest of this famous Levine poem at the Knopf Poem-A-Day archive. I was amused to find myself reading this poem today, given that it’s the day of the West Virginia primary, and I thought perhaps the coincidence was worth sharing.

Levine is, of course, known as a poet of the Detroit working class and many of the workers in Detroit came from the Appalachian hills of Kentucky and West Virginia with stories like that told in Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker.

Alan MacKellar, a local poet and photographer whom I am privileged to count among my friends, hales from Detroit. One of his best poems tells of seeing Levine on the street one day when he was a child.

Updated: Okay, here it is:

The first thing that came into my mind? I had the title, which derived entirely from a statement that was made to me. I was working alongside a guy in Detroit — a black guy named Eugene — when I was probably about twenty-four. He was a somewhat older guy, and we were sorting universal joints, which are part of the drive-shaft of a car. The guy who owned the place had bought used ones, and we were supposed to sort the ones that could be rebuilt and made into usable replacement parts from the ones that were too badly damaged. So we spread them out on the concrete floor, and we were looking at them carefully, because we were the guys who’d then do the job of rebuilding them. We had two sacks that we were putting them in — burlap sacks — and at one point Eugene held up a sack, and on it were the words “Detroit Municipal Zoo.” And he laughed, and said, “They feed they lion they meal in they sacks.”

I guess that these lines are even more ironic than I had supposed in that they grew out of riots in Detroit in 1967, the “black insurrection,” but because this poem seems to me to describe the Appalachian experience also and because the poem mentions West Virginia, it was to Appalachia that my associations went. I really don’t think of the African American out-migration as coming from or through West Virginia. But the “hillbilly” one does.

So I was both stupider and smarter than I thought I was. Because one of the ironies of American culture in general and of this election in particular is that it seems to pit poor blacks and poor whites against each other, when in fact they would be much better served by making common cause.