When Nadja Maril, who manages the posts of OSP, asked us each to write about our favorite poem, this was the one that came to my mind, immediately, as it so often does whenever I want to teach anyone about poetry, or whenever I think of a poem that I love.

What’s Your Favorite Poem?

Philip Levine is a very famous and celebrated poet, and he was also Jewish, which is why it matters, in this poem that the speaker’s brother is using his talent as an opera singer to sing operas by Wagner, who was loved by Hitler.

And so Levine uses this poem to tease out the thorniness of family connections.

And though I have spent the majority of my adult life college-educated and in jobs that would be called white collar, they have almost universally been shitty jobs, which means the pay was low, the hours long, the expectations high: over-supervised, under-appreciated, crap work. And my non-degree-requiring jobs were pretty shitty too: the restaurant owner was a drunk when I was a waitress, the lamp store owner liked to see me crawling on the floor, picking staples out of the thickly-woven carpet to save the upright vacuum cleaner, and the mall store manager wouldn’t let us leave until every item on his list was checked, even though it meant I missed the last trolly, and had to walk the tracks home alone and late at night. Crap jobs abound in my history.

The men who people Levine’s poem also do crap jobs. The brother, at least, is trying to wring some joy from his life, but he does it through singing Wagner, which confounds and hurts his brother.

What I like about this is how it is a pretty good example of the “what” of poetry. What is poetry trying to do?

Levine could simply write it out: I love my brother but his choice of loves, recreation, music, confounds me and upsets me.

We’d all say, “I hear you man,” and we’d all go on with our lives, having heard him, but not “felt” him, or understood.

Better to put us in the rain, shifting foot to foot, to understand that the brother loves singing opera so much that he will slog through the shitty job for it, the humiliation of being told there is no work, the dependence, the lack of agency, all to be able to sing.

The speaker is standing in the rain, getting flooded, and feeling hopeless, and then he is flooded by the love he feels for his brother, a love which he feels from, perhaps, at last understanding how much singing means to his bother, and how much his brother, and the happiness of his brother, means to him: enough that he will do what it takes to love a brother who loves:

Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.

And how long has it been since he held his brother and told him he loved him? And how infinite do we all think life is?

My brother died suddenly and unexpectedly during lockdown, and I was not able to see him for all of the eight or so hours I knew he was dying, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get over it. Our time together is not infinite; my love for my brother was, but he tried that bond many times and in many ways, and don’t we all do that to our siblings?

Levine writes in free verse, and uses enjambment frequently, and so do I. I like the closeness and intimacy of free verse, and I like the way enjambment will not let you walk away: it pulls you to the next line. I like how simple Levine is too: this is a poem almost everyone can understand and be moved by. That is Democracy in action right there. That is inclusiveness. We can all get in on this poem. We can all find a little hand-hold.

And mostly I like how this poem, long before my brother was even ill, always flooded me with love for him, and my sister, every time I read it, and made me consider the ways in which we are like cacti for hugging with our family, when we may be like cashmere with everyone else. And if you don’t know this, and you haven’t done the work to hug the cacti anyway,

then you

don’t know

what work is.

Thanks for enjoying Phil with me~

Dianne Pearce