Poem of the Week | July 04, 2016

This week, we present a new poem by Lindsay Wilson. Wilson, an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College, is the co-editor of The Meadow. He has published five chapbooks, and his first collection, No Elegies, won the Quercus Review Press Spring Book Award in 2014. His poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Verse Daily, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He serves on the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame Selection Committee.
 
Author’s note:

It is difficult to explain what the work of Philip Levine meant to a kid who grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, a place my father sometimes refers to as the “art-free zone.” Levine’s work at age 19 seemed almost impossible. How could someone write about such a blue-collar world and the San Joaquin Valley and Detroit in such a way that made them beautiful? Sure, it was a ramshackle, gritty beauty, filled with contradictions and class issues, but I knew our beauty when I saw it. His work gave me permission to write terrible oil field poetry, to write about roofing, to write about my life, and at that age, I needed someone’s permission to make art. Most of my childhood seemed almost against art—as if what my parents would talk about ran counter to the entire world outside of our home. Levine’s work seemed capable of reconciling working-class contradictions with art. I am not saying anything new about Levine, but these words feel different when they are lived. I tried to pay homage to him, and also to slip into the poem other poetic influences I have picked up due to my love from his work. There are nods to Adrienne Rich, Gary Soto, and Larry Levis in here as well as others. I would have never encountered their poetry, and the poetry of many others, if it was not for Levine. I would have never written this poem or any poem without finding his work.