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Philip Levine
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 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.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Philip Levine was born in Detroit in 1928 to a working-class Jewish immigrant
family. His father died when he was five, and his mother kept the family going
by running a small store. Levine worked on Chevrolet and Cadillac assembly
lines and other labor-intensive jobs for years before he began publishing and
ultimately became a famous poet. "I saw," he said, "that the people that I was
working with were voiceless in a way. That is, the literature of America largely
ignored them." One of Levine's missions as a poet was to give voice to
America's struggling working class. First published in 1972, this month's
favorite poem was inspired by the riots that broke out in Levine's hometown
in 1967.
Perhaps the most brilliant element powering his poem is its title. I can hear
Miss Grundy insist that it should be "They Feed Their Lion!" Occasional
substitution of "they" for "their" is common, however, in AAE (African
American English). Levine tells us that he actually heard a frustrated fellow
assembly-line worker say, "They Feed They Lion." The vernacular variation
makes us feel the presence of long-suffering black workers, struggling to
survive as individuals in a marginalized community.
Those metaphorical chefs serving Levine's metaphorical lion would be loath
to admit their agency in unjust treatment of Detroit laborers both black and
white. They is a pronoun without an antecedent. Our poet is probably thinking
of how that word is often used to refer to a vague, shadowy force that operates
behind the scenes; how it affords politicians, government officials, educators,
and factory owners anonymity. Hiding behind the pronoun, they seem
disconnected from the suffering they contribute to via the unhealthy diet they
dish out. Who they are nobody will say, but since the lion they feed cannot be
said to be theirs, it has the possibility of breaking free and taking control of its
destiny.
Once he has the perfect title, Levine enhances it by adapting what we poets
call "The List" dynamic for the body of his poem. Shakespeare used a list to
create Jaques' misanthropic Ages of Man speech in As You Like It.
Christopher Smart used a 73-line list to praise his cat Geoffrey in his poem
"Jubilate Agno." And Walt Whitman used lists frequently to take all America
under his imaginative wing in poems like "Song of Myself" and "I Hear
America Singing."
The Detroit riots were among the most violent in U.S. history: 43 people were
killed, hundreds more injured, and thousands of buildings were looted or
destroyed. A number of writers, including John Hersey, wrote books wherein
they approached the riots as journalists, attempting to explain why they
happened.
Although Levine's mission is to answer the same question, he brings the
power of poetry to the table. His goal is not to argue and explain, guess or
theorize, but to simply take us inside the historical and cultural experience of
the rioters, creating, beyond opinion or commentary, an encyclopedic,
rhythmical array of all the negative injustices, and hardships they, their
families, and ancestors have suffered.
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread
William Carlos Williams is famous for his "no ideas but in things" esthetic.
The idea Levine's list points to suggests that if a class of people is unfairly
deprived, mistreated, and oppressed long enough, they will eventually erupt
and shake the foundations of the wider society. Levine is careful, however, to
never state that idea but to simply concentrate on things that will bring it to
mind: the heavy burlap sacks that workers carry and empty; the containers
of goods they bear; the black bean and wet slate bread that they carry into
stores and restaurants and feed on after work as cheap, regular staples of
their own diets; the acids that form in their gut; the undeniable tar on the
roads they build and repair; the corrosive creosote and gasoline they handle;
the drive shafts of their ruined jalopies; the wooden dollies they wheel up and
down the docks. This debilitating diet turns them into angry lions, and we
readers become angry with them.
Next, we open onto landscapes where the lions live and work:
Out of the
gray hills / Of industrial barns
, then "out of bus ride
" that takes them
back and forth from work or in search of work; until there's a hint of protest
as West Virginia to Kiss My Ass
introduces an angry human voice that can
hardly be called a "thing.
"
That voice leads to fully-fledged human beings, to
"buried aunties"
and "Mothers hardening like pounded stumps"
;
then into all human bodies as we experience the need of
"the bones to
sharpen and the muscles to stretch."
In the next ten lines, Earth is personified as a diner, eating industrial
waste—the trees that make fence posts, then the posts that end up rotting in
the ground. Mother Earth is eroding and crumbling ephemeral human
productions back into the elements they came from, calling,
"Come home,
Come home!"
From dust we came and to dust we shall return.Too often
those with no hope for change accept death as their only way out.
Suddenly a most un-leonine animal joins the list and the source of what is
being fed shifts as well. "Out of" becomes "From" throughout the rest of the
poem:
From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly
…
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist
…
It's a way of saying "They have fed us with debilitating stuff for generations;
but from this stuff that forces us to
"Bow Down"
comes "Rise Up."
Levine probably expects us to remember the name of the place where the
Detroit riots began. In the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, the Detroit
Police raided a bar on 12th Street to make a routine bust and found 82 African
Americans inside, celebrating the return of two Vietnam War Veterans. The
police decided to detain everyone in the bar. As they waited for busses to
arrive, a crowd formed outside, rapidly becoming larger and angrier. Bottles
were thrown and windows smashed, and this ballooned into the widespread
looting, arson, and violence throughout the city that lasted for five days.
The bar where all the chaos began was called The Blind Pig. Also noteworthy
is the fact that the parts of the pig's body Levine lists (testicles and feet) are
its cheapest parts, eaten mainly by those suffering financial hardship.
Ironically,the order to
Bow Down
has led to Rise Up
. They have lost control,
for "from the reeds of shovels, / The grained arm that pulls the
hands, They Lion grow."
Shovels have become "reeds." Something akin to
a surreal community garden has risen. (Perhaps Levine was thinking of the
fact that wood can produce both shovel handles and musical instrument
reeds; that all that heavy work digging trenches and burying relatives has built
not only muscles, but protest songs.
So far, our poet has presented himself as a reliable narrator, presenting a list
of things. Suddenly, as if he has fully read understood their implications, his
voice becomes intensely personal. Not merely The Poet, but Philip Levine, a
concerned, involved individual enters the poem:
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit….
Philip Levine is the "thing" that has been missing in his poem: not part of the
anonymous they, but someone speaking for all those who have been forgotten
, disrespected, and left behind. "From all my white sins forgiven"
acknowledges his complicity in feeding they lion and his hope that its
unintended effects will be forgiven; "from my children inherit" offers his hope
that his own children will be more aware and considerate. He is ready to
proceed with new-found strength—with
my five arms and all my hands
to work with.
Levine is ready to end his list:
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Oak trees are symbols of strength. Turned away from the light towards a wall,
they become barriers. The Lion violence produced by the attempt to ignore or
hide the truth only serves to expose it. That "opened belly" of the pig is
horrific, but all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
has
been brought to light.
As an English professor told a class I was in many years ago: "An encounter
with the truth, no matter how unpleasant, is always preferable to lies."
Levine's lion has been ill fed by every item on his unflinching multi-layered
poetic list. We know why
they Lion
comes.
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