Philip Levine,

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine will read some of his poems about work and workers today at 1p at the AFL-CIO. Called “the laureate of the industrial heartland,” Levine has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards. “What gives Levine’s work its urgency,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times, “is that impulse to commemorate, the need to restore to life people who were never, despite their deadening work, dead things themselves, and who deserve to be rescued from the longer death of being forgotten.” Levine’s early experience as a Detroit autoworker is reflected in his poetry, which “elevates, and celebrates, the labor of America’s working class,” as Librarian of Congress Dr. James H. Billington described it. photo by Frances Levine