Philip Levine, the former United States poet laureate who spent his early years writing verse between shifts as a Detroit autoworker, has been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement.
The prize, which comes with a $100,000 award, is given annually for “outstanding and proven mastery of the art of poetry.†Mr. Levine’s collections include “What Work Is,†which won the 1991 National Book Award; “The Simple Truth,†which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize; and, in 2009, “News of the World.â€
In an essay quoted on the academy’s Web site, Mr. Levine, now 85, described the impulse to put his experiences on the assembly line into verse. “I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own,†he wrote. “I thought too that if I could understand my life â€" or at least the part my work played in it â€" I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.â€
Other prizes announced by the academy include the $25,000 Lenore Marshall Prize for the best first book of poetry last year, awarded to Patricia Smith’s “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannahâ€; a $25,000 fellowship for “distinguished poetic achievement,†awarded to Carolyn Forché; and a $25,000 translation fellowship, given to John Taylor for his English version of work by the Italian poet Lorenzo Calogero.
