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Philip Levine, the newly appointed poet laureate of the U. Detroit since the ...

Detroit native Philip Levine has been appointed poet laureate by the U.S. Librarian of Congress.

The Library’s 18th poet laureate consultant, Levine, 83, will open the library’s annual literary season Oct. 17 with a reading of his work.

As a Wayne State University student in his 20s, he wrote poems as he worked a number of industrial jobs at Detroit’s auto plants, including Detroit Transmission -- a branch of Cadillac -- and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory.

“Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a news release announcing the appointment. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’ -- about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”

Levine succeeds W.S. Merwin as poet laureate and joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Rita Dove and Richard Wilbur, according to the library.

Levine taught for many years at California State University, Fresno, where he is professor emeritus in the English Department.

“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 has said about writing poetry during his factory days. “I thought, too, that if I could write about it I could come to understand it. I believed that if I could understand my life -- or at least the part my work played in it -- I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”

Levine is the author of 20 collections of poems, including most recently “News of the World” (2009), which the New York Times Sunday Book Review describes as “characteristically wise.” Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for “The Simple Truth.” He also won the National Book Award in 1991 for “What Work Is” and in 1980 for “Ashes: Poems New and Old.” He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979 for both “Ashes: Poems New and Old” and “7 Years From Somewhere,” and the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for “Names of the Lost.

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