SPRING FRUIT

No Lube, So Rude

Apr 02, 2026

I met Philip Levine at The Getty Center in 1999. My teacher, Chris Buckley, invited a small group of his students to attend. Levine taught Chris at UC Irvine in the early 1980s. I have met actors and musicians, but if anyone can make me act starstruck, it is a poet or artist I admire. It’s a day difficult to forget. Levine read all the hits.

Two poems that I carry in my heart by Levine are “They Feed They Lion” and “What Work Is.” Levine is to the urban or working-class as Walt Whitman is to the history of the American spirit in poetry. A lineage that includes Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Jack Gilbert.

In “What Work Is,” Levine works his way down the page navigating the line and sentence, and at its breaks is when the imagination leaps. I come back to Levine’s “light rain falling like mist / into your hair, blurring your vision” until you see the improbable. The brother he loves who is not there, “not beside you or behind or” and the enjambed line breaking at the conjunction leads us back to the person waiting: “For work.”

The poem performs a diptych volta, transporting the reader into the speaker’s imagination as his vision begins to blur, and then returning both speaker and reader to the pressure of the present moment in the anaphoric refrain “not because,” “not because” as if shaking us awake and “incapable of crying” because you don’t know the meaning of work. It is a heartbreaking poem.

There are poets today writing about work and labor, and these are two anthologies I recommend: The Book of Jobs (Ed. Erin Murphy) and What Things Cost (Eds. Rebecca Gayle Howell, Ashley M. Jones, and Emily J. Jalloul).

Many years ago, before the time of graduate degrees and teaching gigs, I was a store manager for Starbucks Coffee Company. I worked there for most of seven years. I remember hiring a young man who had recently arrived from Seattle, Washington. His name was Mark, with ratty blond hair, remnants of a decades-old grunge haircut. Mark and I worked nights and he’d tell me stories about the musicians he met in Seattle.

Recently, I was in Arizona visiting friends and we were invited to a concert. The venue was incredible. It was once a Benedictine Monastery built in the 1930s. Last year, the building was renovated into a venue called La Rosa. More than two decades after listening to Peaches on a cassette at work with Mark, I was finally watching her live. It was glorious.