Much of Levine’s most famous work describes Detroit, the city where he was born, raised and — as a young working man — educated in the rhythms of factory life. “I’m a Detroit-sized poet,” he once said, explaining why the city was a perpetual source of inspiration to him. Levine studied at Michigan’s Wayne State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — where he came in contact with Robert Lowell (“as a teacher, he was a disaster”) and John Berryman (“an inspiration”) — and spent much of his own teaching career at California State University, Fresno.

Reviewing two volumes of Levine’s poetry for the New York Times in 1979, Herbert Leibowitz called Levine “the elegist of lost souls beaten down by forces they could not understand or control,” and went on: “By providing brief verse chronicles of their struggles to survive — their dead-end jobs, sexual fevers, run-ins with the police, fugitive pleasures — and by conferring names on their anonymous selves, Mr. Levine could partially reinstate these victims in our consciousness, even if he could not rescue them from the malevolence of history.”

Those words were written decades ago — and Levine has published a great deal since then — but they describe a poet whose work may be more relevant than ever today (as Dwight Garner argues in an eloquent literary profile of Levine in today’s New York Times).

What are his most famous works?

Levine’s “Ashes: Poems New and Old” and “What Work Is” won the National Book Award in 1980 and 1991, respectively; “The Simple Truth” earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

The poet’s latest volume, “News of the World,” was published two years ago.

What are his responsibilities as poet laureate?

Along with his new title, Levine will get $35,000 for his services between this coming October and next May (unlike his British counterpart, he won’t be invited to indulge in a barrel of sherry) – as well as “maximum freedom to work on [his] own projects.” CBS points out that several recent poets laureate have chosen to use their position for the public good; Levine himself has already discussed his desire to make use of the “bully pulpit” he’s been given.

But based on his evident reluctance to write on demand (he’d hardly relish the chance to compose “a poem to Congress,” he says), it’s probably a good thing that Levine won’t be called upon to conjure odes for momentous state occasions.

Is he pleased?

That might sound like a stupid question, but gifted artists aren’t always overjoyed to be recognized with public accolades. (Remember Doris Lessing’s ticklingly weary response to the news that she had been awarded a Nobel Prize?) Levine hasn’t reacted with anything like Lessing’s now-famous disdain, but in an interview with his local paper, the Fresno Bee, he did downplay the importance of major awards:

“The single greatest reward was the writing of the stuff itself, the poetry,” [Levine] said. “And the second biggest one had to do with my students, mainly here at Fresno State. I had some amazing students here who went on to wonderful careers as poets.”… Levine acknowledges that it’s nice to be recognized, but he insists that no one should get too excited about awards and honors. In the overall picture, they mean very little.

Levine further told the AP: “I’m a fairly irreverent person and at first I thought, ‘This is not you. You’re an old union man.’ But I knew if I didn’t do this, I would kick myself.”

The project has understandably received attention since it was announced. Christle has already explained some of the background to the Guardian; I called her around lunchtime today for a live poetry experience of my own. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, with minor edits for the sake of fluency:

Heather Christle: Hello, this is Heather.

Emma Mustich: Hi, Heather. My name’s Emma, and I’m a culture blogger at Salon.com. I wondered if you might be willing to read me a poem — and chat for a little while about your project.

HC: Yeah, I’d love to. That sounds great!

EM: Well, if it’s all right, the poem I’d like to hear is “Parallelograph.”

HC: Sure, that sounds good. Let me just find “Parallelograph” in the table of contents. It’s funny, I ought to know the numbers really well by now, but it’s all become kind of a blur I think.

EM: How many calls have you had so far today? [I called about 12:30 p.m., so she'd been "open" for two and a half hours.]

HC: Let’s see … Actually, I’ve stopped counting, because it just became too much to keep track of. I don’t know, maybe a dozen so far. It’s funny — at first, it was mostly just individuals calling, and since it’s been getting picked it’s been much more people calling from newspapers and radio shows and things.

EM: Do you do all this from an office? Or do you just pick up the phone wherever you are?

HC: Wherever I am. I’m mostly at home — right now I am. I teach at Emory, but I’m just teaching one class for the summer session. I have read some poems in the grocery store, and I just read one outside while I was playing with my neighbor’s cat. I’m about to go to the hardware store, so I’m hoping I might get to read someone a poem while I’m standing next to hammers. [Laughs.] So should I go ahead and read this poem?

EM: Sure.

HC: OK.

“Parallelograph”

that is not a bird          that is a large dark area          it is the same thing          as your                head          when I do your head in silhouette          there could be a nation          that         outlawed the profile          or only thought of outlines          from the front          it is the           same as your imaginary life          you have just given your concession speech                        bravely to a small crowd of supporters          they could be thinking anything and                   aren’t          you can’t tell a large dark area to give up           everything is possible                       and not happening            to me in this plausible room           despite the five thousand            ways you might reach me           the phone is not ringing           it could be         but it is not                          I elect to see but one thing at a time          one broken toe          one gone-bad                sausage          I could possess a freakish lack of power          like I could be a                         puncture           but instead I am a vice           it all goes on without          or else beside                me           like in this version of the world           there is no gold  

[Spacing adopted from La Petite Zine]

That’s it.

EM: Thanks!

HC: You’re welcome. Someone else was calling — I wasn’t sure if you were hearing beeps on your end.

EM: No, nothing!

HC: OK. I’m never sure if people can hear those beeps or not.

EM: Do you get self-conscious at all, doing this all day?

HC: Not really, no. I thought that I might before it started, but it’s felt very comfortable the whole time.

EM: Would you ever do this face-to-face with people? Or is it the phone in particular that interests you?

HC: Oh, interesting. I mean, I do readings in person — that’s part of my life as a poet — but I suppose it is a little different with the one on one. I’m not sure whether I’d do one-on-one readings, face to face. Although there is a group that does that, actually, The Poetry Brothel. But that’s not really my style so much.

I think the phone is actually especially important to me because these poems imagine these phone calls happening so much, and this possibility that the reader might answer somehow — well, like in that poem I just read, in “Parallelograph,” the poor speaker is feeling really sad that nobody’s calling.

I didn’t have this project in mind when I wrote the poems, but after writing them, I realized how especially poignant it might be to make that action actually occur in the real world.

EM: Yes — I was going to ask whether you had this project in mind as you were writing.

HC: No, not at all. It just kind of happened as I was putting the book together, once the poems were all written.

EM: What kind of phone are you using? Is it a cellphone?

HC: Yes, I’m on a cellphone. But I didn’t want to publish my actual phone number, so I set up a Google voice number, so it just gets forwarded to my cellphone. And it means that I can turn it off for the hours when I’m not doing this.

EM: Your hours are pretty long, aren’t they? Today you’re available from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., I think.

HC: It’s funny — people tend to call in clusters for some reason. Definitely as soon as I get in the shower somebody calls.

EM: My last question: Who’s the most surprising caller that you’ve had?

HC: Probably Julian Marshall from the BBC. That completely flabbergasted me.

EM: They didn’t warn you before he called?

HC: They warned me — I knew that they were going to have someone from ‘Newshour’ calling, but I didn’t know it was going to be actually Julian Marshall. He’s someone whose voice I’m very used to coming out of the radio or my computer, but to suddenly hear his voice coming out of the phone was quite something. [Laughs.]

EM: I know you have another caller on the line, so I won’t ask any more questions. But thanks so much for the poem, and for chatting!

HC: Oh, thanks for being interested, and for listening to the poem. Take care!

Video clips, the most common add-on, can obviously add value to cookbooks or to more substantive nonfiction, such as Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” or Sebastian Junger’s “War” — enhanced, respectively, with CBS news reports and clips from “Restrepo,” the companion film Junger made with the late documentarian Tim Hetherington. Literature, however, is another matter. Most of the stuff appended to the digital versions of new novels, for example, consists of author interviews and background material, most of which can already be easily found online in one form or another. That’s especially true if the author has been dutifully following the industry-wide directive to maintain a website, produce a book trailer, blog, engage with fans via social media and so on.

Given all these stumbling blocks, a $14 version of a famously enigmatic early 20th-century poem written by a decidedly unsexy dead guy — and in the public domain, no less! — would hardly seem the sort of thing to become a hit in the iTunes app store. Nevertheless, that’s just what “The Waste Land” has done. Created by Touch Press (the same company that made the benchmark apps “The Elements” and “Solar System”) and the British poetry publisher Faber and Faber, “The Waste Land” offers one of the best examples yet of how to make a successful literary app, often by contravening conventional wisdom.

First, “The Waste Land” is difficult; even T.S. Eliot acknowledged this in 1922, when he decided to publish notes along with the poem. Touch Press’ version comes with even more notes (by B.C. Southam), illuminating the complex web of literary allusions in those immortal 434 lines. The usual titles at the top of e-book bestseller lists don’t call for this sort of exegesis. There’s not much call to dig deeper unless the book in question has some depth. I don’t really need anyone to help me read a Stieg Larsson thriller, and I don’t plan to be ruminating on it much once I’m done.

“The Waste Land” is also old. Which is to say, it has stood the test of time and readers can feel fairly confident that the effort they put into comprehending it will be rewarded. There are undoubtedly adventurous writers exploring the possibilities of digital texts at this very moment, but they suffer a disadvantage shared by any contemporary experimentalist: Most readers don’t trust them not to waste their time. Apart from a valiant few, the majority would rather wait while someone else sifts through the dross.

Finally, “The Waste Land” is familiar. Publishers may tell themselves that students will buy the app because of its filmed performance by the great Irish actress Fiona Shaw and its audio recordings by Alec Guinness, Viggo Mortensen and the poet himself — not to mention video commentaries by such luminaries as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. I don’t think so, not when you can get a used paperback copy for a buck or just download the thing for free off the Internet.

Instead, the people willing to shell out a premium for “The Waste Land” app are more likely to be older, the sort who feel they could have gotten a lot more out of the poem in college if they’d only been a little less distracted by the temptations that assail freshman English majors. Eliot’s poem is a bit daunting, but undeniably powerful, I told myself when a group of friends arranged a staged reading several years ago. I wish I knew it better, now that I’m more able to grasp its nuances. A new edition often provides the occasion for such revisits, which is one reason why publishers keep commissioning new translations of “Inferno” and “Madame Bovary.”

It sure doesn’t hurt that the app is so beautifully mounted. Shaw, who first toured her popular theatrical reading of the poem in the late ’90s, recites Eliot’s lines in a faded, crumbly Georgian interior that perfectly captures the prevailing tone of idle desiccation. The serenely austere page design conveys the flip side of the poem’s desert imagery, a feeling that in this place where everything extraneous has been burnt away, some titanic revelation is imminent.

You can watch Shaw read for a while, then switch back to the text to check a reference or translation, then go on reading the lines to the accompaniment of Ted Hughes’ very different vocal interpretation; the app keeps track of your place as you go. Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound played a crucial role in shaping “The Waste Land”; and the inclusion of the original manuscript with Pound’s handwritten edits offers a glimpse of that process. These various ways of approaching the text are enticements to the multiple readings that make a full appreciation of the poem possible.

Spending a day poring over “The Waste Land” app made me look at my old Norton critical editions with a new gleam in my eye. Instead of leafing through tissue-paper-thin pages of “Paradise Lost,” squinting at the tiny footnotes, it would be so pleasant to scroll through Milton’s epic (maybe with Gustave Dore’s engravings?), tapping on the lines that cry out for elucidation while listening to a professional narrator vault the poet’s enjambments far better than I ever could myself. How about “The Canterbury Tales,” with an audio track in Middle English to juxtapose against a modern English translation? I would indeed pay for these, and the enthusiastic reception for “The Waste Land” app suggests that I am not alone.

Further reading:

“The Waste Land” app in the iTunes app store

Touch Press page for “The Waste Land” with video demonstration

“We’re all sort of shattered,” she said.

Scott-Heron’s influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

“If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating ‘hooks,’ which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, “Now and Then.”

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply “black music or black American music.”

“Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we’ve come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West.

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which critiqued mass media, for the album “125th and Lenox” in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was “I’m New Here,” which he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.

Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time, including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped by the politics of the 1960s and the black literature, especially of the Harlem Renaissance.

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the publication of “The Vulture,” a murder mystery.

He also was the author of “The Nigger Factory,” a social satire.

Because Santorum is not a very good politician, he allowed himself to be “tripped up” by a student who asked him about how his campaign slogan was written by a gay, black, pro-union leftist poet:

Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, “Fighting to make America America again,” was borrowed from the “pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes.”

“No I had nothing to do with that,” Santorum said. “I didn’t know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn’t inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that.”

The student, whose name was not immediately available, was referring to the poem “Let America Be America Again.” When asked a short time later what the campaign slogan meant to him, Santorum said, “well, I’m not too sure that’s my campaign slogan, I think it’s on a web site.”

It was also printed on the campaign literature handed out before the speech.

Oh, Rick. Immediately disowning your campaign slogan, and denying it’s even your slogan, because some kid said it’s similar to something a liberal poet wrote? It is going to be a long campaign. (But not for you, because you will not do very well and will drop out early.)

Obviously there is a difference between making America be America again and letting it, but Hughes’ poem actually serves as a sort of prebuttal to Santorum’s notion of restoring America to its mythical former glory. America was never America for plenty of Americans. (“There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”)

Here is the poem being read by 95-year-old Lucy Davis:

Santorum hasn’t selected a new slogan yet but I vote for “Rick Santorum: Moving America to Giovanni’s Room.”

[Via]