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Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on September 17, 2009
Literary Imagination, doi:10.1093/litimag/imp066
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Silence Amidst The Crowd

Chard deNiord*

*Providence College, Providence, RI.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Two remarkably patient, deferential poems that invoke the unsayable in the midst of America's increasingly bumptious culture are "The Simple Truth" and "Call It Music" by Philip Levine. Although appearing ten years apart, "The Simple Truth" in 1994 and "Call It Music" in 2004, these two lyrical narratives defer in their conclusions to the ineffable "voice" behind speech, moving from a remorseful ars poetica in "The Simple Truth" to a mystical reverie in "Call It Music." In both poems, the catalyst that inspires Levine to humble himself before ineffable truths lies in his placing others, a potato vender in "The Simple Truth" and Charlie Parker in "Call It Music," before him with Whitman-like awe and empathy. It is Levine's "negative capability" in identifying with these sacred ordinary others that spawns his awareness of the power of the unsayable. Here are the two poems.

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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