A Philip Levine Collection


Title:  The Bread of Time  Toward an Autobiography
Printing:  First
Year of publication:  1994
Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
City:  New York
Number of Pages:  292
Cover:  hard cover
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:  93-22599
ISBN:  0-679-42406-7

Table of Contents:
  • Mine Own John Berryman
  • The Holy Cities
  • Entering Poetry
  • Class with no Class
  • The Key
  • The Poet in New York in Detroit
  • Living in Machado
  • The Shadow of the Big Madrone
  • The Bread of Time Redeemed



cover:  Bread in a Basket by Salvador Dali


excerpt from "The Key"

In fact I know I won't go back, any more than I'll go back to the seminar room on the second floor of Old Main to hear once again the good Dr. Prescott lecture on James Joyce. Chances are that the professor has joined the final bibliography of the air, and there's no one to hear the traffic break in on his serious, hushed voice. Who could ever forget the final day in his Ulysses seminar? After folding his small, delicate hands on the closed book, he removed his glasses so that he seemed in his near-sightedness to be looking at all of us and none of us. "Are there any last questions?" he said. We were twelve totally befuddled students who knew at least that it was too late to begin asking. No one said a word. Dr. Prescott began his summation, the magical key by means of which we would open every impossible, Byzantine text. "As you may know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life."











excerpt from "The Shadow of the Big Madrone"

At 56, more scared of me than I of him,
his right forefinger raised to keep the beat,
he graveled out his two great gifts of truth:
"I'd rather die than reread the last novels
of Henry James," and "Philip, we must never lie
or we shall lose our souls."