Philip Levine reads Federico Garcia Lorca | LIVE from the NYPL

Philip Levine reads Federico Garcia Lorca's "New York (Office and Denunciation)"
Recorded on June 4th, 2013 at the New York Public Library
For more events by LIVE from the NYPL visit: www.nypl.org/events/live-nypl
Watch the full 90-minute recording here: goo.gl/ho4oUB
To coincide with The New York Public Library's exhibition “Back Tomorrow: Federico Garcia Lorca / Poet in New York,” this special installment of LIVE from the NYPL celebrates Lorca's life and legacy with performances and readings. Participants include John Giorno, Will Keen and Maria Fernandez Ache, Philip Levine, Christopher Maurer, Paul Muldoon, Patti Smith, and Tracy K. Smith.
Written while Federico García Lorca was a student at Columbia University in 1929-30, Poet in New York is arguably one of the poet’s most important works, and a powerful testament to New York City as seen through the eyes of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The book was published posthumously in 1940, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared, lost to scholars for decades.
The Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid and The New York Public Library exhibit it now for the first time, together with drawings, photographs, letters, and mementos. Join LIVE for a celebration of this homecoming.
PHILIP LEVINE
Philip Levine "is a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland" who, according to Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, should be considered "one of [America's]...quintessentially urban poets." He was born in 1928 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, in Detroit, a city that inspired much of his writing. The author of twenty collections of poetry, including the most recent, News Of The World (Knopf, 2009), the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Simple Truth, and What Work Is, which won the National Book Award in 1991. Levine is known as the poet of the working class, and he remains dedicated to writing poetry "for people for whom there is no poetry.” He was the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate for 2011-2012.

[@susanadiasjohnson457]

YOU WERE MY PROFESSOR OF POETRY AT FRESNO STATE IN 1970. YOU TAUGHT ME GARCIA LORCA LIKE HE WOULD LOVE TO BE TAUGHT.

[@v.i.p.matthew]

Thank you, Philip Levine. So beautiful!. R.I.P.

[@v.i.p.matthew]

Love Lorca very much. ❤

[@jamey55lee]

Lorca's poetry changed my life.

[@raykaelin]

Alan Lee I believe you, it changed me.

[@mimiseton]

I love this poem -- this poet -- and this reading by Mr. Levine, which I found passionately connected to the rage and horror in the poem.
I wouldn't call this "negative" as Shangrila73eldorado did...I would call it gloriously hideous. Seething with imagistic life. A poem like an army of insects. You might not find it pretty, but you can't deny the life force in it.

[@jeremiahshine]

A true vision of the hell of concentrated populations and managed resources.

[@epameinondaspapamichail9896]

The poem Adivinanza de la Guitarra has become a song by E Papamichail

[@SRfive2O]

💜 March 25 2022

[@darrenrichardson9876]

WOW

[@bbilltthompson]

It's one hell of a thing for a Spaniard to lecture Americans about animal blood.

[@shangrila73eldorado]

is this lorca's work? it seems incredibly negative...lorca has better stuff

[@MuskPumpkin]

shangrila73eldorado Have you read Poet in New York?

[@MrJhonbaker]

Have you read Lorca? It seems you are conflating Neruda with the ever glorious Lorca - and just... no

[@simonlee8889]

“Ángel y musa se escapan con violín o compás, y el duende hiere, y en la curación de esta herida, que no se cierra nunca, está lo insólito, lo inventado de la obra de un hombre.”
I suggest you read more of him and more deeply then...