Philip Levine and I have exchanged almost 150 letters over the past seventeen years. I met him while pursuing a master's in creative writing at New York University. He was the only professor there with the courage to publicly shred his students' poems—shredded some of mine into oblivion, as I recall. "Not one of these lines means anything," he would say, or "Most of what happens to you in a day is not worth writing about." But he was also, at least in my case, the most affirming of teachers: "Looks like we have a young Hart Crane here," he once said after reading one of my poems, and so I zealously read The Bridge to figure out what he meant. Turned out he was wrong. He was wrong a lot, and not afraid to admit it.

I first wrote to him in 1994 when I'd heard from a friend at Duke University's short-lived DoubleTake Magazine that Levine had agreed to write an essay on the closing of my in-laws' White Furniture Company. For more than a century, White had been the heart of the Mayberryesque town of Mebane, North Carolina—now little more than an exurb for nearby Chapel Hill and Burlington. Levine, with his reputation for documenting working-class America, was a logical choice for this assignment. I was delighted at the connection, of course, and exploited it. I now realize that there didn't need to be an occasion for a letter to Levine—or Phil, of "Yours, Phil," as I and many others have come to think of him.

In August of this year, when headlines began to appear saying that Levine had been ap-pointed to poetry's highest office, I wasn't surprised. Having already claimed a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, an NBCC, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and many other laurels, and representing, as he is said to, the voice of the American heartland, he seemed a natural choice for poet laureate. For his own part, he claimed to be "stunned" (Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2011), a characteristic response and not at all false humility. Levine is an authentic skeptic, one who ...

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