Philip Levine, the Detroit native and former Poet Laureate of the U.S. who considered Brooklyn Heights his real home, and who once wrote a poem about an incident on the Promenade, died this past Saturday at his other home in California. His Heights neighbor, Michael Bourne, remembers him fondly:
It was pelting rain in Brooklyn and I was out with my son, then about four, headed to the grocery store. Directly across the street, I saw a lanky elderly man, his iron-gray hair matted with rain, on the top step of his stoop, banging on the front door of his brownstone and shouting up at the third-floor window to be let in. It was the poet Philip Levine. I had seen him around the neighborhood for years, and may have even waved to him the way one does to familiar-looking strangers, but now I recognized him because just a couple weeks before his picture had been in the paper when he was appointed the nation’s Poet Laureate.
Full story here.
Photo: KRDO.com.
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