You Can Have It

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“Of Love and Other Disasters” by Philip Levine (2007)

Like “You Can Have It,” this is a narrative poem that concerns blue-collar individuals, in this case a woman and a man: a divorced “punch-press operator from Flint” (Line 1), another auto city in Michigan; and an “assembler from West Virginia” (Line 2). The woman’s factory job has given her hands “deep lines” (Line 22), but the man sees instead them as “slender and fine” (Lines 29). When she “wipe[s] something off / above his left cheekbone” (Line 35-36), he believes a more intimate connection with her could be possible. Like “You Can Have It,” the poem deals with the difficulties of being a laborer and the need for second chances, as well as the importance of emotional connection.

“What Work Is” by Philip Levine (1991)

This is the titular poem from What Work Is. Like “You Can Have It” this poem features the speaker’s relationship with his brother. Standing in a line for employment, the speaker thinks he sees his brother but is mistaken. In reality, the brother, like the one in “You Can Have It,” is “sleep[ing] off a miserable night shift” (Line 27). The speaker misses his brother and wonders “[h]ow long has it been since you told him / you loved him, held his wide shoulders” (Lines 33-34). The longing for connection resembles the speaker’s in “You Can Have It” and may portray the same brothers.

“Library Days” by Philip Levine (2009)

Embedded in an interview with Tablet Magazine is the autobiographical poem, “Library Days,” collected into News of the World. The poem recounts Levine’s experience of sneaking off for “library days” in “1951” (Line 16) instead of going to work. This poem is set three years after “You Can Have It.” Levine and his co-worker parked their delivery van in a “safe” (Line 3) place. Levine used the time to soak up great literary works. Like “You Can Have It,” the poem suggests there’s more to life than the “offices and shops” (Line 55) and factories. The poet thinks, “men and women could curse / the vicious air, they could buy and sell / each other, they could beg for a cup of soup […] they could embrace or die” (Line 56-60) but “it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do” (Line 61). Unlike the brother in “You Can Have It,” the poet is determined to have a different life and a different concept of “work” (Line 61).

Further Literary Resources

“Fresh Air Remembers Former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine” by Terry Gross (2015)

This is a rebroadcast of a 1991 conversation with host Gross and Levine. Levine discusses his life as a Detroit factory worker, his relationship as a twin, and what that meant for his identity and his poetry. Levine also discusses his debt to poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell. He mentions to Gross his growth from thinking he would change the world with his poetry to his deep love and engagement with its craft: “[W]hether it changes people or whether it doesn't, it's what I have to do.”

“Breath: Can’t Forget the Motor City” by Terrence Rafferty (2004)

In this review of Breath, one of Levine’s later collections, Rafferty describes Levine as a “famously […] working-class poet, having often drawn on his unprivileged youth in industrial Detroit for the material of his work.” He notes how Levine intends to “restore to life people who were never, despite their deadening work, dead things themselves, and who deserve to be rescued from the longer death of being forgotten.” This directly applies to the elegiac tone of “You Can Have It.” Rafferty also addresses the musicality of Levine’s work.

“Standing Up for the Fallen” by Edward Hirsch (1991)

In this New York Times review of Levine’s New Selected Poems, Hirsch uses lines from “You Can Have It” to illustrate Levine’s subject matter. According to Hirsch, Levine is “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland, loyal to his roots in Detroit, determined to remember the exhausted and enraged worker, the unlucky immigrant, the man who gasps for breath and asks, am I going to make it?” He commends Levine for his two decades depicting “the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.” Assessing Levine’s first 10 years of work, the review discusses the development of Levine’s “increasingly narrative and supple free verse style” and working-class themes. Hirsch notes how his poems are “ultimately carried forward and transmuted by passion, by a stubborn will to remember and testify.”

Listen to Poem

Philip Levine reads “You Can Have It”

This audio recording was posted on SoundCloud in 2022 by poets.org, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. It is undated, but the sound of applause indicates it was a public reading.