The Riot That Found Its Threnody : THE BREAD OF TIME: Toward an Autobiography, <i> By Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 296 pp.)</i>

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” Federico Garcia Lorca exclaimed when he arrived in New York. Out of the bewildered encounter between the finely surreal singer of slain gypsies and flowers that bleed, and Manhattan’s stink and clangor, came “Poet in New York.” A poet can write out of any state of spirit as long as he trusts it. Lorca trusted his dismay.

And he taught Philip Levine to trust his. Levine came to poetry in the course of a dozen years alternately spent studying and working in the hot-metal foundries of Detroit’s auto industry. Illegitimate, not knowing who his father was, raised in near-poverty by a keen-spirited mother, he wore his blue collar with pride; particularly when he took a course from the languidly patrician Robert Lowell, whom he loathed. He also wore it with a sense of artistic constriction. Had he lived in the ‘30s, he might have settled into Socialist Realism. In the supremely disengaged ‘50s, his proletarian condition, leftist convictions and passion for the old Spanish Republic had no place to lodge. But there was more to it than that.

After working the overnight shift at Chevrolet Gear & Axle, he would try to write, he tells us in one of these autobiographical essays. It didn’t work. What stopped him was not weariness or unfashionability. It was his own sensibility. How could you write poetry about the gritty reality of America’s working life? His rage was rhetoric-sized but he despised rhetoric. He loved Whitman, but there can be no other Whitman. He loved Keats, Stevens, William Carlos Williams and the fine, shining craft.

In this doubt, he tells us, he came upon “Poet in New York.” Outrage shatters the sheer heaviness of things--derricks, subways, office-buildings--and the heaviness of outrage is lifted, in turn, by the childlike joyfulness of Lorca’s imagery. “A wooden wind from the south,” Levine quotes from a dockside passage, “slanting through the black mire/ spits on the broken boats and drives tacks into shoulders./ A south wind that carries/ tusks, sunflowers, alphabets,/ and a battery with drowned wasps.”

“Never in poetry written in English had I found such a direct confrontation of one image with another or heard such violence held in abeyance and enclosed in so perfect a musical form,” Levine writes. “What in my work had been chaotic rant was in his a stately threnody circling around a center of riot.” It validated Levine’s own rioting center; it told him that he might find a threnody of his own to circle it. It took years, he tells us. It was achieved--though he doesn’t tell us--in his great collection “What Work Is,” published two years ago.

The pieces in “The Bread of Time” are a series of experiments in remembering rather than a whole organized act of memory. In suggesting the present simultaneity of discrete past images, Levine sometimes introduces bits that don’t very clearly fit. He can strut his blue collar, as in his mockery of a young academic who “pranced before us reading some sprightly little paper for ‘Notes and Queries.’ ” He prefers bowling, he lets us know.

His wandering method works perfectly, though, in his portrait of his mother. She lived in Europe for a while, worked for years and in near-poverty in Detroit to raise her children and, when they were grown, skipped to California. Philip visits her when she is 80; she is sardonic and free. She shows an odd familiarity with the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio--Levine pauses to wonder if he could be his father--and translates one of his poems for him. “It’s a lot worse than it sounds,” she assures him. “It loses a lot in the original.” Truly, a poet’s mother.

After sketching a mannered professor who taught him James Joyce at college, Levine touches upon various aspects of his own life and his growing sense of aging. Suddenly the professor is back, no longer caricatured but a contemporary in Levine’s own autumnal process. The professor ends his course with Joyce’s injunction that a reader should spend a lifetime reading what it took him, Joyce, a lifetime to write.

“I am that reader,” Professor Prescott tells his departing students, “and I can tell you that it was a wasted life.”

The three best pieces are about Levine’s poetic mentors. He portrays John Berryman as a man stretched past his own long gawkiness in his passion to impart what poetry must be. His voice went so high that “it seemed that only a dog could hear it.” His class was a battlefield; Berryman would tear the poems apart or praise them; either way, the students were goaded to make them better. “Levine, this will never do,” still rings in the writer’s ears, along with, “One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will” and--when one student turned in a magnificent sonnet--”Say that better in 1,000 words and you’re a genius.”

Levine’s young passion for the Spanish Republic led him to spend a sabbatical, years later, in Barcelona. He evokes the mid-’60s when the Franco regime still oppressed, but with a shaky hand. There is a wonderful encounter with two members of the once-feared Guardia Civil taking refuge from the rain in a bar. One of them showed Levine a cork stuck in the muzzle of his carbine to keep the water out, and launched into a sardonic political skit: “This is what they have given me to defend the sacred shores of Spain from the communist fleet. I haven’t a chance. The string on the cork is broken; one shot and I’m through.”

Out of his sketch comes the shadowy figure of Antonio Machado, modern Spain’s greatest poet. Levine takes Spanish lessons from a young poet; he in turn introduces his pupil to Machado’s grave, seemingly plain and magically haunted work. It has all but defied translation. Levine’s efforts to translate a poem, and his irritation over a set of translations by Robert Bly, produce a comically frank image of a poet’s work and prickles. Finally there is a beautiful tribute--virtually a prose poem--to Machado’s spiritual oneness with the gaunt landscape of Castille. Levine calls it “soul” and his writing strips the word of millennia of lofty and sentimental associations and delivers it plain.

It is also the key word in his portrait of Ivor Winters. Freed from factory work by a fellowship to Stanford, Levine spent a year studying with the bristly and resolutely unfashionable poet and critic. In almost every respect they were opposites. Levine was young and new; Winters was old and even his contemporaries considered him a stylistic reactionary. Levine depicts a man whose passionate attachment to what he considered real poetry--he insisted that an obscure Georgian poet, T. Sturge Moore, was superior to Yeats--had isolated him both aesthetically and personally. Yet Levine manages to let us see what burned beneath the crust. Through long afternoons Winters read old French and Breton poetry to him, laying out imagery, metrics, etymology. In the passion for craft it recalled Berryman; and in another way it recalled Machado. “Philip,” Winters told him once, “we must never lie or we shall lose our soul.”