! ! A Tribute To Philip Levine. For Hanque

Tenderness. It was forty-seven years ago and Bernie Strempek and I were in this bar in downtown Detroit watching this beautiful second-rate jazz singer and Bernie started to talk about tenderness. His father had abandoned this family of four and so his mother worked nights at Ford Rouge and she knew Bernie wanted to become a poet and she totally supported that. Bernie was a guy of amazing smarts who seemed almost too gentle and delicate for this world in which he did not long remain. I didn’t know the word tenderness but when Bernie talked of it I thought wow, I could use some of that. * [From his conversations]