August 2003
Carl Phillips
St. Louis, Missouri

Carl Phillips was born in Everett, Washington, in 1959. The son of an African-American Air Force sergeant from Alabama and an English, white homemaker, Phillips spent his childhood moving from one air force base to the next before his father retired in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where Phillips finished high school. He attended Harvard University, where he majored in classics, then earned a master’s in Latin and classical humanities at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He also holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University.

Phillips has received many awards and honors for his work: the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2002, which carries a prize of $100,000, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1995, the Lambda Book Award in 2000, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship. One of his books was a finalist for the National Book Award and another, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has two books forthcoming in 2004.

In 1993, Phillips moved to St. Louis, where he teaches English, creative writing, and African American literature at Washington University.

Two new poems by Phillips, never before published, follow the interview.

You began as a scholar of classical literature and Latin. Recently you’ve been translating Sophocles. What led you to your interest in classics?
I’ve been interested in codes—inventing them and breaking them—since about the fifth grade, which is also when I was living in Germany and began taking German. The transition from codes to foreign languages is an obvious one, of course; as for Latin and Greek, that came about when I moved back to the states, learned that German wasn’t offered, and discovered there was a place available in the beginning Latin class. I’d just started high school. I ended up taking Latin the entire time and promised my teachers I’d take one Greek course once I got to Harvard. One Greek course, and I was hooked.

What first drew me to the Greeks was the poetry in translation of the archaic poets—Sappho and Archilochus, especially. I hadn’t realized how much could be expressed by brevity, by mere fragment. Another lesson, but from the Latin side, was the power of syntax to control and manipulate a sentence and its reader. This I learned from the prose of Tacitus and Cicero.
As I was working on my degree in classics, I was also reading Plath. The combination of control and unabashed expression of emotion in her work somehow resonated with the Greek and Latin literature that I was reading.

I certainly wasn’t writing anything I’d call poetry at that time, but 10 years later, the influence of those writers proved to have been a lasting one.

What do you mean by “codes”?
Something fairly ordinary—ciphers, Morse code, that sort of thing. I read a book about them as a kid and began inventing my own, keeping journals in code, etc. It seems to me to have been an early sign of an interest both in manipulation of received information and in the creation of a world based in language or in language’s parts.

Was poetry attractive to you because of your interest in codes? Do you consider your poetry a kind of code?
I don’t think of my work as being in code, but I’m aware that it comes across that way to some readers. To the extent that my work is difficult, if that’s the word, it has to do with syntax—and yet, I don’t see that as some form of unbreakable code. Closer to the truth, I think, is that readers of poetry have become less familiar with a syntax that still exists in English, and is used by articulate speakers. And I think poetry has tended to split either into a use of language as flat (i.e., accessible, marketable, and easily learned) as possible or to an abandonment of syntax in exchange for radical fragmentation. My own notion for my poems, though, is that there’s a use for eloquence, rhetorical language, and precision of language, and that those things needn’t render the work cryptic. What they do is make the work something that challenges a reader to engage actively in the struggle to articulate meaning. That’s my goal, anyway.

So many of your poems seem to engage classical myth and history on such a deeply personal, lyrical level—“Roman Glass,” for example. How do you see yourself bridging the gap between ancient and the contemporary worlds? Do you see your poems transforming classical mythology and history?
I don’t think my poems really transform or contemporize existing myths. Rather, it seems to me that the myths that exist do so because they arose out of experiences common to being human, and that makes them timeless, given that there are still humans on earth. Much of what I think about mythology comes to me via Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he tracks the common threads among myths of widely disparate cultures. All of that is to say that it is more the case that I will find a contemporary experience resonating with and aligning itself with an existing myth. In a poem like “Roman Glass,” it’s less myth than history we’re talking about. I turned to the Roman model of co-consulship, and its ultimate ineffectiveness, as a means of discussing the balance of power in a contemporary relationship between two men and the ways in which that power, necessarily, cannot remain balanced all the time. But I don’t think that means that I contemporized an ancient institution.

In a recent interview, you mentioned The Tether being about the inability to distinguish between art and life. What did you mean by that?
I think it’s possible to lose a sense of reality—or more exactly, responsibility—in the making of art, or at least for me that is the danger—it’s the danger of being in love with argument and debate and intellectual conceits. And somewhere in there, I am also thinking of how we justify questionable behavior as a means of sustaining that behavior. Is it betrayal of a relationship to have sex with another person if love didn’t figure into it? That’s an example. Or in my poem “Clap of Thunder,” from Pastoral, there’s an argument that the gods reveal themselves to us—or have, in the past—in unexpected ways. If that’s the case, to what degree are we to put faith in a stranger? Of course, one has only to remember that the appearance of gods as I’m speaking of it is a scene from literature, not reality, unless one is prone to visions, which is another story...

What is the connection between “failing one’s art,” as you say in “Clap of “Thunder,” and failing one’s life?
For me, they are one and the same. The stakes are that personal, and that high.

So fidelity and morality, in art and in life, are the principal concerns of Pastoral?
I was thinking of those issues when I wrote Pastoral, but by the time of the poems in The Tether, they reached a different kind of pitch, I suppose, which is about as much as I can say or feel comfortable saying. I think that change in pitch is reflected in the dramatic shift in how the poems look on the page after Pastoral. It also reflects a weariness with the romanticized notion of the pastoral genre and with the kind of elaborated language that I had found for those poems.

You became weary of the pastoral?
I’d had this notion that the pastoral was intriguing. I discovered it in college, in Virgil, and it was new to me then. When I returned to it with a lot more living behind me, I could see how naive it could be—not within its own period, but in terms of my own experience. As I was writing the poems that ended up being the book Pastoral, it seemed as if the mystique (if you want to call it that) of even my own symbology was finally only a dodge around facing up to more difficult truths. My point, in fact, in the final poem, “The Kill,” had been to kill all of my own symbols—the swan, the crashing deer—only to have a choice have to be made between the relentlessness of those symbols and the more troubling (real) life that those symbols vied with. In the end, I guess I can’t make the choice—in that poem anyway—which is why it ends the way it does.

Critics of The Tether have focused on how you use symbols to explore our relationships with erotic desire, God, and the body, all themes we see addressed in your other books, too. Yet you’ve said that The Tether is the most markedly different from all of your other collections.
The less obvious way it’s different is in its sensibility: The poems in The Tether acknowledge the sort of thing I’ve been saying about naivete and tend to admit, as well, to an exhaustion with romanticizing the world. Sure, there are still symbols and things allegorical, but I think the poems face squarely a truth that was circled in Pastoral: that there is nothing romantic about infidelity (sexual and spiritual), and that morality may be flexible (and should be), but somehow that flexibility becomes the test of an individual’s ability to accept or refuse responsibility for one’s mistakes.

But the most immediately noticeable difference is that in The Tether, the line bears no resemblance to that of the earlier books. I found myself for the most part only able to write a very tight, short line, and I think the syntax—in being more spare—somehow also is more pushed to its limits. I feel that the syntax has a harshness reflective of the sensibility I’ve just mentioned. Whereas in Pastoral, the lines and their syntax seem much more baroque, reflective of the style of argument by which the poems’ speakers justify their often-questionable behavior.

When you say “romanticizing the world,” are you weary with that stance only within yourself, or do you think it’s a problem in contemporary poetry?
No, I don’t see it as a trend in contemporary poetry. If anything, poems now seem to have gone in a direction of clinicizing the world. Maybe that’s the result of people misunderstanding what I think Jorie Graham means by “the end of beauty.” I think she was getting at the the idea of there being no clear and fixed definition of beauty—of that definition being increasingly more fluid—and at the idea of an end to beauty as something that blinds us to what is less beautiful, but very real, about life. But it doesn’t mean that beauty itself is over, as continues to be clear in Graham’s work.

In my own work, I had a similar concern. It seemed to me that I had reached a kind of limit, in terms of lushness of syntax, which is a kind of beauty, in Pastoral. And difficulties in my own life led, I believe, to the comparative starkness of the line and of how syntax works in The Tether. I think I’m now working toward a middle ground, where I can have the stark and the lush work together somehow.

Boston Review has said your work has “the sound of high seriousness,” and you’ve mentioned that you take a dim view of the current climate of irony in poetry. What’s your general take on humor in poetry?
I don’t like silliness, because I take poetry seriously, as unfashionable as that apparently is. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a sense of humor, nor does it mean I can’t appreciate it in poetry—but it has to have its own resonance and ability to contribute to meaning. Maybe a way to explain is that I could watch The Honeymooners forever—there’s crude slapstick, but there’s also a way in which the humor illuminates and grants poignancy to working-class struggle and to the importance of friendship and love when it comes to sustaining that struggle. On the other hand, there’s The Three Stooges. Enough said?

But I may also just have a strange notion of humor. I think there’s a lot of wit and humor in Geoffrey Hill’s work, and I love that. I like how the humor works in Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands.

Your newest book, Rock Harbor, has been discussed as being about ethics, morality, and responsibility against the backdrop of intimate personal relationships. Would you say that’s accurate? How is Rock Harbor a different project from, say, The Tether?
I agree with critics who say that, although I wouldn’t call it a conscious project as much as the result of a highly personal questioning about relationships and their various manifestations. This became my main concern around the writing of Cortege, when I was interested in the possibilities for stability in same-sex relationships, male specifically. And then, simply in the course of being in a relationship, and in the world, for as long as I have, I’ve seen how relationships—as well as one’s interior relationship to oneself—get variously challenged along the way. Earlier assumptions get reconfigured…It’s a constant testing, I think, and our ability to adapt determines the degree to which our relationships survive the many changes that occur along the way.

As far as how Rock Harbor differs from The Tether, I’d say The Tether comes directly out of a place of crisis in a relationship, and Rock Harbor comes from and responds to the uneasy survival of that crisis, the new anchorlessness (or tetherlessness), one might say. Or the life after realizing that any anchor/tether will be an abstract one —which was always the case, but it took the thrashing in The Tether to figure that out, for this writer anyway.

Your newest poems are stylistically very different from those in The Tether and Rock Harbor. Your lines have lengthened, your diction seems more flowing, the subject matter less abstract. Is this a conscious change, or a kind of natural evolution?
Nothing is conscious, in terms of style, except the division of a poem into stanzas later, over which I spend a great deal of time. But the line length—and diction—all of that determines itself. I found myself writing longer lines even as the delivery of content became more meditative—and if the subject matter has become less abstract—has it?—then that may have something to do with counterbalancing the longer sentences …I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it.

I also have never been consciously working on a book. I just sort of write poems, and eventually it seems I have more than enough for a book, and I decide to go over all of them and see what still seems good, and how the good pieces seem to be interacting with each other. I’d say I usually have to have about 50 poems before I go through and winnow them down to 30 or so. The others never end up in a book, or that’s been true so far, even if the individual poems have been published in journals. If three poems are doing the same work, I only want the one that does it best to appear in a book. Very much not the vogue in putting a volume of poems together, to judge from the current state of things…

Are the poems we’ve seen lately in journals from the forthcoming book or a future collection?
The poems, or some of them that you’ve seen recently, are from The Rest of Love, which will be published in February. The publisher sees it as a third volume in a trilogy, and I begin to think that may be right. The two poems you’re publishing in Pleiades are more recent and won’t be in The Rest of Love.

How did the poem “Come Blue, Come Silver” come about?
I get something into my head and obsess over it. I’d read an article about ground-nesting birds—quail, for example—and how they survive the winter, or try to, by huddling beneath the snow in a group, for body heat. Somehow, that set the poem into motion. What I didn’t expect is the violence that emerges and the parallel between birds staying or leaving a climate and people staying in or leaving a threatening relationship. I see the poem as spiritual, though—the “he” as something like God, although at the same time, the “he” as the sadist in a sadomasochistic relationship—now there’s a parallel … The title is meant as a variation on “come rain, come shine,” the notion of remaining devoted in spite of changes in the emotional climate. Blue, for me, ever since the poem “Blue,” in my first book, is a kind of ideal—and therefore impossible—state of joy and stability. Silver, as in the silver age, is less so.

What about “Coin of the Realm”?
The power struggle in any relationship fascinates me. I am also increasingly interested in that division of power, voluntarily, in sadomasochism. As I am interested, too, in the viability of considering sadomasochism in the context of a spiritual life. “Coin of the Realm” comes out of that. The division of society into master and slave (the armored and the armorless), the lack of complaint about such a division, the way in which the tensions of struggle to which one surrenders the self can yield creativity, a kind of art in fact; which is how, toward the end, I see the poem as also being about the making of art itself and the degree to which the art we produce will have been worth what it cost us, if we had to suffer (and generate suffering, perhaps) in order to get at the art. It all seems of a piece with my earlier work, I think – the relationship as restive crucible out of which poems emerge. The examined life as, itself, such a crucible.

The poem became a starting point for an essay that I wrote on the high seriousness of poetry, the high stakes, and how much an artist must be willing to commit to the hard truths of life in order to produce meaningful, committed work. It’s the title piece in a collection of essays, Coin of the Realm, which comes out next year, a few months after The Rest of Love.

Has life in the Midwest influenced your writing and career?
Absolutely. When my first book came out, several reviews referred to me as a decidedly “urban” poet, by which I think they meant both streetwise and maybe a bit cocky, and, of course, they meant the context in which the poems seem to occur. But my entire way of writing, of seeing the world, changed when I came to Missouri. Part of it was feeling isolated in St. Louis, not included in the writing “circle” there, in part because of having just arrived. The effect was that I felt much freer to do whatever I wanted on the page. I became less self-conscious, I guess. This, as opposed to Cambridge/Boston, where it seemed impossible not to be aware of what everyone else was doing, impossible to imagine no one was looking over one’s shoulder, if that makes sense…

The other big thing that happened was that I found myself out in the landscape much more, thanks in part to my partner, Doug, a landscape photographer. So we drove out into the Midwest countryside a lot, and I found the skies gave me some strange version of what the ocean gives out east. It seemed somehow conducive to a more meditative poem, and I think that’s where the poems took on a more spiritual/moral questing cast, which has come to characterize all of my work since then.

Careerwise— hmm. Well, the move to the Midwest has had everything to do with how things have turned out. I was supposed to be a visiting writer for three years at Washington University. After the first year, they decided to make mine a tenure-track position, and in the third year, they gave me tenure. I think that that kind of support from the university—their belief in and commitment to what I was doing—has made all the difference in my ability to write as I want to write. Sure, I would have written anyway, but it never hurts to have people believe in you.

Interview conducted by Kevin Prufer and Joy Katz for Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and Web publication by the Missouri Center for the Book. Prufer is a professor of English and philosophy and the poetry editor of Pleiades. His latest book is The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2003). Katz is a senior editor at Pleiades and an art director who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Fabulae (Southern Illinois Press).

Books by Carl Phillips
Coin of the Realm (Graywolf; essays) forthcoming in 2004
The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; poetry) forthcoming in 2004
Philoctetes (Oxford University Press; translation), 2003
Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 2002
The Tether (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 2001
Pastoral (Graywolf), 2000
From the Devotions (Graywolf), 1998
Cortege (Graywolf), 1995
In the Blood (Northeastern), 1992

Come Blue, Come Silver

Not every bird flies elsewhere—some stay. Even if I could. Some
live grounded. Everything that he handles he handles roughly,
why should I be exceptional? I don’t think he can help it,

no one can help him. Roughly at first, and then that harshness
as in winter when it’s gone routine, steady downbeat to the light
we forget to notice—I’d forgotten. His hands like that,

his fist: part promise, and part the attraction,
let go of me, deeper than that, beneath the snow that the ice
seals fast, deeper still, where the birds lie huddled, slow-hearted, against

one another, some stay, barely stir inside me, each one of them
a stunned psalm, little preface to a spring that
may never include them. It won’t have mattered: What is a fist

but that which, opening, must disappear? Not every bird,
not every. Some fly like help straight toward what won’t be helped, ever—
and find themselves: no less grounded; not exceptional. And some of us let go.

Coin of the Realm

Wrecked tiaras; plundered tombs ago— Beauty

was form, and form was discipline when, at last,
it forgets itself. Glamour and scandal weren’t yet
the same. Devotion was what it mostly still is:

a force. A willed exception. Some wore armor—
and to those who wore it others knelt, making of
the body and its gestures a complicated,

though very efficient braid of courtesy and
debasement—against all of which, no voice
from either party is said to have cried out, ever:

in fact, they worked together, so well, it made
labor seem a music, almost, in the way
the fluttering of a tattered flag—the sound

of that—and that of a whole one also fluttering
make a kind of music, though a music born
of accident, which they had long since stopped

trying to distinguish from fixed circumstance,
which is to say fate—their version of it—
which they did believe in. They believed in the gods,

and it is true the gods lived, for a time,
among them. Less credible: that the gods
when they retreated, did so because convinced

no one prayed anymore, or not enough.
Or not to them. They simply left. In the wake
of which, the citizens continued turning wilderness

into settlement. Inscribing, as had been the custom,
each new building with that motto in which,
if anywhere, they seem clearly to have intended

to announce a sensibility they either thought
most defined them, or they hoped it would seem to:
Trust Me, As I Trust You— Meaning what, though?

That they were naïve? unexacting? shrewd?
Each possibility is a real one,
as the difference it makes is real, when it comes

to determining not what manner of end they come to—
that part is legend—but to what degree, having found
you must, you must call it something, you will call it

inevitable. Deserved, even. Maybe worth what it cost.