A Conversation with Carl Phillips

A Conversation with Carl Phillips Kylan Rice (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution photo by Reston Allen End Page 148 Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. A new book of poems, Scattered Snows, to the North, will be out in the early fall of 2024. Phillips's honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). He teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis. End Page 149 KYLAN RICE: Much has been written about your unique relationship to syntax, especially your use of the long sentence broken across multiple lines. In my experience as a reader of your poetry, the long periodic sentence is often employed in an effort to speak with precision, to make a claim and then adjust it in the next breath. In other words, your sentences make distinctions. And yet, your sentences as often trail off or lose themselves. You seem equally concerned with twilight, with "shadowlands," with mists and fogs—or with indistinction, and indeed in some cases with things making no difference or being no different from each other. Can you respond to these observations and perhaps also speak to this tension I see in your work, between distinction and indistinction, between difference and indifference? CARL PHILLIPS: I think what you're seeing is just my own way of mirroring/enacting how to be human is to move routinely between clarity and unclarity. We are clear about some things—the sun is up, the dog is ready for her walk—but there's always unclarity as well: what will my looming retirement look like, what should I make for dinner tonight? And this seems especially true about the larger abstractions—love, for example. We can know we love someone, but there's the unclarity as to how that love might evolve, is there a shelf life to it, will the two of us evolve in different directions that might require us to rethink what we mean by love and companionship? I realized early in my life that it's very hard to know anything for sure. I also just assumed, when I began writing, that there was a responsibility to be accurate, and I believed authority came from being as close to the truth as possible—but the truth is slippery, ever in flux, and there's often no agreement on what the truth even is. So each time I say something in a poem, I'm feeling out the ground of my ideas, I suppose, testing it for accuracy. And I find, as I proceed with an idea, that one thought often displaces or revises another as I attempt to get my idea, the articulation of it, "right." I don't trust poems that simply assume a stance as the correct one, without their having proved to me that real thought has gone into getting to that stance. Even something subjective—if someone says, in a poem, "I'm sad," I immediately start thinking about the infinite gradations of sadness: how are you sad, how long have you been sad, sad as in broken and unable to go on, or sad as in you carry your sorrow with you everywhere you go, you'd miss it . . . ? End Page 150 KR: The feeling of sadness depends on a concrete situation. But sometimes your poems will examine a feeling like sadness on its own, as an abstract noun. Your particular handling of the abstract noun seems to me to be one of the most distinctive features of your work. Ezra Pound told poets to "go in fear of abstractions"—but your poetry reminds us that we are all the time experiencing abstractions like freedom, fidelity, love, betrayal...