Carl Phillips is a poet, critic, and translator whose books include Double Shadow and Coin of the Realm. He teaches at Washington University.

Published Date: October 10, 2012

Transcription

Announcer:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Carl Phillips.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2012 AWP Annual Conference in Chicago with poet Carl Phillips.

Carl Phillips is the author of 11 books of poetry, including most recently, Double Shadow, Speak Low, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006, and Riding Westward. He's won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. Phillips is professor of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

Carl Phillips, welcome.

Carl Phillips:

Thank you, Brian.

Brian Brodeur:

I'd like to start off with a poem, if you don't mind. Would you read, "Radiance versus Ordinary Light"?

Carl Phillips:

Sure, thanks. "Radiance versus Ordinary Light."

"Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation--his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder and, on his chest, the larger bruise, star-shaped, a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands, has tried--can't remember...

"That kind of rhythm to it, even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's what we say. We dive in and, as usual, the swimming feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first slackens that much more quickly, if you don't look back.

"Regret, like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther, leaving the shore the way the water--in its own watered, of course, version of semaphore-keeps leaving the subject out, flashing, 'Why should it matter now' and 'Why, why shouldn't it,' as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine."

Brian Brodeur:

Wonderful, thank you. Like many of your poems, this one explores the tenuous dichotomies between mind and body, intimacy and history, control and powerlessness, sex and the spiritual life. These dichotomies have stuck with you throughout your career. Does a poet choose his subjects and themes or are they chosen for him?

Carl Phillips:

Maybe it depends on the type of poet you are. For me, they feel chosen. I'm not able to just randomly decide I'm now going to write about, say, baseball or something like that. So I feel as if, in the same way that we develop our own symbology, that there's certain things that at least haunt certain kinds of poets, and that's the answer I give to myself most of the time. Sometimes I think it just means I only have a handful of things to write about, but so did Emily Dickinson.

Brian Brodeur:

Good company. There's also the sense in "Radiance versus Ordinary Light" that sex in the body cannot escape transgressions, bruises, regret. Yet the speaker, through his awareness and acceptance of these things, achieves a kind of freedom in that final sentiment, "I'll break your heart, break mine." This seems a trend in your work. The more you write and publish about sex, the body, and desire, the more affirmatively you view these subjects. Would you agree?

Carl Phillips:

I would agree. I think it might have to do with how I began writing struggling with a lot of those things and struggling with the idea of feeling guilty about one's identity or having been raised to think that you should feel guilty, and I think somehow, maybe just getting older and ways in which society has changed or maybe getting older and realizing maybe it's too late anyway to change so perhaps you should start embracing your demons instead of wrestling with them all the time. But I think there's a danger to that too. You could sort of give sway to them entirely. It seems an ongoing negotiation with what troubles a person.

Brian Brodeur:

And who they are.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Brian Brodeur:

Through various forms and tones, the speaker of your poems over the years has remained remarkably constant, I think anyway. How closely does this speaker resemble your own personality? Maybe a more interesting question is how much has the creation of the self or those selves on the page influenced and informed your identity outside of your poems?

Carl Phillips:

That's a really interesting question because I guess I think... Well, first of all, I guess I think all poems are in some way autobiographical, just through the lens of our own experience. That's how we see the world. But I used to think that the poems were reflective of who I was in ways that I didn't understand. I once described them as "advanced bulletins from the interior" because I feel I'd learned something about myself that I wasn't yet ready to think about, but it would be there in the poem.

And I don't know, maybe five books into all of this, I started wondering if it's possible that you can start writing towards something that you start becoming that isn't exactly who you are. And it's very troubling to me actually because if I'm going to write all these transgressive types of things, does that mean I become transgressive, or am I indeed a transgressive and the poems have just started to reflect it? I don't know.

But to answer the first part of the question, I think that the poems are very reflective of part of who I am, but people are always surprised, for example, to learn that I have a sense of humor and I think, "Yeah, I do." I don't, for some reason, include that on the page. That's not something I wrestle with. Or some people have said they were afraid to meet me because of reading the poems, but they don't specify the fear. But I think that the poems might seem less approachable sometimes and more severe, but that's just the nature of the subject matter, I think, and anyone who actually lived that way would be a mess.

Brian Brodeur:

So if you met this speaker in a dark alley, might not be a...

Carl Phillips:

I'd be intrigued, but I would expect trouble, but it might be a trouble I could learn from. Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Right. That's a good way to think about it.

In your more recent books, you've begun experimenting with line, employing drop lines and lines of a much longer length. Where does this formal restlessness come from? Is it simply an effort to keep things interesting for yourself, or is this experimentation tied to some larger psychological, emotional, or spiritual seeking?

Carl Phillips:

I like these questions. Well, when these things happen, they're things that just start happening. I'll notice, in the same way, looking at this poem that you had me read, I realize I don't seem to write poems that are anywhere near this length anymore. They're much shorter, but that is never a conscious decision.

Is it reflective of a different kind of restlessness? Probably, but not one I've analyzed and I resist going to therapy because I don't want to understand. I just want to have things manifest themselves for better and worse.

But there is, I do think there's an increased restlessness in my life in general. It's weird. I find one of the challenges of getting older, which I guess I can say now that I'm in my 50s, is that how do you reach a point where your life is fairly stable and you have the things that you would like to have in life, but you still believe in a kind of restlessness that is productive for poetry and also for an imaginative life off the page? And that's what I'm still wondering about. I think for some people, it becomes a midlife crisis of some kind or they get a sports car or something. I don't know.

I found... A person I was speaking of earlier today, when I met Thom Gunn, he had just turned 70, and he changed my life in many ways because of his sensibility. I was interested in how he still managed at 70 to be a very restless person and edgy, frighteningly edgy to me in my naive state at the time, and yet I admired it. So I'd like to be able to do that and also be able to keep surprising myself in poems. We'll see, yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

How old were you when you first met Gunn?

Carl Phillips:

Well, that was in 2000, so perhaps you could do the math. I was born in '59. I don't know what that equals. 60, 40? I guess it was 41. I can do the math, yes.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. And what were the circumstances of your meeting?

Carl Phillips:

Oh, he came to St. Louis for a three-week residency where I was teaching. And so I was sort of his guide to make sure... I was the director of the writing program at the time. And anything from he showed up to speak to my undergraduate poetry survey class in full motorcycle leather regalia. It was great. Or he got really drunk at a party and the next morning when I went to pick him up to take him to lunch or whatever, he wanted me to look at the back of his head because he said he'd fallen while taking his boots off and hit his head. And he said, "I think there's a lot of blood on the floor." And indeed, there was. And he had this huge cut in his head. I'm like, "You're 70 years old."

And it's not that I admired those things, but I thought, in some strange way, I thought it was pretty cool that, oh, he's not thinking, "I'm 70. I should go to bed at 8:00 in the evening. I should never drink and I should dress like a poet," whatever that is. So I admired that. I think it was shortly after meeting him that I got my tattoos.

Brian Brodeur:

Great.

Carl Phillips:

And the whole... All the hell broke loose after that.

Brian Brodeur:

So he was the gateway drug, meeting him was?

Carl Phillips:

I guess so, yeah. Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great.

I was hoping we could talk directly about your writing process. In a 2010 interview with Jeffrey Brown, you mentioned that you work first with paper and pencil, gradually moving to the computer, and that each digital draft must be printed out and assigned a number. Could you speak to this process?

Carl Phillips:

Well, what more do you want me to say?

Brian Brodeur:

I think the numbered system is interesting. What got you started on that?

Carl Phillips:

Well, before I even had my first book, I would keep all these handwritten drafts, but I quickly started seeing the often... Well, first of all, I was interested in the sequence, how I would get someplace. So I would finish a poem, then I'd think, "Now, how did this even begin?" And I go back and it was just interesting to me that I often ended up nowhere near where I started, and so I just started doing this numbering thing so I could track it.

And so it's actually even more neurotic perhaps because it's just regular numbers, whatever the word is for those, for the handwritten drafts. But then for the typed ones, it's Roman numeral numbers. And so that as if I couldn't tell which ones were the typed ones, but that's just my little system. And then there's a date when there's the final one.

And I've always done this, never with any idea that anyone should care about it, but it was only recently that some place purchased my papers, and they were fascinated with this and thought, "No one does this. No one organizes all the stuff." And I guess maybe that's part of why I started doing it, that I've always been interested in other poets' drafts. You look at Elizabeth Bishop's drafts of "One Art" or something like that, or "The Waste Land," and I love seeing all the markings, and so you can kind of track partly where the mind was going.

So it's just a little hobby of mine, a little tick.

Brian Brodeur:

Right. Organizing your collection, yeah.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. But even things like I write notes in books all the time, but I have always been fascinated checking library books out in the old days when people did that, and you see-

Brian Brodeur:

They still do it.

Carl Phillips:

Oh, do they? Okay. And I thought it's interesting when somebody puts an exclamation point next to something. Why was that exciting to this person?

And then once Robert Pinsky, he was recommending some English Renaissance poet to me, and he said, "Oh, take this anthology. Just keep it." And this is a great anthology. Williams, I think, is the editor. And when I got home, I saw that it had Frank Bidart's name in it, and it had belonged to Frank who had given it to Robert or lent it to him, whatever. But it has certain lines underlined and Frank has written little things in it, and it's fascinating to me. But at that time, I hadn't met Frank Bidart, but have always idolized his work. But he seemed to always want to underline the things about suffering and moral dilemma. And I thought, "This is perfect. Of course he was drawn to this as a graduate student."

So that's not to say that I also have a number of my books or something, but I like that, I keep books that I've written in just because I think for my own knowledge, it's kind of interesting. Or to reread. Sometimes I'll reread, as I recently did Middlemarch, and I hadn't read it since I was 25. It was interesting to see the passages I had underlined and was interested, and they actually, I'm still. I was on target, so I still like these passages.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, good. So you might even like that 25-year-old version of yourself.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. And in terms of when you are drafting, and do you ever, if you get frustrated with the draft and then go back and say, "Oh, drafts 35 through 52 are just awful. I need to go back to 34 or something"?

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, and that's partly why I keep all of that because it feels like it's gotten out of control. And that recently happened when I was putting a new manuscript together. There was a poem that's gone through all these different versions, and I still thought something was not quite right and went back to a really early draft and kept only three lines. The whole latest version is only three lines, and I was kind of interested in they appear at very different parts of the poem. So I feel like I might've stumbled into yet another kind of formal change, these short things that are highly associative between lines. I don't know.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Your poems could be classified as meditative, even philosophical. Is poetry for you a mode of inquiry?

Carl Phillips:

Yes, it is. I know I've used the word wrestle a couple of times. I think of it as the page is a space across which to wrestle with unanswerable questions. And I was just on a Dickinson panel earlier today, and she's very much like that. She keeps returning to things, I think precisely because they can't be... It's kind of thing where you think you've found the answer only to find at the end of the poem that that wasn't quite it, which generates the next poem, for me anyway.

So yeah, it took a while. I've always thought that if I had to describe myself, I would be a philosophical poet as opposed to what I think people initially thought, which was a sexual poet and a poet of sexual identity and race identity. But I think all those fall beneath the umbrella of philosophy.

Brian Brodeur:

Since you mentioned identity, it is interesting too looking over this growing body of work that you're producing, the very prolific poet that you are. It seems like these issues of identity are sort of, I don't know, somehow beneath the surface; they're not major concerns or at least outright concerns. So could you talk about how identity informs your work or whether it's even important in a sense or-

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, it's important, but I think sometimes people misunderstand how importance of that kind should manifest itself in a poem. It's certainly important to how I see the world and my sensibility that I'm Black, or more to the point, that I'm a mix of Black and white and that I'm gay. I'm sure those things, I know in terms of growing up, they've been things that have made me feel isolated and different in ways that, in those days, people didn't quite know how to answer. And in those days, being the days of my childhood.

But there's a certain point at which, certainly in terms of race, for me, there's a point at which I've been this all my life, and I don't know if I've been gay all my life, I haven't understood that, but I certainly have for most of my life. So that becomes second nature. So the way I've explained it sometimes is part of my daily ritual is to walk my dog. When I'm walking down the street, I don't think, "I'm a gay Black man walking my dog." If anything, "I'm a person who lives in this neighborhood," or, "I'm a dog owner."

And so I feel like in the first couple of books of mine, I had just come out. Well, in the first book, I was actually married to a woman and had just come out, and so it makes sense to me that I would be very obsessed with this, in particular, sexual identity. And then that was true for the second book because I have begun what would become an 18-year relationship with another man, and I didn't see any examples of stability in relationships between men. And so I think that second book, Cortege, came out of investigating the possibilities for that. But then things settle down and you move on to these other things that you've been thinking about all your life too. What is out there? What is faith? What is... And the deeper into a relationship, what is fidelity? What's betrayal and trust?

So yeah, I've had people say, "Well, you really aren't a Black poet. You don't write about Black things." And I think, "Really? Like love and desire and death?" I mean, I think those things are issues that Black people experience. And similarly, people have said, "It seems there are fewer gay poems." And I don't know, I guess they're gay to me, but I've never wanted to... I would like people to be able to read my poems in the way that when I read poems by people like John Donne, I don't think about whether he's straight or gay when he's writing about love, even if he's mentioning a woman. It's the way he writes about desire.

And it's what I love about Robert Hayden, that yes, he can decide to write a poem that speaks specifically to African-American history, but he can also, in something like "Those Winter Sundays," it's so much about childhood, missed opportunities, not realizing what you should have been grateful for in your father, that kind of regret of adulthood. That's not bound to any particular identity. That was a long answer.

Brian Brodeur:

A great poem. No, that's not a long answer at all. I mean, it's a complicated question. You're also, I think, hinting at that distinction or at least claim of whether a poet says, "I am a Black poet," or, "I just want to be a poet." And this thing about Countee Cullen saying, "I don't want to be a Black poet. I want to be a poet," and then Langston Hughes saying, "What's Black is beautiful. What's wrong?" Et cetera.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. I mean, they're not merely incidental, these identity markers, but I think people try to tie you down to certain particular ones.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, you mentioned one earlier, dog owner. They don't say, "Oh, Carl Phillips, he's a dog owner."

Carl Phillips:

That's right. That's right. And I understand that people first deal with what they see, they see color, perhaps they see sexuality, sexual orientation. But even within these categories, everyone's so different. And it's a vexed issue in poetry though, I find, because it's not just the world, but within the world of poetry, where I would have thought that there's a little bit broader perspective, there are still these kinds of ideas of who's doing what they should be doing for the race or for queer poetry?

And I feel like what we should be doing is whatever it is that we are able to do, and if we look at enough different voices, we start to see what Black poetry is or what queer poetry is. And it was brought out in the Dickinson panel today that Dickinson only referred to the Civil War maybe in four or five poems. That doesn't mean that she wasn't patriotic or thinking about politics in the way... She just wasn't doing it in the way Whitman was. But I feel like having those two sensibilities beside each other gives us a very interesting portrait of the psychology of that period. Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

And doesn't one's fidelity have to be to language after all, rather than subject matter?

Carl Phillips:

I would think so. And to how we... It's not even how we can use it or how we want to, it's how we can. I say that to my students all the time. Sometimes they seem like they're trying to decide what kind of poet to be. And I think this maybe sadder truth is we're the kind of poet we are already. There's not much we can do about it. So we can admire things in others, but we're just stuck with ourselves.

Brian Brodeur:

Switching gears a little. In essays and interviews, you've cited ancient Greek and Roman writers, especially Homer, Cicero, and Tacitus as early influences. Do you still see these poets affecting your writing now?

Carl Phillips:

In different ways. Homer more now than before because I realized the last few books, I've been thinking a lot about power and the dynamics of power within human relationships between two people and/or three. And I started thinking about this because of the essay, I can't think of the title of it, that Simone Weil wrote about The Iliad. And I read that a few years ago and she sees all of... It helped me sort of reread The Iliad in different ways and the way power struggles manifest themselves. Well, I happen to teach Homer most years to freshmen, but it's made me start to see that more, those issues.

With the other people you mentioned, Thucydides, Cicero, I think the influence was more in terms of syntax and the way sentences seem to be used to manipulate audience, which is also a kind of power, a kind of who holds the power through language? And if you can sustain a sentence long enough, it kind of puts your reader, at least if you're an orator, it puts your listeners in a state of suspense. But I wouldn't say I turn to them in a daily way.

I also feel though the Greek tragedies, which are, to me, what I want my poems to do, the way they wrestle again with these things that can't be resolved. Antigone fails her brother if she doesn't give him a burial, but if she gives him a burial, she's a traitor to the state. So there's no winning and what to do with that moral conundrum.

Brian Brodeur:

Absolutely. What is it like teaching Homer to freshmen?

Carl Phillips:

I find it exciting. I think they do. When I say Homer, I only mean The Iliad. I don't have time for The Odyssey, which to me, is like a trip to Disney World or something. But they think, "Oh, he's chosen the more boring text, and it's going to be just spears and wounds and things like that."

Brian Brodeur:

Shields.

Carl Phillips:

And there's a lot of that, but it's exciting to see them see how much is in The Iliad. I mean, there's even a recipe. There are tender love scenes, there's sex, and yeah, a lot of violence, but the way violence is treated is often so lovely, which in itself sets up a strange moral dilemma for me. What does it mean if it's this beautiful to describe somebody's head rolling off? But also, it gives them a chance to... It's a morals course in disguise. It's not called that. It's called something like Classics in Translation, but it's really a morals course. And so we investigate war, the morality of war, and so it's fun.

It's the closest I've gotten to... Because these are freshmen in the first semester, and I used to be a high school teacher of Latin, and it was always exciting to watch the freshmen come into language. They suddenly realize there was this language they didn't know and now here they were, reading it, writing it. And in the same way. To see someone discover something like The Iliad and actually think, "Wow, there's really something here," I feel as if I've done some kind of duty.

Sometimes they return in senior year before graduation and say, "I still have my copy of The Iliad."

Brian Brodeur:

That's good.

Carl Phillips:

If you didn't sell it back to the bookstore, you might open it again too.

Brian Brodeur:

Look back at your notes in 25 years.

Carl Phillips:

Exactly, yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Do you have a particular translation that you prefer or a book?

Carl Phillips:

Well, I do, but I don't know if it's that I prefer it as much as the students, it works best, which is just the Fitzgerald, but there's something particularly poetic about it. I tried the Lattimore one time and they pointed out, and they're right, it takes longer to read that translation. The lines are longer, and I don't know, they like the idea that they can flip through rather quickly, but it might be the way the book is shaped and the font.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, that's interesting.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. And I think that's true of the Bernard Knox translation too. It takes longer to read. And so the last thing I want them to think is it's a fat book and it's going to be a drudge. And the Fitzgerald has pictures every once in a while. They seem to like that.

Brian Brodeur:

It's a nice little reprieve, yeah.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. So it's a stupid reason to choose a translation, but it's teachable.

Brian Brodeur:

Could you talk briefly about assembling the essays and interviews in Coin of the Realm? How did that book come about? Did Graywolf approach you with the idea for a collection of essays or what happened? What was the genesis of it?

Carl Phillips:

It was agony. Well, what happened actually, I then was teaching at Warren Wilson, and part of doing that is that you have to give craft lecture, and also the same thing was happening at Bread Loaf. So I had a bunch of these just lying around that I had done. And then Barbara Ross was going to start Trinity Press and do something like the U Michigan series.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, great series.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. And I guess maybe Ellen Bryant Voigt had suggested me for that because she'd heard these craft talks and thought these would be good. And so I was supposed to do that. But then it was taking a while for the press to get off the ground, I guess, and in the meantime... But I wanted them, once this idea had been planted in my mind, I wanted them to be published.

I was at Graywolf at the time already and wondered if they would have any interest, and they looked and said, "Yeah, this would be great." The problem was, they said, "But there needs to be some kind of unifying kind of essay, maybe to end it all." And that was the problem that I hate writing prose, and I'd only sort of done the others because of my fear of Ellen Voigt. And plus, they had pointed out, "Well, these sound like lectures. Now you have to turn them into essays." So that was laborious. And then I couldn't come up with anything.

And then a week before, they said, "You have to, you have to." I wrote the Coin of the Realm title essay. That was the other problem. There was no title for the essay book. And then I had this poem, "Coin of the Realm," but I never really liked it enough to put it in, or it hadn't fit, I guess, in a collection of poems. And somehow, I just started writing towards that. And so it worked out.

So no, I would never have been able to do it if I started from nothing and thought, "Oh, I have some essays to write." But I only can do that sort of thing if there's an assignment, but in sort of little drips and drabs. So I don't realize I'm...

Brian Brodeur:

Actually writing an essay or something?

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, yeah. It's just very... And every time, I'm always down to the wire, it brings back all the reasons I hated school. I just hated it. And I hated the papers. I hated them so much I don't assign them to my students.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, is that right?

Carl Phillips:

I don't want to read them.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, that's right. That's what I was going to say, then you don't have to read them. That's smart.

Finally, what are you working on now? You mentioned the briefer poems that you're writing.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah. Well, see, I resist this whole thing of being prolific, which you mentioned, but maybe it's a demon I should embrace. So I just turned in a new manuscript called Silverchest. It's all one word, Silverchest, and that has a lot of these short poems in it, and that's supposed to come out next year. So it's hard to say what I'm working on now because I've only written three poems since then, but because I never write towards a book, I just write. And then one day, it seems like there are enough poems, maybe they'll have something in common.

So I guess that's it. Just the other day, I was asking myself this very question, "Well, so Carl, is this what you're going to do the rest of your life? Write poems and then put them into books?" And it seemed frightening. It seemed frightening that that might be it. So I don't know. I want to move to Point Reyes forever and just lie on Limantour Beach and read books, but I'm not sure how you do that and who pays you. So I don't know.

Brian Brodeur:

Independent wealth would probably help, but you know.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, but I don't think that's the future.

Brian Brodeur:

That's not in the cards, yeah.

Carl Phillips:

No.

Brian Brodeur:

Let's end it on future hopeful independent wealth for you and some beach-going.

Carl Phillips:

Yeah, and more poems.

Brian Brodeur:

And more poems.

Carl Phillips:

You know? Because that might be all we have in the end.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right. That's right. Wonderful. Carl Phillips, thank you very much.

Carl Phillips:

Thank you.

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