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Carl Phillips
Probably the most glaring hole in my classics/English education to this point is that I really don't know much about poetry. I've studied many of the Greek and Latin poets, but only in English translations. I've studied some of William Shakespeare's sonnets but no other poetry of that period. I've studied and read modernist poets (H.D., Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams) and the Harlem Renaissance poets (Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay) but I only read Hughes and Eliot with anything resembling regularity. I've read and enjoyed Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Amiri Baraka and a few other poets. It's possible that I have read more poetry than the average American.
But I don't read poetry very often. And I have little sense of many of the formal qualities that makes a poem good, especially when it comes to things like meter, rhythm, etc. I do like the economy of poetic language, dazzling and ambiguous (thanks William Empson!) imagery but I have little idea of what formally makes a "good" poem other than...well, whether I like it or not.
Usually, I need a pretty compelling reason to read contemporary poetry. For example, when reading various biographical stuff of David Foster Wallace, I learned that he had a rather stormy relationship with autobiographer and poet Mary Karr, so when I ran across the September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine and saw Mary Karr's name on the cover, I was curious and of, when I read the title of the poem, I bought the magazine and I still have it. I've read a couple of Karr's memoirs as well.
About six months ago I ran across an old copy of the New Yorker. When I read the New Yorker, I tend to begin with the various items of cultural criticism, beginning with the book reviews. And I ran across Don Chiasson's review of a new book of poem by Carl Phillips. Chiasson's opening paragraph had me...intrigued.
I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips, who has published fourteen books in the past twenty years. Poets work primarily in lines, and often dream of writing perfect ones; this is why every poet is an innovator of sentences, dissecting them, ranking them, scattering, by means of line and stanza breaks, little cliffhangers across their lengths.
A poet who writes "the most interesting contemporary English sentences?" I'm intrigued and read on.
“Silverchest” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is Phillips’s eighth volume of new poems since 2000. That’s a large yield for any poet, but especially for one enthralled by silence. Phillips is fifty-three and a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. The ordinary markers of identity—he is black, he is gay, he grew up in a military family, crisscrossing the country—have at times been hard to find in his work, which suggests that identity abides not in the outer fringe of autobiographical fact but in the inner circle of emotional life.
A black gay poet.
Man, I might have to read this dude, I think, and I continue.
The lover is named for his traits—“wanderer,” “whisperer,” “little firework,” “little not-my-own”—a gesture that recalls the epithets of classical heroes and gods (swift-footed Achilles, shining Diana) and, perhaps, the names of flowers (goosefoot, meadowsweet)
Achilles and Diana? And later on, the Greek poet/pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes is mentioned. Oh, this is
real good.
Thinking about gods helps Phillips account for sudden, even violent, transformation, the kind we associate with sex. Phillips is a highly cerebral erotic poet, but an erotic poet nonetheless. Sex breaks into poetry this thinky the only way it can—by force and by surprise.
A "highly cerebral erotic poet?"
"...sudden, even violent, transformation?" ("metamorphosis" seems like the obvious word there...maybe a bit too obvious.)
There's the biography, the quality of the sentences, black, gay, cerebral erotic poet.
I must read this dude.
Sure enough, in Phillips' first book of poems, In The Blood, all of the "markers" of identity are there. For example, there's "Passing" and the musings on "The Famous Black Poet."
The Famous Black Poet is
speaking of the dark river in the mind
that runs thick with the heroes of color,
Jackie R, Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone
who knew how to sing or when to run...
There's The Heritage, the giant shoulders on which The Famous Black Poet stands. Yet even there, one senses a bit of sadness and even anger that the only available "models" for The Famous Black Poet is sports and song.
I think of voodoo in the bottoms of coup-cans,
and I want to tell the poet that the blues
is not my name, that Alabama
is something that I cannot use
in my business
Sure enough, even in
In The Blood, it seems as if race recedes into the background and we're treated to quite a bit of musings about the gods and goddesses of classical antiquity.
In Philips' essay, Boon and Burden: Identity on Contemporary American Poetry, collected in his 2004 collection of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry , Phillips gives his most definitive statement on the dangers of using the intentional fallacy in judging literary work.
Phillips begins his essay with a reading and a discussion of a poem whose author he does not identify:
A certain amount of talk ensued about structure, the missing stress of the fourth stanza, for examine, serving to reinforce metrically the aborted hopes of the speaker...
All that "technical stuff" that I know little or nothing about, in other words.
Then Phillips reveals to the class that the poet is actually Langston Hughes.
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there. Langston Hughes
And the trajectory of the discussion changes.
Really changes.
When I then added that Langston Hughes was the author of the poem, however, all of that interpretation was abandoned-the class was certain that Hughes must mean to address slavery, and how it figures into the African-American psyche...
Then Philips drops the bomb on the class that, in all likelihood, Langston Hughes was gay and the very technical discussions of structures and missing stresses in fourth stanzas disappears entirely. In its' place are interpretations of Hughes' "Island" focused on race and sexuality. Later in the essay, Phillips points out that writers of AIDS poetry, while responding to specifics of time and place, might suffer from similar evaluations of the more literary and technical aspects of their work.
This is not an unfamiliar discussion; I well remember that James Baldwin once wrote that he didn't necessarily want to be considered simply as a "Negro writer;" indeed, it was one of the reasons that Baldwin wrote Giovanni's Room and had some trouble getting the novel published because the publishing world of that time wanted to market Baldwin as the "Negro writer."
Of course, the poet can also decide to embrace identity and revel in it, even to the exclusion of other identities; Phillips uses Amiri Baraka's "Black Art" as an example.
Phillips concludes:
Ultimately-necessarily- we speak and write from who we are (and when and how) and what we produce is, if we allow for the many-sidedness of self, bound to be not just reflective of ourselves but of the rest of human civilization, of which we are finally only the latest part, not the newest. The best writers produce work that resists easy limitation. And the best readers read accordingly; they impose no limits.
Yes, markers like "black" and "gay" and "classicist" reeled me into the work of Carl Phillips and, even then, reeled me more into the essays than the poetry (poetry still intimidates me a bit). Mr. Philips has done me the favor that all great mentors do: he insists that I not be satisfied with the individual stones of the mosaic (which are beautiful, in themselves) but that I appreciate the sprawling and finished mosaic as the integrated work it is.
Goodreads page on Carl Phillips with a listing of his works- I especially like this:
influences Thucydides, Cicero, Tacitus, George Herbert, John Donne
I love Cicero but I do prefer Herodotus to Thucydides (although Thucydides' accounts of Pericles' Funeral Oration, The Plague in Athens, and the destruction of the herms is
damn good reading). And I prefer the gossip-monger Suetonius and even Livy and Dio Cassius to the cranky Tacitus.
Lastly, here's a one-hour interview that Washington Post book critic Ron Charles conducted with Carl Phillips on February 6, 2014 as a part of the Hill Center Poetry Series:
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