Pulitzer winner Carl Phillips: Poetry should challenge our preconceived notions

Renowned literary master

Born in Everett, Washington in 1959 to an African-American military father and a white British mother, Phillips often moved around with his family to different military bases inside and outside the US, before eventually settling down in Massachusetts.

Phillips came to prominence in the past decade as one of America's most original, influential, and accomplished lyrical poets. He graduated in 1981 from Harvard where he studied Greek and Latin, then earned his master's degree in Latin and Classic Humanities from the University of Massachusetts in 1983.

After teaching high-school Latin for eight years, Phillips briefly returned to Harvard as a PhD candidate in the Classic Language Studies programme but found himself miserable there. He decided to move to Boston University, where he eventually earned an MA in Creative Writing.

Today, Phillips is a professor in the English Department and African and Afro-American Studies programme at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches creative writing. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, Harvard, Northwestern University, and others.

He has received several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In addition to poetry, Phillips is engaged in the literary field as a critic, translator, and influential literary figure. He has penned a variety of critical essays on the English poet George Herbert, the problem of the prose poem, and the issue of identity in African-American poetry, including an essay collection entitled Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. His translation of Greek poet Sophocles's Philoctetes was published in 2003.

A continuous reflection of human emotions

Phillips believes that all his writings and poems are a continuous reflection on the ways in which human emotions like desire, loss, and victory are formed. In an interview with the Katonah Poetry Series, Phillips argued that a poet does not have an obligation to meet people's expectations.

"People keep trying to make art into something that speaks for everyone and serves a common purpose; but for me, art has always challenged what we think, and a good body of art often challenges our preconceived notions."

Phillips' poetry often hints at the truth through evasive, deceptive, and playful language. His poems, as one critic noted, "do not stick to facts." Through his lyrical genius, Phillips guides the reader along a path of words toward a stunning endpoint to rephrase the hard question of "how did we get here?", which harks back to Emily Dickinson's famous verse: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant."

The poems of his Pulitzer-winning collection, which relay Phillips' life experiences over the past 13 years, seem to be closer to lyrical poetry. In 'Invasive Species', his very first poem in the collection, Phillips writes: "Little song years remastering truth/ Now begins its own little truth song/ deep in the night."

Therefore, the strength, gracefulness, and poetry of the song lie in the poet's ability to delicately "remaster" the truth to get to his own truth. The song moves along from "past/regret" and shockingly shifts towards violence, rising "up from dragged lake of the singer's throat."

Capturing nuances

Phillips is neither a confessional nor a biographical poet. Now in his sixties, his use of shade, changes in daylight, darkness, and the brightness of the night in his poems has become even more distinctive.

He treats language like an experienced photographer, his poetry capturing subtle and vague nuances depending on the mood, such as his confessions centred on the regret associated with ambition and the cruelty of love.

The collection's poems are all connected to several truths that echo each other. The poet takes the reader on a journey to a powerful and influential poetic landscape, one of trees, forests, and wilderness as a metaphor for places that serve as a refugee for memories, to stand on the edge of civilisation, to take risks and to rest assured that the wilderness will hide one's secrets.

Phillips organises his raw prose with poetic magic emerging through line breaks and structures that help build up visually-appealing poetic structures that complement the meanings and tones.

In a review of the ambiguously titled 'For Nothing Tender About It,' The Guardian says of the sonnet-like lyric: "[The] poem opens with an extended question that immediately sets the reader asking themselves what 'shame is to memory'."

"Shame is entwined with memory in that a particular memory recalls and recreates – even physically, perhaps – the sensation of shame. An experience that prompts shame can deepen and fix its memorability, and, of course, also ensure therapeutic forgetting."

"If as shame is to memory, so too desire,
then is this desire, this cloak of shadows,
that I wrap close around me, that I
refuse to take off?

But the lake looks endless.
And my boat's increasingly but a slowish swimmer,
across the waves – I've known
hurt, I mean; and I have been afraid. Sometimes

the difference between forgetting
to bring along artillery and showing up
on purpose to the war unarmed

is just that: a difference. Sometimes a lost tune,
unreckoned on, unearned, resurfaces anyway. Just because.

Am I not the animal by belief alone I myself make possible?"

Challenging tradition

This unsentimental treatment of emotions and unconventional sonnet structure is set to challenge established traditions of the genre. An additional challenge comes in the form of the final extended question, which wonders whether the solid identity of the "animal" is not an act of its own faith.

In an interview with The Paris Review in Spring 2019, Phillips said: "I tell people, especially if I'm giving a reading, it's okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art..."

He added that he thinks of many of his poems as emotional gestures, irrespective of the context. "Context isn't always essential—or maybe it's that I resist context as an absolute. I like what happens when context begins to wobble a bit."

Phillips said his mastery of Latin and Greek, coupled with fluency in German, allows him to create grammatical and syntactical structures that are rarely used in English, which helped draw the attention of critics to his poetry.

"Syntax is the thing that allows for manipulation in a sentence, in a way that grammar doesn't. Syntax allows us to move blocks of text around, stall the delivery of information, establish hierarchies. Its ability to give only so much, then to switch directions, teasing the sentence out—that's like foreplay."