About Carl Phillips: A Profile

Immediately upon entering Carl Phillips's spartan, Cape Cod writing studio—all wood and windows, abutting some forty acres of conservation land—two things catch the eye: an antique horse bridle, worn but handsomely preserved, on the wall, and an old-fashioned stand-up writing desk in the corner. Both objects open windows onto Phillips's writing life and a poetry that is, in his own words, "becoming more about the unsayable, containing more and more questions, and more sentences that end by not ending."

"I'm intrigued by ideas of restraint and release—on the page and with the body," he says, tracing the bridle's collar. It's no surprise that horses, their power, their danger, the gear and vocabulary of riding—all these figure in a complex symbology the poet has developed over the years. As for the stand-up writing desk, it was a surprise birthday gift from Phillips's partner of twelve years, photographer Doug Macomber. The oak desk is literally, and in some ways figuratively, what the poet leans on during composition. "Writing is, for me, a bodily act," he says, "moving the arm, hearing the pen scratch, feeling the paper." Phillips, in fact, is often praised for his intense lyric moments about the body, its needs, wants, and its mortality, yet he also writes about "the invisible things that tie us together—space, desire, the erotic, where the sacred meets with notions of the body."

Phillips is led to poetry by "trying to understand something otherworldly and at the same time something very worldly about oneself," a statement that introduces the notion of paradox lurking behind his life and verse. Take, for example, the fact that Phillips the poet has been critically praised for poems energized by a "trademark phrasal difficulty and oblique half-metaphors [which] remain as beautiful and perplexing as ever," and yet Phillips the man admits he most enjoys that part of his day when he walks his dog—"because it's what's most uncomplicated about life."

Phillips never planned on being a poet at all. Born in 1959 in Everett, Washington, he suspects that his becoming a poet may have had a lot to do with feeling—"being made to feel"—like an outsider from early on, starting with his being the product of a mixed-race marriage: his father is African American, a retired Air Force sergeant from Alabama; his mother, a painter and homemaker, is English-born and white. An instinct to take refuge in a more interior, private space was only strengthened by the transient life of being raised in the military. Every year of his childhood until the age of ten, Phillips's family was uprooted by his father's transfers, leaving little time or incentive for him to form friendships. He found solace in the "portable world" of his favorite books, books usually about secret codes and wildlife. Even today, dividing his time between Cape Cod and St. Louis and calling home "some combination of the two," Phillips carries his world with him: Hopkins, George Herbert, Jarrell, Hayden, and Dickinson are among the staples.

He first discovered the power and mystery inherent in language when he was twelve and beginning to study German during the four years his father was stationed in Zweibrücken. When the family moved back to the States to Falmouth, Massachusetts, Phillips continued studying languages by taking Latin, and then went on to Harvard University, where he earned his A.B. in Greek and Latin—though his intention when he enrolled had been to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian. "I learned a great deal about surprise, and about opening oneself up to chance." From eating his first bagel to being dumbstruck by Woolf's To The Lighthouse, everything at Harvard was about discovery. "I do feel those years have almost everything to do with who I am now," he says. The first person in his family to go on to higher education, Phillips recalls how strange it was to be thrown into a world of wealth and privilege, and of families who had attended schools like Harvard for generations. "For the first two years, I had a job cleaning dorm bathrooms. Walking across Harvard Yard with a bucket in hand and a mop over one shoulder —that's still one of my most vivid memories of my Harvard experience. I wouldn't change it in any way."

While studying the great Latin and Greek poets and playwrights, Phillips was "struck by the immediacy of the emotional content of the work. . . . Reading Sappho or Horace, I didn't feel as if I was reading the work of a people from centuries ago. I saw those writers as companions, whose humanness I recognized; longing, grief, rage, and joy are not emotions which single us out as strangers, but which unify us in our being human." He hopes his verse makes apparent "not the distance between our century and theirs, but the intimacy we share in the arena where body, soul, mind, heart all come together."

As a sophomore, Phillips—who had composed poems here and there in high school—joined the staff of The Harvard Advocate literary review and began writing all the more earnestly. "Probably like everyone else, I was discovering Plath's Ariel, but getting it all wrong, missing the poetry for the life," he admits, and the poems showed as much. At one point,he applied to a very popular writing course, with competitive admission, taught by Seamus Heaney, but he didn't make the cut, "and rightly so," Phillips asserts. (He would later teach the same Harvard course as a visiting professor.)

After graduating in 1981, Phillips earned a Master's in Latin and Classical Humanities from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and began a career teaching Latin in high school. He also married a woman with whom he'd been friends since freshman year at Harvard. And he stopped writing. "It wasn't writer's block—I had no interest in writing, and assumed it had been a passing hobby." But during this time, Phillips was—if only half-aware of the fact himself—trying to come to terms with his homosexuality. When he did return to writing poems, it was, in some ways, "a psychological last-ditch rescue effort." It suddenly made sense, he explains, to turn to the invitation of the blank page, to sort things out "in the private place of the poem." Perhaps it's no surprise that his motto is, "All art is pain, suffered and outlived," a line from Robert Hayden's "The Tattooed Man." "The things that drive me to write a poem," he adds, "are things that I don't understand about myself, or that I'm afraid to understand, or that I wouldn't dare try to understand in the presence of people who are in my life."

In 1990, with the help of a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship, he enrolled in his first poetry workshop, led by Alan Dugan, at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro. Dugan insisted the novice poet, again feeling like the uninitiated outsider, be the first to read his work aloud. Dugan's response to his timid reading shocked Phillips: "Well, obviously it's a real poem. Change nothing."

The encouragement meant everything. The young poet produced in a mere six months the poems that would become the bulk of his first book, In the Blood (Northeastern, 1992), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. The poems were heralded by Rachel Hadas in the book's introduction as "transcendent and terrestrial," composed of "pained contradictions—eros tugging against anger, despair, isolation."

Only weeks before learning he'd won the Morse prize, Phillips met his partner Macomber, who became an essential reader. ("Doug's mind isn't cluttered with poetry jargon and trends. He gives me the only reaction I care about, one from the gut.") Macomber prompted Phillips to pursue an M.A. in poetry at Boston University, even though the admissions deadline had passed. "Doug suggested we call Robert Pinsky, whom I'd never met, and ask if we could drive to his house and hand him a manuscript. It seemed outrageous, and was." But Pinsky—who would serve as Phillips's principal mentor—agreed to look at the work and phoned the next night with a simple message: "Welcome to the workshop."

After BU, Phillips was hired at Washington University in 1993 as a visiting writer-in-residence. Three years later, he was awarded tenure, and he is now a professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies. His passion for teaching comes through in his voice when he talks about his writing workshops and literature courses, the stimulation of being exposed to the multitude of new voices he encounters every year. He also stresses the necessity of mentoring students in order to keep not just poetry but learning itself alive in the next generation. To that end, he encourages his graduate students to conduct writing workshops in the inner-city schools of St. Louis.

Phillips's second and third books, Cortège (Graywolf, 1995) and From the Devotions (Graywolf, 1998), were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, respectively, a remarkable feat for such a young poet. Then, while writing his next book, Pastoral (Graywolf, 2000), he stumbled upon a more personal way of writing that "paradoxically also came across as being allegorical," he says, hinting at the attention critics have given to the recurring symbols in the poems. Allegorical or not, the Lambda Literary Award–winning Pastoral was received as breathtaking:

. . . At this hour of sun, in clubs
of light, in broad beams failing, I do not

stop it: I love you. Let us finally, un—
daunted, slow, with the slowness that a
jaded ease engenders, together

                                                    step into
—this house, this sun: city of trumpets,
noteless now; of tracks whose end is here.

His fifth book, The Tether (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), "was written during a period of crisis about the inability to distinguish between art and life —or the temptation to blur the distinction, as a means of explaining questionable behavior," he says. One critic reviewing the book, which Phillips believes is most markedly different from his other work, praised him for "some of the most formally accomplished first-person poems of male desire and relationships of his generation." While Phillips regards The Tether as "so much about thrashing at the limitations in a relationship with another person or with something like God," his most recent book, Rock Harbor (FSG, 2002), "though not a book of compromise, has a more anchored quality of the mind." The book, he hopes, suggests "that while love and faith may figure in a relationship, they're not sources of our salvation, and shouldn't be expected to be."

The publication of three critically praised books in three consecutive years has solidified his reputation as a prolific and vital force in American poetry, the work garnering the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who cited Phillips as a "poet of restless imagination—part mythical, part mystical—and an artist of generous instincts and rare authority."

He shows little sign of slowing down. This year, Oxford University Press will publish his translation of Sophocles's Philoctetes. Next year, Coin of the Realm, a collection of his essays, and The Rest of Love, his seventh book of poetry, will appear—the works rooted, as always, in personal experience, serving as testimony against the "prevailing age of cool irony where we deny we even have woundable feelings."

Christopher Hennessy's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, James White Review, and elsewhere. He has also interviewed Frank Bidart, J. D. McClatchy, Mark Doty, Rafael Campo, Timothy Liu, Bernard Cooper, and Edmund White.