'Then the War'
To round out National Poetry Month, TFP revisits my April 2022 conversation with classicist, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.
By Michael Judge
Most of the poets I know—at least the ones I respect—pause when asked what it is, exactly, they do for a living. None blurt out “I’m a poet.” Most prefer to say something like “I’m a writer” or “I write and teach poetry.” Seamus Heaney, the late great Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, said this is because the word “poet” still carries a magical charge to it. To say “I’m a poet” is, therefore, akin to saying “I’m an alchemist.” Or “I’m a word magician who transmutes the base metals of everyday language into golden immortality.”
Not that poets—and, I confess, I too write poems—think of themselves that way. It’s just what they do. Like a piano player plays piano, or a basketball player plays basketball, a poet plays language. Maybe they should be called “language players.”
The word poem, after all, comes from the Greek poiein, “to create or make.” Like potters make pottery, poets make poems. Children, not knowing any better, and acquiring language as an early tool (second only to music and mimicry) make poems all the time—we just don’t think to write them down.
My son, Max, for example, said this when he was just five:
Am I you? Is the sky gray or is it covered in clouds? Where is tomorrow?
All I did was write it down. Now, at 10, he’s “learning how to write” and that magic is slipping out of his language. William Stafford, when asked by a reporter, “When did you become a poet?” famously replied, “ When did you stop being a poet?” Naomi Shihab Nye, in the same vein as Stafford, likes to say that we’re all poets when we’re young, and some of us “just tried to keep up the habit.”
All of this comes to mind on this the first day of April, National Poetry Month, which was founded in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets to “remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.” Perhaps not coincidentally, April, as the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, is also “the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”
Cruel or not, throughout April TFP will be publishing interviews with some of America’s most celebrated poets, including current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and former Poet Laureate Robert Hass. TFP will also be publishing essays on some of the greatest poets of this and the past century, including Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz and the brilliant African-American poet Etheridge Knight, a man whom I had the great honor of getting to know before his death in 1991.
To kick off National Poetry Month, TFP is thrilled to have as our first guest Carl Phillips, a former high school Latin teacher and professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he teaches poetry writing and African-American literature. He is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 and Wild Is the Wind, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Trained as a classicist, Phillips studied Latin, Greek, and Classics at Boston University, Harvard University, and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has translated Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
Born in 1959, Phillips was raised in a military family, and moved around the country before settling in his high-school years on Cape Cod, Mass. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips’ other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, where he served as chancellor from 2006-2012.
I recently had the pleasure of attending a reading by Phillips at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I studied poetry in the early 1990s. As the poet James Galvin said in his introduction, “Most people think of Carl as being a poet of Eros, which he is, but you can’t have Eros without Thanatos, and you can’t have either without Psyche. Love’s not love until it’s lost, and love as much as loss is a kind of catastrophe.”
That anticipation of loss, that restlessness, is what stands out to me in Phillips’ poetry—a kind of meditation on a phrase, image or idea, and the emotion that summons it, until it is revealed for what it is: fleeting, unrepeatable, perfectly heartbreaking.
As Phillips writes in the preface to his 2014 collection of essays on poetry, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination: “I think restlessness—of imagination, but also bodily, by which I have mostly meant sexual, I see that now—is what brings us to that space where art and life not only seem interchangeable, for a moment they are so, space where they penetrate one another, space in which, caught between the two, we can be variously lost, broken, or we can summon that daring that can bring us—loss and brokenness in tow to unknowing. When I speak of unknowing, I don't mean ignorance so much as a kind of removal of all the trappings of presentation—how we present ourselves to the world—and an accompanying exposure of the usually hidden parts, what we hide equally from others and from ourselves.”
In other words, nakedness.
All of this conspires to make Carl Phillips one of the most accomplished and fascinating poets writing today, and his new book, Then the War, a leading contender for next year’s Pulitzer Prize in Poetry [Note from MJ: Then the War did indeed win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry]. Extremely busy with readings and teaching, Phillips was kind enough to answer my questions via email, which helps explain the somewhat unusual interview style that follows:
MJ: Carl, apologies for not getting these to you sooner. I think this is four questions, asked in a very roundabout way. I’m so used to having conversations with my guests, I find it hard to ask simple questions out of the blue. So these are in the context of what I was doing and thinking when they came to me. Hope that makes sense. Again, many thanks for agreeing to this conversation. Your reading was refreshingly straightforward and enlightening . . . and your poems, all of them, are made up of Not only what lasts, but what / applies over time also. Anyway, I woke up at 4:49 in the morning today. Couldn't sleep, which is happening more and more the older I get. So like a moron I turned on my phone and this is what I saw:
And then I thought about not wanting to think. And then I thought about your book Then the War. Then I came across an email from a friend about an incredible project publishing preschool kids’ poems. Here’s one:
BULLETS
by Brayden
Sit down, world
and relax
so you don’t have tornadoes.
Trees, color your leaves.
Relax, people. Go to sleep.
Relax, wolves. Lay down by the trees.
Relax, bullets from guns.
Stop shooting people.
Fire, eat wood.
Here’s another:
MIRACLE’S POEM
by Miracle
You play outside in the sun.
You climb on climbing things in the sun.
The sun looks at you outside.
It comes down and play with you.
The sun says, “I want to play with you.”
I want to say to the sun,
“This might shock you.
I love you.”
And then I thought about your book, Then the War, again, and how these poems remind me of your poems, like “In a Low Voice, Slowly,” when you write:
So stubborn, and as if almost necessary, this little wind, playing the leaves, their surfaces, playing the leaves where they lie fallen, while not once rearranging them…
Or in this poem of yours:
In a Field, at Sunset When he asked if I still loved him. I didn’t answer; but of course, I loved him. He’d become, by then, like the rhyme between lost and most.
Or in these lines from your poem “Somewhere, right now, a hawk”:
I’m a song, changing. I’m a light
rain falling through a vast
darkness toward a different
darkness. It could be anything—
the earth; it could be the sea.
I taught poetry in the schools back in the early 1990s and after one workshop with elementary school kids in rural Iowa this little girl came up to me and said, “I’m a poetry.” It seems easier for children to listen to and speak in the “lyrical I.” Then they grow up and “learn” how to write and that fades. Why is that, do you think?
CP: I believe it’s because to truly write a meaningful poem that has authenticity means letting go of a lot of self-consciousness. Children lack that self-consciousness, or it’s not yet highly developed, so it doesn’t occur to them to stop and think about what they say—and likewise, it doesn’t occur to them to think that they can’t say what they want to say on paper. I’m fascinated with how easily kids in high school and junior high understand my poems no problem—while critics speak of the poems’ difficulty. The difference is that kids haven’t been taught that poetry IS difficult or that there is an accepted way to read a poem. So they just read the words and take them at face value, which is all I ask for in my readers.
None of this is surprising to me, though. It’s adults who feel that nakedness is somehow wrong. Kids will run around naked all the time, until they’re told—by adults—that it’s improper. It’s a bit how English departments have essentially removed literature from the classroom, along with the pleasures that literature provides.
In a recent interview with St. Louis Public Radio you said, when asked about releasing a book of poems called Then the War just when the world is on the brink of another, perhaps, world war: “[T]hat’s not the kind of war I mean in the poem. It’s actual war that’s meant, but I was more interested in the relationship between violence and tenderness, I suppose.” Could you talk a bit about what you mean by that, and how that, it seems to me, surfaces again and again in your poems?
What I mean about the war between violence and tenderness? I guess I think all relationships are at some level about power and vulnerability. We need to be vulnerable enough to trust other people. We also have good reason not to trust everyone, which makes us want to withhold trust and vulnerability—and that withholding can be a form of power. So I think there’s always an internal struggle within us to have control of ourselves and of our lives, and to share ourselves and our lives with others, which means being open to them, which means they have the power to hurt us. The ongoing negotiation of this tug of war is, for me, what it is to be a self-conscious human being. And because I haven’t quite solved the conundrum of being human—nor do I expect to!—I keep writing about and from that conundrum, as a way to understand it just a little bit more, with each poem.
You write in one of your poems, “Sing a Darkness,” about fog being lifted
the way veils tend to at some point in epic verse so that the hero can see the divinity at work constantly behind all things mortal, or that’s the idea, anyway….
During the pandemic, I read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, sadly, for the first time in their entirety. I was, in many ways, surprised at how comforted I was by this notion of the veil being lifted, Homer lifting the veil, and revealing how the gods are at work or in love or at war with one another and how their conflicts and interaction to a degree control and manipulate our lives. But how they are also a part of our lives, our emotions, and war, and suffer alongside us, in many ways. Later in that same poem you speak of our “impulse to find affection everywhere.” I was wondering if, as a classicist, you find comfort in the idea that the gods' emotions—including lust, love, jealousy, courage—and ours are forever intertwined? It’s difficult, at least for me, to return to the squareness, maybe moral rigidity is a better term—of monotheism after Homer.
Well, I should say first that I don’t believe in the gods, so I can’t really think of their emotions being intertwined with ours. It’s more that the gods in Homer are, for me, a human way to try to understand the otherwise vagaries of things like love, jealousy, lust… And imposing on the gods the same fickleness of humans makes it easier to understand the randomness of our lives—or at least I assume that’s how it was for the ancient Greeks. As I understand it, that’s how all deities come into being, from humans needing to believe there’s a reason for, say, our suffering, rather than thinking suffering just randomly happens, which is bleaker to think. Monotheism is just another version of that, equally unsatisfying, it seems to me.
Not only what lasts, but what applies over time also.
I can’t help thinking, now, with Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities under siege, of the murderous siege of Troy in The Iliad, and at the same time, the tenderness (there’s that word again) between Achilles and Patroclus and the rage of Achilles at his death, and his subsequent slaughter of Hector and ruthless treatment of his corpse. But then, in perhaps the most memorable and moving moment in all of literature, Hector’s father, Priam, kisses Achilles’ hands, the hands that murdered his son, Hector, and asks that Achilles think of his own father and his love for him and vice versa. They weep together, and then break bread, and Achilles allows Priam to take his son’s body home for a proper burial. I’m not doing it justice, but Homer not only lasts, but truly “applies over time also.” Is this the kind of tenderness you spoke of earlier? And what, maybe, is embodied, in this line of yours from “All the Love You’ve Got”:
Leave them; they do
no harm.
That line from “All the Love You’ve Got” refers to the two young men who are seen having sex by a passerby—I’m quite literal in my poems, so all I mean is that the men are doing no harm by having sex by the riverside, so there’s no reason to disturb or judge them… And yes, the scene you mention from The Iliad is exactly what I mean by tenderness—shared vulnerability that can, for a time, displace our differences and bring us, if only briefly, together, as it brings the two men in that scene together, across their grief, across their being on different sides. In their shared suffering, they are reminded that they’re both human beings. That’s why I say, in another poem in the book, “If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution—” and then end the thought right there; tenderness is its own weapon, finally, but everything depends first on that “If.”