[New-Poetry] Carl Phillips

[David Bircumshaw]

Sorry, Mr Mole, I think this is a load of wank, pardon my French.

I've just been looking at his attempted poem: it is dire, it's like a tribute to flat writing. If you'd like a view on the universe from Lear's Castle take this link - ok?


http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/bbc7/aod.shtml?bbc7/davepodmore_cricketfix


Carl Philips and poetry, they are not even associated terms.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: TheOldMole 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views 
  Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 11:21 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Carl Phillips


  New York, September 26-Poet Carl Phillips has been selected as the recipient of the 2006 Academy Fellowship, given in memory of James Ingram Merrill. The Fellowship is awarded once a year to a poet for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career and provides a stipend of $25,000. Fellows are elected by the Academy's Board of Chancellors, a body of fifteen eminent poets.

  Of Carl Phillips's work, Academy Chancellor Ellen Bryant Voigt wrote:

    It might be said that all memorable poems explore or enact what it means to be human. Carl Phillips's work does both, looking steadily at his abiding subject-the complexities of intimacy and isolation-in sentences majestic and muscular, in lines taut and musical, and in language vivid and exact. These are indelible poems, and the voice in them entirely his own.
  For almost a decade, Phillips taught Greek and Latin to high school students in and around Boston. Classical prose writers such as Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus, as well as the Greek tragedians were early influences on his work. Phillips writes that they taught him "a great deal about compression when conveying psychological and emotional crisis." Phillips's work reflects a faith in the way a sentence can move over lines to lead readers to charged moments of intense insight and amazing beauty. 

  Phillips admits that he "came very late to modern/contemporary poetry," and it was when he was in his thirties that he began to publish his work. Since then, his collections have been recognized for their emotional engagement with the timeless subjects of desire, loss, and myth, yet also their very contemporary sense of how we speak in the world.

  Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Riding Westward (2006). His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

  His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Phillips is the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004). He translated Sophocles's Philoctetes (Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Phillips's honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He received a B.A. in Classics from Harvard University and an M.A.T. in Classical Humanities from U. Mass/Amherst. He later went on to receive an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. Phillips is a professor of English and of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the creative writing program.



  Leda, After the Swan by Carl Phillips 


Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,

the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,

I recognized
something more
than swan, I can't say.

There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,

and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down

to the heat-crippled field,

ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,

and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere--

then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.



  Passing by Carl Phillips 


When the Famous Black Poet speaks,
I understand

that his is the same unnervingly slow 
rambling method of getting from A to B
that I hated in my father,
my father who always told me
don't shuffle.

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. 
I think of my grandmother, said
to have dropped dead from the evil eye,
of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and
a generally difficult future headed her way
in the still water
of her brother's commode.
I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans,
and I want to tell the poet that the blues
is not my name, that Alabama
is something I cannot use
in my business.

He is so like my father,
I don't ask the Famous Black Poet,
afterwards,
to remove his shoes,
knowing the inexplicable black
and pink I will find there, a cut 
gone wrong in five places.
I don't ask him to remove
his pants, since that too
is known, what has never known
a blade, all the spaces between,
where we differ .  .  .

I have spent years tugging
between my legs,
and proved nothing, really.
I wake to the sheets I kicked aside,
and examine where they've failed to mend
their own creases, resembling some silken
obstruction, something pulled
from my father's chest, a bad heart,
a lung,

the lung of the Famous Black Poet
saying nothing I want to understand. 









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