SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to In Three Poems, where we get to know today's poets through reading a couple of their own works as well as works of others who have had some influence on them in some way. Without further delay, today's poet is Carl Phillips, the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently, Scattered Snows to the North in 2024, and Then the War and Selected Poems 2007 to 2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Penn USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips also has three prose books. Most recently, My Trade is Mystery, Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, Yale University Press, 2022. He lives in Cape Cod, and here he is in conversation with me on In Three Poems. Thank you for joining me, Carl, for Conversation in Three Poems. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited that you're here. The way this normally works is we read three poems, two of them by our guest poet, and one of them by a poet of your choice. And so we'll close on that one. We'll talk a little bit about the poems in between, but we're going to start with my favorite part, which is I get to read the first one. And this is from Scattered Snows to the North, which I believe of your seventeen books, this is the most recent book of poems. And this is Sunlight in Fog. Maybe what a river loves most about the banks that hold it that appear to hold it is their willingness or resignation to being mere context for the river's progress or retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattails and reeds thrive there means they prefer what a river love. How the river running always away the way rivers tend to stands as proof that reliability doesn't have to mean steadfast how the river itself would say so if a river could say I've forgotten entirely what it felt like to enter his body or to be entered by his, but not how he'd spent long afternoons as if to look away had become impossible. Just watching his face get routinely blurred by the river's motion like an inside out version psychologically of a painting where the model sleeps beneath a portrait of himself not sleeping, if that makes any sense. Not I mean that he was capable of love, but that like history already mistaking itself for myth again. He loved a river. And that's early on in the book, I think only the the second or third poem. I love that poem.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

So I gotta tell you, Carl, I don't know, are you an Indigo Indigo girls fan?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Well um Not a question you expected coming into this interview. Well, I mean I liked when they started out, I I had that first album. I liked those songs. I I haven't continued throughout the decade.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Well, I think it's one of those things too where there was an ex who played the Indigo Girls all the time, so it's associated with a lot of memories from for me from the mid-90s. But uh something about this poem, even though it doesn't go that way at all, it reminds me of their song Ghost. There's this phrase in it, the Mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place you can walk across with five steps down. I love the idea of the things that thrive there on the margins, the cattails and whatnot. But also like the the questioning of does a river really hold? I remember thinking about that as a child, thinking how much of the ground needs to be soaked through in order for the river to a certain extent it's just the force of the water, right, I suppose, that makes it. But then you've got long places like maybe in that song where the M Mississippi widens out into this extremely large thing, you know. And the mud banks along the edges, and you think, what where are the margins margins? Where are the edges of the river? If you could go back to when you wrote that, what was on your mind as you were I I've often said that writing a poem, I don't necessarily know where it's going when I start it. Is that what it was like with this, or did you have something you were aiming for?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

No, I'm not able to aim it. And I'm not uh with poetry anyway. And I'm not I'm not able to write if I have an idea of what I'm going to be writing about. And I hadn't thought about this poem in a while. I reread it since I knew you were going to be reading it. And I don't know. I I mean I know it was written a long time before this book came out. Yeah, that happens. But it's also a memory uh it it's to do with another relationship that was very long ago. And this morning when I looked at the poem, I thought, you know, I think I think this is partly my way of talking about my own if I had to make equations, I'd say, okay, Carl, you're the river in this poem. And people in relationships with you have to realize that, you know, you're always doing this dance between reliability and stability. And reliability doesn't have to like what's the what's the role of fidelity in reliability, I suppose. Or um what if someone is they can be relied upon to never always be where they where someone would want them to be? And so, and what does that mean to say it's okay, I love you, even if you're constantly leaving me? And yeah, and so you could say that's a kind of love to have, and a river love can be that, as and the river, meanwhile, can represent, I suppose, something about, yeah, I love you, and um, I'm always in motion in some way, and I won't be pinned down. So, which doesn't have to mean that it's sexual, that this is about sexual fidelity. It could just be about, you know, psychological. Um and see, all these things are just things that occurred to me this morning looking at this poem.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Which is part of the fun.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah, part of me when I wrote it. But this person's staring into the river, and I was thinking about, you know, that's almost like how that relationship worked, that this person only could see himself. He wanted to see himself in me. You can only see a blurred version of himself because that's not how you see yourself. You you shouldn't see yourself in another person, or that shouldn't be exclusively how you do. Yeah. Um so that's the problem, um, that they can lose themselves in what would seem like a kind of faithfulness to looking steadily into this other stream. I feel like even as I say that, it sounds so convoluted. It's convoluted as that weird example towards the end of the poem, which even I can't entirely parse. But the whole idea of how it's psychologically an inside-out version of this, which I think is why I left in the phrase, if that makes sense. That makes sense. Because I thought I I feel like it makes a kind of sense to me, but barely. Not the kind I can explain.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

I think it works in this example.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Well, I think it gives a reader. It gives a weird reader a break, because if the reader gets there and says, you know what, that I didn't quite get that, but it sounds like that's okay to be a little confused. And as I think it sh it is okay to be a little confused in a poem as reader and as the the maker. There is an analogy, there is a kind of chiasmus working, you know, this mirror image. So you have the clear face of the of this man that is then blurred and unclear in the river he looks at, and then you have the unclarity of an unconscious sleeper. But above him is what he looks like when he's wakeful, which you could say is a kind of clarity. So it's like clarity goes to unclarity as unclarity returns to clarity. So it's this reverse image. The image itself is reversing the way you would reverse your image if you looked in a river. So that's how it seems like it's a turned inside out thing, but it's not literal, so it seems psychological. There's a kind of sense to it. I love it, actually.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Well, and and it's it's one of those things too, and part of why I wanted to read it is because I I kind of get it, but I don't know that I could explain it. And and I think that's kind of cool that poetry can do that, that there can be an emotional sense of which something feels right.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Sure. And that's what I have talked about a lot in classes that you know everyone talks about the narrative of a poem, but I'm interested in the psychological and emotional narratives, which are often different from the overt narrative that's happening. But it but in some way, I feel like the poem, I hope it lands on its feet. I mean, this idea that it's not that he wasn't capable of love, it's that he loved a river. And so when you love a river, you have to realize that that means you're loving what is always disappearing and going elsewhere. It's you are not the destination, you're simply the context. And if you can handle that, then that's a great relationship. And if your idea of a perfect relationship is to stop someone from moving and say, now you're gonna stay here with me all the time, a river is a bad choice. Go with a tree. A tree would be good, or rock. You know, or you could even a pond for crying out loud. That's some kind of body that's there. But don't do that, or it's kind of like saying, I don't want any violence in my life. Don't love an ocean. You know, that's probably not a good thing because you're gonna get some violence.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Well said. But love a kid's pool, little kiddie pool.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

And some people just were not made to be that. And I, you know, that's probably now that now you're saying it, we're kind of explaining why this reminds me of that song, which is that it doesn't necessarily remind me of that song so much as it reminds me of that ex, that relationship. Who he and I are very good friends these days, by the way. But uh, we were not for a very long time. Um you said this was an older one, or at least at least it was sometime before the book came out. When I was thinking about that this morning, I t I was thinking about a poem by Gerald Stern where he uh it's called There's Wind, There Are Matches. And in a lot of ways, there's there's elements of that poem that are just so deeply metaphorical that it's the fact that you can't explain it is probably part of what makes it a poem, I suppose. Um there's a line in there that he says he said, I believe now more than I ever did before in my first poems. And it was sort of a turn uh midway through. And it got me to thinking if if you had the chance and someone said, Hey, I want to read some Carl Phillips and I want to read some of his poems, if you had a choice to where to guide them to where to start, is there a particular book you would choose?

SPEAKER_00 11:14

I don't know. Interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I feel like um it it is possible to find an author and pick any book of theirs, and you know, you can catch up as you as you wish.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

But I myself like the chronological um you know, the scene where people started and they evolved over time. Yeah, and so but maybe that's the reason to do things like a selected poems, um, you know, because that's that's how I've come to understand certain writers, like Jory Graham. It wasn't until I the dream of the unified field. Um and then I thought, oh, I get this now. Now that I see in order where her mind went across five books. But before I had just sort of dipped into different books and thought, I don't know, I didn't understand the overall sensibility, and which is what I'm most interested in with poets, not what's going on in a particular book, but yeah, where am I at this stage of their sensibility? So interesting. So I don't know. I think to answer that question, I say, well, you may may want to start with the first book because that's get a sense of how this person started out. It's hard to say because it's sort of like pick the photograph of yourself from all the times of your life that most reflects you. Are you going to choose when you were 16, when you're 34, a current picture, and say, Well, this is who I am? Or here I am as an infant.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Avoided answering the question.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

I think you avoided it really interestingly. That was good.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

What's the best way to avoid? I mean, so people don't feel upset. They just think, oh, interesting. Gave me something to think about.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

So then the war, uh, which uh is the book previous to Two Scattered Snows to the North. And you chose a poem to read uh from that book. And is there anything you want to say about that, or do you want to just read it and we'll talk about it afterwards?

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Well, I mean, I can say that it it is in that book, then the war, but originally it was um in the chat book. In this chat book.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Yeah, I have that one too. Sibling rivalry.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

I had told myself I will never include these poems in another book. But what I meant by that was I'm never going to include them as part of a regular book. Like I I would do it with when it came to new and selected, I thought, well, this is actually you know pretty recent um poetry, and it's poetry that mm most people hadn't had a chance to see because it it is a chat book, and that's sort of part of the thing I love about chat books, but also it can be frustrating that they're not easily found. And you have to it's word of mouth kind of thing. And I love that. We can, if you want, at some point talk about how my original intention with Scattered Snows to the North, I had given up writing books. I thought I'm not gonna do it anymore. I only want to write chat books, and I'm not going to get caught up in what's involved in launching a book book. But then I ended up I ended up doing what I thought of as three little chat books, but then I put them together and they're a book. Um, anyway. Did I read this poem? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Okay, I'll do that. And if I fall. There's this cathedral in my head I keep making from cricket song and dying but rogue in spirit still bamboo. Not making. I keep imagining it as if that were the same thing as making. And as if making might bring it back somehow to the real cathedral. In anger, as in desire. It was everything to that cathedral. As if my body itself was a cathedral. I conduct my body with a cathedral's steadiness. I try to a cathedral in desire. In anger. Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body. Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body. So I don't know, let me see. I have a picture of myself writing this poem that my boyfriend took when I was in Provincetown one week years ago. And I'd been very ill from the first day of this whole vacation and unable to actually leave the cottage we'd rented. And then finally I was able to come outside and before I had to be tied to a bathroom, basically. And then then I was outside and I've been playing with this idea in my mind. Um I can say that I lived for many years next to a cathedral in St. Louis, the the center of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, like literally next door to it. So cathedrals figure largely in my life. And also that I do consider this poem a sonnet. And I don't think every 14-line poem is a sonnet, but that's how I feel about this. And I will say that this dancing around the idea of cathedral was fine. I wasn't sure where to go with it. But when I suddenly wrote I Cathedral and turned it into a verb, that's when that's the thing I always hope is going to happen when I'm writing. Okay, now something just happened. I don't know where it's going, but I'm going to follow it because now I've been I've surprised myself.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

That's the fun part.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

And when I don't, that's when I know I don't really have a poem. I think, oh, this you wrote something in a kind of very workman-like way. But but that's that's you built something, but that doesn't mean it's a poem. And and it seems somehow a way to talk about something that I don't know. This idea of light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body. That was also a surprise to me. And I I have gone into this cathedral many a time in my secular uh anti-religious way. Um and I I'm fascinated with how light enters cathedrals. But the idea the way persuasion fills a body, which and filling is different from entering, but also suddenly the sacred and profane, and the idea that the light can be seen as a kind of fucking of the cathedral. You know, just as persuasion, which needs to, it seems to me, enter the body before the actual fucking can happen. Um is I don't know, the psychological fuckery of it all.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

I was thinking the seduction of the cathedral, but yeah. Yeah, I've had I have a similar love-hate relationship with architecture and churches and such because uh sounds like for many of the same reasons we probably bonded over some of those same things uh at a distance. Uh I say bonded, and I don't mean that to sound like I'm a I'm a stalker of you on social media for that. But that's kind of what social media is for. I think one of the things that struck me the the way that you could have the anaphora of cathedral and it not get old, I think was fascinating. The way that you change- and then when you really clinched it, is like, yeah, when when you verbed that noun.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yeah, and I think that's the thing. This knowing when, you know, something that's an interesting pattern has gone as far as it needs to go. So now you're gonna have to switch it up in some way.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And it takes that leap. Which I guess would you say that's I'm sorry, would you say that's the Volta? Would you say that to the Volta, maybe?

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah, I think it probably is. I didn't count which one it is, but it probably is somewhere around there. Well, it's a little late. I don't have to be too stupid. As if my body itself cathedral, because it then it turns into starting to align the cathedral with a body, which is going to be the preview for how we'll end with persuasion entering a body and being aligned with the cathedral and the light. But and then, you know, I also think it's a sonnet-like element to have the last two lines. That couplet basically. But they are a couplet, yeah. And and the only difference between those two lines is that there's a comma in the second the in the last line, which changes. It's supposed to it's meant to change if people read it correctly, how we read it. You can you know that you can pause a a different part part and get a slightly different resonance from the lime.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

It becomes like a list of these two things that you're re-highlighting from what you just said, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah. I've had many a person write to me and say, Carl, that comma. And that's all they say. They seem like, okay, I'm glad I can get that much out of a comma. People react to it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

You're gonna enjoy this then. And most people are listening to this, not viewing it, but for those on YouTube, I'm holding it up and it's it's appearing backwards probably. But uh Scattered Snows to the North, uh my friend Joel is actually uh he's a poet but also an editor um in a in a non-creative uh marketing company. And so I took a I took a photo of of the cover of Scattered Snows to the North and I said, Talk to me about that comma.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

And he loves it when I when I say things like that. Because in my radio days, when I went from well, it had to do with my coming out, I went from Christian radio station to God, I need a job now. Uh and so I ended up as a as a weather broadcaster for uh uh a national weather company. Yeah. But and I would have scattered snows to the north. I would have not put the comma there. Is that maybe I was wrong? Is that grammatically necessary? And he he said, Well, no, it's it's not, but it's neither is it grammatically wrong. And I'm like, well, that was a very poet kind of answer. So I don't know what your thoughts were. Um because I don't think that phrase is actually in the poem by the title, is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

No, it isn't. Um yeah, um, I guess I think of uh I mean it did come from over here in a weather forecast. That's how I thought of the title. And and as usual for me, the title was the last thing to be found. I mean, I go for weeks, months even without a title. And for me, what the comma does, Scattered Snows, comma to the north, is the comma's a kind of um wedge between what's going to happen, but it staves it off a bit. And I feel like I've said in a few interviews that for me that's what writing does. I feel like when I write a poem, I create a wedge between myself and what it seems at the time unbearable. Um unbearable in terms of just how to move forward and be alive. And so in that sense, I feel like I write for my life in some way. And a poem sort of staves off, like just when I think it's gotten it's it's too much it life. It's like the poem becomes a place to go and wrestle, pin down some demons. And just calm them down, not kill them, but calm them down. And so I feel like I have an okay relationship with them now, and I can move forward until the next need for a poem. And the comma for me works that way sometimes. It sort of says, yes, this is part of the picture. There will be scattered snows to the north. But right now, they're off to the north. The comma sort of they haven't arrived. And for me, well, and not just for me, in a lot of literature, snow often seems to represent mortality and death. And so this idea that scattered snows, mortality is coming closer. Soon there'll be the full snow. But it's still to the north. You're not there yet. It hasn't reached you. And and that poem, the title poem of the book, is very much about older civilizations and how people have cried in every century. And even ancient Romans, we may not remember individual people anymore, nor do we know why they cried, nor could they themselves say why they were crying sometimes. But we all have moments when we just burst into tears. And and that's just part of being human, and then we die. So anyway, it seemed like the right thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah. Scattered snows. And it's like, oh, where? To the north. Yeah, because otherwise you would think that the the the whole thing is about the scattered snows to the north rather than what's happening between here and there, maybe as well.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Yeah. And I mean I've had many people tell me that they think that I'm my titles are very gay. And they said this they point to this one in particular, and they say this is one of your gayest titles because the comma makes it gay. And I I find that more interesting to think about what that means about them, that they have this idea. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

But the comma makes it gay.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Yeah, like it it's an unnecessary flourish, it's an unnecessary fancy thing. And as if that's what gayness is, is a bunch of unnecessary flourishes. And I don't, of course, think that. But but they always tell me, oh yeah, you can tell a Carl Phillips poet poem or poem title because it's going to be like that. But maybe like Star Map with action figures, maybe I should have had star map comma with action figures with action figures.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

But he said making it a list is not what I was doing. I wish I could remember the line right now because it would make a great example of another way that that's but you had me thinking when you said about in then the war, there's this there's this line about some discipline, what the most memorable sentences like people always slightly resist. And and I thought, wow, isn't that poetry itself? Or at least the poetry maybe is found in that tension between wanting to to you know pour the words into some form or something that that becomes the poem and the poem resisting that at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah, I think that's yeah. I think the problem with a lot of for me with a lot of contemporary poetry is it succumbs and obeys. Um there should be a little bit of recklessness and a refusal to be entirely disciplined. And I do find that the most interesting people are that way too. Um I don't want someone who is just some devoted, loyal person whose actions are predictable. And I don't want unbridled adoration from somebody. It's sort of um it's boring. And and and it means it doesn't challenge you yourself. But yeah, and sentences are like that for me too.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

And that that part of it too, the the the the lines in poems, like sentences that are resisting the discipline. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Well, it's like to me, um, and again, I don't think a lot of contemporary poems work this way. I think a lot of people are very much into each line containing its idea. And so you s are spoon-fed the information. I'm interested in a sentence that could be the whole poem is one sentence. Crosses through. But it keeps moving around and the lines break not where they're supposed to, but where they're we're told specifically not to, not at the word the. Um, you know, we're not supposed to do that. But I find that doing that means that you have a sentence that is a complete grammatically proper sentence, but it's refusing to stay literally within the lines assigned it. And and to me, there's something exp exciting about what happens when that you you kind of feel torqued around as a reader. Um But yeah, what's when when when it's all very predictable, it's it's hard for me to appreciate that particular kind of poetry.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Aaron Ross Powell I remember back in the the early nineties when I was just first playing around with writing poetry, and uh it was one of the newer books on the shelf. So it must have been very early nineties, because I think that was 1989, was William Stafford's an Oregon message. I still have that same beaten-up paperback copy coffee stains and everything. But that was one of the things that frustrated me as a young poetry student at at first. Um how's he ending a a line with uh or the? What is the Honestly, I was so intrigued by like the way he would do things with syntax that really even even if uh uh even if in most of his poetry wasn't uh heavily rhymed and metered, but there was uh there was an Emily Dickinson-ness in uh the way he would say things, the syntax of the the word choice and how he put them together. It just uh It intrigued me. And I I would say now that probably if somebody asks me who's biggest influence on you know my early writing, I would say probably William Stafford. Yeah. His poem Ask Me, some sometime when the river is ice, ask me mistakes I have made. It's not ask me what mistakes I've made or ask me about the mistakes I've made. Ask me mistakes I've made. And that was intriguing because it in my mind it's like this works, but it I've been taught this isn't supposed to work.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah, that's the problem with a lot of teaching about poetry. But I mean I spent many years of teaching in a writing program and every single day questioning why not questioning my passion for teaching, but wondering if I myself actually believe that this is has anything to do with the real making of art. Um you know, I can I believe I used to tell my students, I can I can teach all of you technique. I can't teach vision. I can't that's someone has that or or not. And we're told not even to use the word vision in terms of that. Um it's not supposed to exist. Um but but I feel like, well, there's a reason why we still look at Emily Dickinson's poems. And yeah, and and what she's doing doesn't follow any rules at all, including how she just messes up rhymes, punctuations all messed up. But you know, I I used to tell myself, you know, if someone like Emily Dickinson came into my class as a student, how would I respond? Would I under I like to think I would realize, you know, don't even touch this, just let her go and do what she needs to do. Because I would have students like that. And then there'd be other students where I felt as if, you know, I'm helping them fix and arrange their room. But that's different from, you know, that's someone who can be a good workman-like poet, um, I suppose. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there's a reason why there's some poets you come away and you think, I just I've never heard anything like that. And I'm I and then you come back if you like it enough, you do that. And then there are majority of poetry. It seems to me I can't, I couldn't tell you like who wrote this. Um, this whole idea of a signature. And, you know, people go back and forth about whether they think that's a good thing to have in poetry or not. But to me, it goes back to people. I'm interested in memorable people. And memorable people are not the ones who have the standard number of children and live the standard way of life and all that. There's something odd about them, sometimes frustrating, but but you know that you're never going to be bored when you and you might not want to spend time with them all the time, but when you do, you're interested. And that's how I feel like poetry. I I want I read it every night, so I want to I want to go to something I want to spend real time with.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

Yeah.

unknown 30:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

And I'm not on a rant now about poetry and what's good and what's bad, and who cares what Carl thinks? I mean, really, it's like as I tell people, don't listen to me. I'm just telling you. I often will ask myself, I mean, I'm flattered that people want to hear my thoughts. But sometimes I think, why? Because, you know, Carl, you just have opinions like everybody else, and they're they're not the answer. They're just how you make your way through life.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

I don't know what podcast it was. I want to say it was something like poetry off the shelf, but it might not have been that. Where you were talking with uh a young student who said uh she said something about she edited something later after it was published. And and you just very frankly, you know, and I think with a smile on your face, said, Oh, well, what'd you send it out for then if it wasn't finished? And it was just such a delightful thing to hear because she didn't take it as an insult and the two of them had have a wonderful conversation about how different people approach different things and how you approach it. And that that's what I think I find it's sort of a little bit freeing, I think, to hear that, okay, it doesn't have to be this way that maybe I was taught.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

I can be a bit of a And I will say with the editing, I mean, I I of course have changed poems too after they've been published in magazines, but I didn't send them out. I think the problem is I don't remember that particular interview, but I've had many a person say, you know, I sent some poems out and I I kind of don't really think they're finished yet, but I I just want to give it a go. And that's where I think, well, don't do it until you feel it's finished. It's perfectly fine to say, yes, this poem is absolutely done. And then a few years later you think, as you're wondering, should I include it in the book, you think, I will if I can get this ending better or how it looks. Um so that's fair enough. But it's it's like when people uh tell me, Oh yeah, my second book. Uh I've I've got four poems in there that I would stand by. And I think, really? Um I want to say that I will stand by all the poems in my book. And it doesn't mean I think they're all perfect. It means that I have I do believe each of these was the best I could do at the time. At the time. Yeah. Which is why I also don't understand these poets who disavow their first book. So many do, and they say, Oh, I don't count. I think how of course it counts. That's that's who you were then. And you know, the you of course you would do things differently 30 years later. Right. But there you are at twenty-five or whatever, and you wrote as well as you could. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

Yeah, you have uh another poem by uh Stephanie Marless. Stephanie Marless. And do you do you want to tell us why you picked it or do you want to read it and then tell us?

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Oh, I can I can tell you. I don't remember what year, but uh a long time ago I heard this poem in a talk that Michael Waters gave for a summer retreat that no longer exists that Carol Frost used to do in the Catskill Mountains. I think it was called the Catskill Writers Workshop. And and I was there on the faculty, and I want to say this was in the 90s, late 90s, and Michael Waters got up and he more or less spoke about associative leaping in poetry. And I didn't actually know what that was. Um, or I'd never heard the term. I guess I was doing it in some ways in my poems. And then he read this this poem, which made no sense to me at all, but it was mesmerizing. But I thought, I actually thought this is a dangerous poem for me because it seems like it's saying you can just throw a whole bunch of stuff in a poem and say it's all related because it's in the same poem. And I thought that's such that's so dangerous because then how are you ever going to revise anything? You could, you know, or how or to give this poem to students, and then they'll say, well, then I'll just put a bunch of unexplained leaps in a poem and make it work. But then the more I studied the poem, the more I thought, oh, actually, there are different ways in which things come together. But I also, this is the first time I really thought consciously about how as soon as two things are beside one another, a narrative is set into place. And I think about Rothko paintings, the ones where there are the two squares usually of different colors, one above the other. And which I used to be frustrated at when I would look at them, because they never have titles that are interesting, like abstract number three or whatever. And so it doesn't it's not a key to the poem. But it occurred to me, oh, well, the whole or to the painting, the whole thing about this painting is just spending time in the relationality between a block of yellow and a block of red, say. Um and what do you take away from it? It's not a narrative, but what do you feel? And I'm interested in that in poetry, where as soon as you put one thing down next to the other, it can have relationship. And I'm also interested in how I think in a good associative poem, the relationships might not be immediately apparent, but over time they emerge. And that seems what she's very straightforwardly talking about when, as we'll see, when she asks, don't things come into harmony? And yes, if you wait long enough, you can start to see how you know something random, and then you think, I never connected that with this other memory or something. Anyway, I'll read the poem. Okay and see what we think. Chinese bowls. Oh, and even that, the fact that that's the title, um the next thing we see is butter melting on a knife. So I'm already like, what? Like, how was that connected?

SPEAKER_02 36:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Chinese bowls. Butter melting on the knife at breakfast, a deer by the stone wall makes no sound. Elliot sleeping. But things without harmony? In Virgil's Georgics, the wonder is in things unlike the muscled oxen and the delicate bells and fruit of the field. For the ancients, all unlikely things joined in the stars, the goddesses charted among the bears and snakes. And don't things come to harmony? As when you judge someone by how she dresses or keeps house, and then come to see you are alike. I have been going around memories, climbing a flight of stairs from the city street into the quiet disorder of your apartment, your clothes, your books, the Chinese bowl you drank from, things that come to likeness. So the bear, the bull, the dog, starlight. So a child at the zoo asks, if she came back, would she be a zebra? A tiger. So jumble.

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

But and especially from the start, butter melting on the knife at breakfast, a deer by the stone wall makes no sound, Elliot sleeping. I think these are three nothing to do with each other. But already I start to think, well, they're all happening in the morning at breakfast time. There's a knife, and you can look out the window and see a deer, and you've got this man in your life who's asleep still. So there is a harmony to these things once you contextualize them. And so then we have this leap to Virgil after a very contemporary scene to Virgil's Georgix, and which does have oxen and bells and fruit, and it's like, okay, well, those all belong in the same poem. So there's some relatedness, which leads her to leap to the ancients more generally about the stars. And you know, the there are different um constellations that are named after goddesses and bears and snakes. So these seemingly real unrelated things come together under the category of constellations. And and then, yeah, you judge somebody else and say, Oh, look at her, blah blah blah. And then you think, actually, I'm I'm kind of like that. I thought I was talking about somebody else as if I were in a position to judge, but we're related, even though we're strangers, we're related by our habits. And just to continue along, I guess. Then this Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

No, I was just gonna say, and even though this is 16 lines, I think in a lot of ways it's sonnet-like.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

Because there's there's all these leaps, I think, but then there's that big turn we were about to make that I've been going around memories.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

Yeah, this turn that I think, well, what does that have to do with anything? You know, she's been meditating on harmony, I suppose, and lack of harmony. And then memories. But again, memories are another thing where we have a whole bunch of mixed bag of things, but they all are in your head. So they come together, but there are also things that can represent a relationship that's apparently over. Maybe this person is dead, and so that's why we're back in the apartment looking at their stuff, clothes, books, a bowl they used to drink from. Um, and they seemed unrelated, but now they come together. One, they're all in the apartment, two, they all belonged to this unnamed person. Three, they're all inside the memory of the person who's there visiting the apartment, who maybe was involved with the person one time. And then just to, and then she seems to throw that away. So the bear, the bull, the dog. And I have to think for a moment, oh, those are all three constellations. So we're back to constellations. Um, and then she says starlight, which that's what constellations are made of. And then this odd ending. A child at the zoo asks if she came back, would she be a zebra, a tiger? Which isn't a constellation. I don't think there are constellations for those two things, but the I but the constellations, many of them are heroes who, when they died, were transformed into constellations. So there's a way in which they come back as stars shaped as animals. And this girl is wondering, would she come back as an animal? Though she's thinking not of something celestial but terrestrial, animals in a zoo. And but also by the time the poem gets to that point, I'm willing to let anything go on. So I think, okay, now you can make some because she also changes the uh the grammar. After all these declarative statements, she uh introduces the interrogative. So she changes the grammatical mood right at the end. But that can seem like a turn out of the system of the poem, but interrogative and indicative are both grammatical moods, so they come together under the umbrella of grammar. I don't know. It taught me a lot, this poem. It made me feel like, you know, Carl, you could be. I I feel like one of my downfalls as a writer is my concern with control. And I very much care about controlling everything and and making sure that there's only one way the reader will read this and and interpret it. And and it took a while for me to think, you know, you talk a lot about risk-taking and recklessness, but you've got to be that way more in your poems. And and you can you can let things lie there in a poem and the fact that they're there, they belong in some way, even if you can't always explain it.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

So this poem was useful. Though again, I wouldn't show it to a beginning poetry student, because I do think it could it'd be like if someone says, Oh, I'm writing a poem about being confused, so I'm just gonna put a whole bunch of shit in it. And the aren't you confused reader? I think no, that's not the goal. But it should be that upon many readings, the poem's pieces start to coalesce. And that's what this poem seems to be talking about and in acting at the same time. So I love it.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

I think it goes back to what we said before with sometimes upon first reading, there's something in your gut that knows like, okay, this works somehow, but I don't know how yet. But when you read something and you're like, okay, this is beautiful, and this resonates with something, this this does something to me. I just don't know what yet. I want to read it again. Yep. And in in this case, it's not even an either-or. It's the beginning of a list. A zebra, a tiger, which implies, you know, there are multiple possibilities.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Yeah, which is another thing that um I'm very interested in how poems end and how we can resist closure, as Lynn Heginian has written a lot about.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

And it's too tempting to just zip it all up at the end, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 43:19

Well, that's what the again, that's what the majority of poems that people seem to like and that are popular. That's what seems to win the day. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think we have a desire for stability and for things coming together. I think in part because we know that life isn't like that. And so that's there's a satisfaction to a mystery novel that every all the pieces get decoded and put together. Uh, there's a satisfaction in a fairy tale that you know they lived happily ever after. But I think the reason we like those is because our actual lives f don't work that way. And so we turn to something that would give us that comfort, or like the romance novel. And we You we know that the the the lovers are going to come together and be happy. But but for poetry, for me, I want it to be more reflective of what life really is like. So this open-endedness is more accurate, it seems to me. And maybe that's the thing. Precision is the thing I care more about than control. And um being precise and and not sort of smoothing things over for so even a poem that might seem like it comes to because people will say, well, someone who's an offender and who um always has an easy bow at the end is Mary Oliver. I actually disagree. I I love Mary Oliver's poems, and I I feel like, you know, sure, maybe some of them work the way people are complaining about, but but I think she's actually very interested in what's wrong and what's difficult to parse in life. And and I never feel like the message is, oh, you know, pick up a shell and life will be sweet. Um I don't think she's the same.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

I think that's a misreading when people talk. I think, yeah. She can seem deceptively simple, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

And she also is very much talking about her queerness often in in poems. And so but it's a different way to to talk about it. And anyway, that's all to say that yeah, I mean, it's even poems that let's say Shakespeare's sonnets. I think the best of those sonnets, which is most of them, their rhyme structure suggests that everything comes into place at the end. But that's usually in meaningful tension with what's actually being talked about. And it's not as if the re the dilemma of love and loss has been resolved. Um so we're still left living in that messy space, but with beautiful music, which is which actually under sort of makes it sort of throws into dramatic relief the messiness of the situation.

unknown 46:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

And it's kind of like a pop song that can sound really sweet, and then you realize it's about child abuse. And it's like, whoa. Um I I didn't know as I was singing along.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Brian and I were talking recently about uh Lady Gaga's bad romance. Uh-huh. Yeah. And when that first came out, and you see all the kids out there on the dance floor having fun and smiling and singing, you and me could have a bad romance, and it's like, wait a year think about this song later. Right. If you ever do, because the lyrics are saying something very different. Sure. Sure. I think like hey yeah, we you we could we we could really mess each other up. Sure. Let's get together.

SPEAKER_00 46:42

Yeah. And there's something alluring about it. And and then you realize, oh, what am I what am I saying? I know my poems aren't the answer. And you know, what's nice is is um it's nice to have all kinds of poetry out there so people can pick and choose. It's a strange journey. What can I say? I just gave a reading in DC a couple days ago, and I chose to read half from my reissued first book and half from Scattered Snows, the most recent book. And it was a weird experience for me because I want to say I'm a vastly different person from that one who was scared and closeted and all of that. But on the other hand, it was interesting to me to see that, you know, Carl, have you even grown up? Because you're still writing about the same things, but through the lens of, you know, three more decades. And I see the the scared person wrestling with certain things in the first book. And then I see that I'm not scared of those things in the more mature work, but I'm still wrestling with them. You know, it's uh it's like it's kind of like when people think, oh, what will I do? I remember after I wrote my first book, and which I always feel outed me in some ways, and I thought, okay, well, I guess I needed to write that book to understand that I'm gay. But now I understand it. What will I ever write about again? And I had no, I should have just thought. What does it mean to be gay? And what does it mean to be gay at 40 or now almost 67? And so you're still asking these same questions, but presumably a little more with more wisdom behind you and more experience. Or like when people say, Oh, I don't need to write love poems anymore because I already wrote about love and I mean my I'm 25. And I think, do you think you're gonna feel the same way about love at 45? Good luck. Yeah. And like sort of saying, What is life? I mean, you I think a 25-year-old has an answer to that, but you know, it's not the answer. And now I I see once a week my 91-year-old father, and I think, yeah, uh I guess if you're you're in your 90s and you're you have yet more revision to that answer. And you would think by then, oh, okay, now I understand life, but no, you still now you understand life at 91.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

Whatever that is.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

My own father at 93 is a similar sort of thing, who's outlived two of his wives, you know.

SPEAKER_00 49:10

And you know Yeah, my I'm worried that my father's gonna live me, but we'll see. Um Well We'll see. I hope I hope not. If only because he kind of needs me to handle things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:24

So is there anything you want to say to our listeners about anything that you're working on next or next projects? Or are you taking a are you taking a break from writing books again? Or where are we?

SPEAKER_00 49:34

No, I never well the thing is I never really feel I'm writing books. Um you know, I kind of go poem by poem. Usually it seems every couple of years. I think, oh, I think I have about fifty poems. I'll bet 30 of these would be good enough to be, you know, in a book. So yeah, I have a book coming out next year. Um I thought later than that, but it's coming out next, I guess, April. And it's called Stir. And I know.

SPEAKER_01 50:03

Um Evocative in one syllable.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Yeah, that's all it's called. And I don't know what to say about it except that's you don't have to give any spoilers. There's poems by Carl. I mean, you know, it's uh there's always this thing when books come out well in production when the publisher asks, you know, can you write a paragraph about what the book's about, you know, to put on the flap or the back, whatever. And I always find this the hardest thing to do because what I want to say is, oh, further adventures in the life of Carl. That's but that's all it is. Further thinking. So I think, oh, I don't know. You know, it's like some some I used to envy people who could say, well, this book is my book about boxing, let's say. And and I also wrote a book about, you know, a famous whaler or something. Whereas I think, oh no, I'm just always sort of writing about the body, memory, time, you know, desire. And it it sounds so vague to put it that way. But yeah, in some ways I think of all the books as just one long meditation on these things. And the the subjects get turned around and catch different parts of the light. So but I think this book, Sur, is in is in some ways concerned with power dynamics, and obviously there's a sur of BDSM kind of thing. But then there's also What does that say that that's the first thing I thought of? Well, I mean that's the first thing that I thought of, and then but then there's sur, there's the racial overtones of sur and slavery, there and mastery, there's sur of respect, and there's the sur that sometimes splits generations. I mean, when a young when a kid says, you know, sir, do you need help with your groceries? And you're like, oh, because you think I'm an old man and I'm too weak to take this bag or something. But they also sometimes mean it in a polite way. So I'm interested. I I don't know, I think it's probably about that to some extent.

SPEAKER_01 52:03

Well, thank you so much for taking a big chunk of your morning and talking to me. Thank you, David. I'll have links to uh where people can get hold of things, and I'll have links to your website. Um and anything else that you wanted to say before we wrap things up? No.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

No, I'm just looking forward to I think this is this was fun. I enjoyed it. I'm glad you thought so. Yeah. I'm thinking about how next I'm gonna go and change the laundry in the basement. And I've got to clean the kitchen. Take the dog out. Um so non-poetic realities. Students would be shocked to see me in a supermarket, like, why are you here? Doesn't someone get your food for you? But no. I I buy my own food and then I actually cook it. Yeah. Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 52:52

As as a matter of fact, during the pandemic, yeah, your Instagram page was not all about poetry and poems and language. It was, hey, we're cooking something today and we're putting on some music and we're gonna dance in the kitchen.

SPEAKER_00 53:06

That's how I mean that's how it is every night when I make dinner for us.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

And that was wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 53:11

It's dancing around and singing and listening to playlists.

SPEAKER_01 53:14

I'll do that with singing to the animals in the morning when I'm feeding them, and I'll throw on something crazy like Good Morning Starshine. And yeah, it's uh I'm not always in that mood in the morning, but it helps. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Carl. Thank you. You've been listening to a special edition of In Three Poems with our guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips. I'm David J. Bauman, and we read Sunlight and Fog, a poem by Carl Phillips from Scattered Snows to the North, published in 2024 by Farrar Strauss and Guru, read here by David J. Bauman, and the poem And If I Fall from Then the War and selected poems 2007 to 2020, Farrar Strauss and Guru, 2023, written and read by Carl Phillips. We also read Chinese Bowls, written by Stephanie Marlis, from her book Slow Joy, published by University of Wisconsin Press in 1989. And that was read by Carl Phillips. If you enjoy these podcasts, do us a favor and give us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you would. In the show notes below, you can send us a text or a voice message. You can also support the show on our Ko Fi page. Thanks again for listening.