In October, 2005, the first annual Tomales Bay Workshops welcomed award-winning poet Carl Phillips to its faculty. In the months following the workshops, UCDavis graduate student Kate Asche (poetry) had a chance to correspond with Mr. Phillips regarding poetry, fantasy indie bands, book-making, and cowboy metaphysics.
K: Carl, I've read several of your books now, and your poems frequently seem to grow out of experienced moments. Are there moments in your life that resonate poetically for you, yet after trying to approach them in writing, you find you cannot? What do you think about these half-written moments—for instance, do you consider them “failed” poem-attempts? Perhaps what I am wondering is, do you think there exist certain emotions, experiences or moments that cannot be translated (I hesitate to use “depicted”) into writing? If yes, do you think other art forms can approach these moments? If no—if you think writing can somehow get at any moment of experience—do you think there are any times when it shouldn't?
C: So, to get to the first question, I suppose I do find there are moments that resonate poetically for me, but I'm not always aware of that at the time. I don't have an experience, and then write it down. Rather, there will be a cast of mind that seems to be the result of how I've been feeling and/or thinking in response to a series of events over a given period. I just finished a poem that I know comes directly from the time I spent in California , both at Tomales Bay and later in Napa , and yet there is not evidence that that event lies behind the poem, at least to a reader besides me.
And sure, there are experiences which somehow don't seem translatable—by me, anyway—into poetry. Sometimes, they can only be translated via the eye. I'll see something, and feel something in response, but it will seem enough, just to have seen and felt—perhaps because I suspect that to try to pin it down as language wouldn't work for me. Music captures a lot of what isn't translatable in poetry, I think. And certain smells can capture a season as no poem can.
And then there are experiences that, for whatever reason, one resists writing about, or just plain doesn't feel moved toward language. I have only twice written something about my decidedly turbulent and troubled family (the childhood family, I mean, as opposed to the one that now consists of my partner and our two dogs). I have often thought that there is at least a book of poems that could deal with the family stuff, but I'm just not moved to do so—it doesn't matter enough to me, it's not what I live with, anymore, it's not what I wrestle with. And for me, poems are the result of a very real wrestling with a foe that one is half-attracted to. My family isn't that.
K: In your last note, Carl, you said that for you, “poems are the result of a very real wrestling with a foe that one is half-attracted to.” In Joe Wenderoth's graduate poetry workshop this quarter, we read some of Henri Michaux's poetry. In his brief essay “Powers”, Michaux says that “one must be able to lose some of one's friends; but enemies must be kept. Precious!” [1] Michaux goes on to write: “The problem is not to calm this pressure [of the enemy] down, but to place it. To transform what is wrong, the enemy, the irritating situation, hostile surroundsings, into energy.”
How, if at all, do Michaux's comments come to bear on your concept of poetry? Also, it seems to me that many of your poems deal with love and/or intimacy, and the things that create intimacy: conflict and its resolution, honesty, failure, forgiveness, empathy. How does your view of poetry as a “wrestling with a foe that one is half-attracted to” inform your treatment of these themes? How does thinking about these themes change the way your poetry wrestles?
C: Michaux's comments and my notion about wrestling as the source of poetry, for me, are very much analagous. What he calls the enemy, that's what I think of as certain demons or distractions, things that can get in the way of behaving how one would ideally like to behave. And in my effort to understand those things that get in the way, I often end up with a poem. An example of such an enemy, to use the Michaux term, would be sexual desire. It's not necessarily an enemy, but it can get in the way of such perhaps old-fashioned but very real notions as fidelity. How to reconcile the commitment to a single person with the fact of physical desire that just comes with having a human body?
And perhaps that gets at your question about love, as well, since I have been interested in figuring out how love can incorporate the possibility of betrayal, mistrust, etc. I think we go into love in an idealistic way, but the fact of the matter is that we are all variously flawed and have to figure out how to still love and be worth loving, in spite of those flaws. So a lot of what I've written has concerned love, monogamy, fidelity, and the various things that distract from that. And I guess I think, when I say love, that I don't just mean between two human beings, but also the kind of thing that Herbert is concerned with: belief (which is a form of love, I somehow think). It doesn't have to be a belief in a particular deity, but I think my poems can be read as exploring ideas of trust/belief and the willingness to abandon oneself up to what can't be proven to exist (whether it's a deity or it's fidelity, etc.)...
K: I am intrigued by your comments on belief in your last note, and what you call “the willingness to abandon oneself up to what can't be proven to exist.” It seems, from your poems, that your relationship to poetry/language is one of such abandonment. Do you think so? If not, how would you characterize your own sense or feeling about what language is and what it does?
Along those lines, though turning a little, if there was no such thing as poetry, what art form do you think you would use to think the things you're thinking? Do you think you could operate in another form? Or maybe this is a better question: is there an art form or media that you ever wish you could work in instead of poetry? In your opinion, what is it that poetry does that other arts cannot? What do you think is poetry's greatest limitation?
C: I guess I think what language is, is a medium of perception. In the way that we wake to the visual world or to sound, there's a waking into language, which is what it feels like when I'm actually in that mode where I might be able to write a poem—it also happens when I am reading great work, poetry or prose. Language, at least when it comes to literature, has a transporting quality to it, or so I find. And it's the frustration I can have with so many things being written out there—I feel as if I've been taken absolutely nowhere.
If I were to choose a different medium from poetry, I think it would be dance—the kind of dance that looks freeform, until you realize that the dancer has absolute sensitivity to timing, rhythm, and an anticipatory sense about how the music might at any moment change... My fantasy was always to be a singer in an indie band, but it's probably too late for that... Maybe I have become my own indie band?
K: You mention in it that so little of what is being written these days “transports” you. Are there any specific poets (or other kinds of writers) that you think of as producing writing that “goes somewhere”? I am always looking for new books to read.
I am struck by your description of the kind of dancing you would do, if you were not writing poetry... Actually, what I am interested in is its paradox: its demonstration of a particular kind of freedom which appears to be not freedom at all, but...what? A balance of forces? It seems like you are getting at more than that. If you are interested, I'd love for you to expand on that idea.
Or, if you prefer, here is a different thought/question: like the rest of the poets in my class at UCDavis, I am currently putting together my thesis, which is a collection of poems. As I put my collection together, I find myself dealing with forces I have not dealt with before—the forces that work on/within a book, as opposed to a single poem. I am wondering if you might comment on your experience of book-shaping: do you always think of your poems as part of a larger work, do you perceive them as standing completely alone, or some combination of the two? How do you decide what poems to keep in a collection, and what poems to cut? How significant do you think the title is, and what are some ways you have arrived at titles?
C: About poetry that transports me: one poet who comes immediately to mind is Frank Bidart, especially in his latest book, Star Dust . I guess what I want is to be challenged by a poem, made to see up close something that can often be painful or disorienting to look at—Bidart does that with morality, ethics, the sexual, violence...and he does it often in language that strains our conventional ways of thinking about language.
You asked about the paradox of “a particular kind of freedom which appears to be not freedom at all, but...what?” I sort of lose track of how that relates to dance and my choice of it as an alternative to poetry, if I had to choose. But I can say that I am very caught up in the notion of free will, the degree to which it exists—and, if it does exist, the human impulse to create restraints in a world where maybe there needn't be any. I think of this especially in light of sexual behavior, but also in the context of moral behavior—whatever that is. I think I first got intrigued about this when I read Gide's book Lafcadio's Adventures —I believe that's the one where a young man kills another man, simply because he can, and knows he won't be caught, and here's his opportunity to see how that might feel...I'm intrigued with how temptation works, and what temptation would mean, if we in fact had no free will—are we then preordained to transgress? And does that then make transgression okay? And somehow, in the midst of all of this, I think my concerns about this issue of freedom and limits have affected how my lines get laid down on the page.
Now, the question of book-shaping. Well, I don't think in terms of a book when I'm writing poems—I mean, I just write here and there, and a couple of years will go by, and I'll realize that I have, say, 50 poems. At that point, I lay them all out, and try to work out how they may be speaking to one another, are there any thematic connections; essentially, it's as if I've been working in the dark, and now get to see everything in the light at once. Usually, I'll find that there are three or four poems doing the same thing, so that means I have to get rid of all but one. Out of 50, I'll hope to be able to save around 30 poems. Then, I go back to the laying-out stage, and try to just imagine them in any number of configurations, and what would be the strengths and weaknesses of each configuration.
I think of each poem standing alone. It has to be able to stand alone. I have no patience—in my own work—for poems that simply serve as a bridge between poems; to me, that just means they're weak, and I'm trying to get away with something. But it is also true that the strongest poems can resonate even more deeply, as a result of placement in a manuscript. So I find the arrangement pretty crucial, even as I also feel that each poem should be able to resonate independently of the other poems.
I think the title of a book—as with a poem—is incredibly significant. It's the first chance we have to influence how the reader will read the poem and/or book. As for how I arrive at them, well, the ways are various. With my book The Tether, I'd actually been urged by my publisher to change the title, which had been Spoils, Dividing. So I went back and realized I had a poem called Tether. By putting the “The” in front of that, I thought the poem had a George Herbert ring to it—you know, how he has poems like “The Collar,” “The Pulley”... And the more I read the manuscript, the more I realized how many poems concerned connection, the things that tether two people together... My latest book—out next month—is called Riding Westward. The title is from the Donne poem “Good Friday, Riding Westward...” The poem's actually a sort of comic self-portrait, I suppose—a cowboy figure who's riding toward sunset (all of this is pre- Brokeback , I swear!); I liked the idea of juxtaposing a comedic cowboy poem with the lofty metaphysical poet title. Only later did I think it would work for the title of the book, since the Donne poem concerns the inability to repent, as it were—to entirely give up the bad behavior that the self admits to. And that resonates as a theme throughout the manuscript...
Anyway, those are some answers. When it comes to putting a book together, there finally seems a kind of magic to it that's different for each person. I'm always amazed that I can ever put a book together. And once I actually do, and have thought through the order, the sequencing, the title, etc., I'm amazed at how rarely anyone every picks up on those details. All the more confirmation that we ultimately write for ourselves.
Carl Phillips has published nearly eight books of poems: his latest, Riding Westward , is due out this April from FSG. Mr. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis .
This interview published with permission of, and very special thanks to, Mr. Carl Phillips.
[1] Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 . Berkely: U of Californa P, 1994. Page 169.