A Conversation with Carl Phillips
BY KEITH KOPKA
Carl Phillips is the author, most recently, of Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips’s other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). After over thirty years teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Phillips lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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Keith Kopka: Carl, thank you for speaking with me about Scattered Snows, To the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2024). The collection is moving in the way that it asks readers to meditate on how we all work to reconcile past and current versions of ourselves, often while at the mercy of the faults and whims of memory. You engage with incredibly complicated elements of what it is to be human throughout the collection, and you do it, as always, with vulnerability, grace, and nuance.
Perhaps a good place to start discussing this complicated subject matter is the title poem of the collection, which introduces many of the themes in the collection (myth, memory, alienation, boundaries, etc.) and ends with a beautiful image of everyday people, forgotten by history, lighting fires simply because it is night, while even their tears become a gesture of the mundane.
This moment of epiphany seems to be a source of both comfort and longing for the speaker that reverberates throughout the rest of the collection. It brings into focus the ways in which many of these poems ask readers to reconcile the internal and external forces that impact how we understand and memorialize ourselves. How do you see the interrogation of memory operating across the book?
Carl Phillips: Thanks for your words about the book, Keith, and for this question – a tough one to get us started! I think each of my books has become increasingly obsessed with memory, which makes sense: the older we get, the more history we’ve accumulated, and the more material to look back on and to interrogate. And I think the reason we interrogate what we remember at all is because it’s an instinct – maybe for artists, especially? – to want to make sense of the past that, no matter how we try, we can’t entirely step free of. Could I have been kinder? Did I misunderstand something said, and if so, was my behavior – based on that misunderstanding – mistaken, which means everything could have been otherwise, if I’d understood more clearly? And the problem with all of this is that we are sifting through memories as if they’re reliable evidence – but as I think everyone learns, with time, our memories morph, to accommodate what we need to believe in order to still trust ourselves and our actions. The farther away we get from past events, the less accurate our memory is of them. We look back and, as I say at the end of “Surfers,” we can “almost still see it, from here.” But as I say in a later poem, “On Why I Cannot Promise,” “we hear from afar.” Both those quotes suggest that we rely largely on our senses to remember things. But the fact that we can almost remember, and that we remember from afar seems key: nothing is certain. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s the meaning of the title, “On Why I Cannot Promise”: I can’t promise, because I’m not certain of anything anymore.
KK: Speaking of memory, references to classical history often appear in these poems. Can you talk a bit about these recurring classical elements and how they operate as a vehicle for analyzing and interrogating the ideas of myth and storytelling on both individual and cultural levels in these poems?
CP: That’s interesting, I don’t know that I can think of any classical references here except for the title poem – oh, and I guess also the centaurs at the end of one poem, and how another poem is called “Gladiators.” I used to be a lot more preoccupied with classical myth, especially in my first two or three books, but I recall making a conscious decision one day to avoid doing so, because I didn’t want it to become an easy go-to strategy. As for why bring myth into it at all, I guess I used to be interested in how myths originate in part as ways to explain human behavior – the gods we create tend to have human features, to speak as we do, to have flaws as we do. There’s a logic by which, if it’s okay for the gods to fuck up, then it’s okay if we do too. But the problem with that logic, of course, is we’re the ones who created the gods in the first place – so the gods aren’t some objective template against which to measure our own behaviors. And very early on, I think it was easier for me to write about certain things if I did so via the persona of myth. I could write about my own experience of rape, for example, if I spoke from the point of view of Leda as she’s remembering being raped by a swan, aka Zeus. But again, that soon seemed to me too easy, and I wanted to do the riskier thing of speaking as my actual self.
Regarding the references I can find in Scattered Snows: centaurs are major for me, because they’re a restless fusion of animal instinct and human self-consciousness and reason – for me, they more accurately represent how it feels to be human, since we’re never entirely about reason; the gladiators poem wasn’t written with gladiators in mind at all, that was a last-minute idea to have gladiators as the title – I just wanted to speak about intimacy between men, and since the poem alludes to earlier fighting and wounding, gladiators came to mind, the way they tend to, ha; and the mention of ancient Romans is just a way, I suppose, to say that certain experiences are timeless. I could have made reference to any number of ancient cultures and histories, but this is the one I know best.
KK: You’ve made some intentional and interesting choices regarding the order of poems in the collection. Each of the three titled sections takes its title from a poem in a different section of the book, and the collection also opens and closes with a similar image of people disrobing. These elements create a cyclical feeling as readers encounter the poems. Can you talk about the decisions you made regarding the order and construction of the collection and how you see these choices connecting to the book’s themes?
CP: I’m glad you noticed the arrangement! I always think the arrangement of a book is so important, but I never expect a reader to see what I’ve done – I need to know that the ordering of the poems is inevitable, but just for myself.
What happened is, when I finally thought I probably had enough poems for a book, I printed them all out. And my memory had been that I had thought I had a lot of uncharacteristically narrative poems – narrative in the traditional sense, which I usually avoid. But it turned out that I really had only three such poems, and they each had in common the idea of two people (or more) trying to get somewhere, some kind of quest within the context of intimacy and a lot of landscape. So it occurred to me that each of these could be the anchor poem in a three-sectioned book – three sections because I had three of these poems…I should say, too, that I had tried to make a decision, after my previous book (Then the War) to never write a book of poems again, but instead to just do chapbooks (That is another, longer story!). I moved away from this decision, but it occurred to me that this could be a new way to put a book together, as three chapbooks. I could rely on there being resonance among them – what happens in a full-length book – because they were all written by the same person. And originally each section was titled after the title of its anchor poem. But I hated how predictable that became, and how quickly. In a last-minute decision, I moved the titles around, and when I looked at the table of contents that resulted, I could see how this strategy meant that there was a chiastic interlocking effect – it stitched the three sections together almost physically. And it seemed to me that this made sense on one level, because there are certainly recurring motifs across the sections, but also on another level it seemed to me to say something about the nature of memory itself, how memories are linked, how there are points where they intersect and where they don’t – for me, the effect of the ordering is kaleidoscopic, you see the same colors constantly reconfiguring themselves into different patterns, and this is – again, for me – exactly how memory seems to work, or how the act of remembering works.
KK: I love that idea of the order being kaleidoscopic. That’s an excellent word for it, and, as a reader, I can assure you that your choices are working wonderfully. The way that those reverberations connect throughout the sections makes the experience of the collection feel like memory at work.
That intimate experience of memory also plays out in the way many of these poems read as reflections on the speaker’s understanding of self. For example, in the poem “Somewhere it’s Still Summer,” the speaker admits, “I keep my best to myself; my worst / also,” while in the poem “Fall Colors,” we see a questioning of the speaker’s friendships that leaves the speaker similarly exposed. All of this leads me to wonder how, if at all, you see these poems engaging with the confessional tradition?
CP: Oh, I believe all poems are confessional at some level, just as I believe all poems are autobiographical. Even if we ‘just’ write about a sycamore tree, for example, it reveals something about us, at the very least that that’s the tree that comes immediately to mind, but also maybe it reveals something about where we grew up, what trees were in our past. Or maybe we’ve never seen a sycamore but we’ve read about it in a book – that in itself is an autobiographical detail, no matter how incidental…But when I think specifically of the confessional tradition, I understand it as never being merely a person spilling their thoughts and guts – I think that’s how many people misunderstand that tradition. Instead – for me, at least – it’s about self-interrogation without any consciousness of an audience that is nevertheless there, if that makes sense. I don’t think I could say the things I say if I thought someone was listening. Nor would I say them in the way that I say them, because I’d be wondering how to make myself understood by the audience. Instead, I’m trying to make myself understood to myself.
KK: I want to ask you about the final poem in the collection, “Rehearsal,” which ends with an image of two people taking off their clothes and swimming out to a ship at anchor, calm in the dark. I am reminded of your poem “The Jetty” from Silverchest, in which you write: “Some are willing to trust any anchor. Some will / choose the ship anyway, no matter how anchorless / and dashed, between the wind and the sea.” In some ways, “Rehearsal” is a more peaceful imagining of a similar scene. Instead of the ship being “anchorless” and “dashed,” it is defiant in its calm, and “everything was itself. As it always had been.” In your mind, are these poems in conversation with one another? And is this calmer reimagining a gesture of hope and trust as the two people swim out towards the ship in their most vulnerable state, or is this the rehearsal before the scene goes wrong?
CP: Ah, that’s a good callback to a poem I’d all but forgotten! I never thought of the two poems being in conversation, because I didn’t have “The Jetty” in mind at all, but now that you bring it up, it seems as if there must be a relatedness, even if only coincidental. I think what’s more immediately accurate, though, is that we all – by we, I guess I mean writers – have our private obsessions (what my teacher, Robert Pinsky, calls our monomania), and we gradually assemble the images/symbols/whatever around and within which to articulate those obsessions. So I’ve always had particular animals in my poems – raptors, horses – and there’s often a particular geography, namely the one I grew up with, the Massachusetts coast, beaches, scrub pines, etc. The poems in our head take place in the places we know, I suppose that makes sense.
On to “Rehearsal.” I think the big point about that ship is that there isn’t a ship. As the poem says, “the dark lay / like – defiantly – a ship at anchor,” but “everything [else] was itself.” The ship is the lone simile here, in a world that’s otherwise entirely literal – one of the things I’ve always wrestled with is how poets get caught up in metaphor and simile, as a way to understand reality, but sometimes these figurations can feel like an escape from reality, a way to avoid facing the truth. So, in this poem, the troubling thing is that the two people make their way to the one thing that isn’t real – there’s no ship, it’s just the dark. But the poem ends with the line “They swam out to the dark ship,” which sounds very definite – my idea is for that line to reflect how these two people believe in the ship enough that for them it is the truth. Which in turn brings up the idea of what is true, what is memory, is a thing true if we believe it is.
I liked ending the book on what feels like a note of arrival, but what turns out to be a commitment to what’s unknown – which, for me, is what any relationship between two people is. We love someone, we decide to make a life with them, we have ideas of how it will play out, but we can’t know anything for certain – that’s the trust part, in a relationship, and the risk part, too. And in taking off their clothes and shoes, the bodies of these people are at their most vulnerable. What does it mean to risk vulnerability with another human being? This is probably the question that has hovered over all of my poems for forty years, now that I think of it.
Meanwhile, it was a complete coincidence when I noticed that I had two poems in which people disrobe. The idea of having these bookend the manuscript seemed another way to have connection and to say something about how certain motifs recur across memory.
KK: I like what you just said about relationships and the poem reaffirming a commitment to what is unknown. The epigraph of the collection from Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas: “Now let’s sit here for a bit, and stop / being sorry about the things we’ve done” seems connected to this same sentiment in the way that it announces to readers the idea of letting go even if it’s uncomfortable. How do you see this epigraph helping readers to understand and contextualize the collection’s overarching arguments?
CP: Oh, when I came across those words in the novel, they seemed like a kind of reminder that there’s more to life than the past and to dwelling on it – or there’s more to remembering than blaming ourselves for what we can’t change anyway. So many of the poems seemed to be about self-interrogation and potential self-blame, and the epigraph seemed to counterbalance that a bit. I don’t know. I always figure no one notices epigraphs, but here you’ve asked me about it, ha!
KK: Lastly, there is a physicality that stands in contrast to the more intellectual, less tangible elements of self and memory in these poems. I’m thinking of pieces like “Surfers” and “Artillery.” There is also a theme of borders and boundaries represented by recurring images of rivers, the sea, etc., that seems connected to this physicality. I’m interested in how you see this tension between the tangible physicality and eroticism of these poems and the more intangible psychological elements operating throughout the collection. This tension recurs not just in Scattered Snows, To The North but also throughout many of your other books. Can you speak about this tension and its importance in your poems?
CP: You’re right, that this has been a tension in all of my poems. It even ties in with that ship in the final poem, the abstraction of darkness that the people decide to understand as a physical ship. It all goes back to something I said in a poem long ago (“Fray”), about it being “a human need, / to give to shapelessness / a form.” To me, this is pretty obvious, but people bring it up a lot when talking about my poems, so I guess it isn’t obvious? It just seems to me that we live in a physical world and we have physical bodies, but we also have this (apparently unique to human beings) self-consciousness that makes us aware of abstractions like mortality, time, freedom, fear, desire, etc. Not that these are things that animals that aren’t human experience – a rabbit knows fear, but we’re told that a rabbit can’t be analytical about fear, or reflective about it; likewise a rabbit understands time at some level, there’s dusk and there’s dawn, there’s the cold of winter and the heat of summer, but there’s not a human consciousness of time.
But self-consciousness is a weird burden, I find. It would be so freeing, not to have thoughts like “is this the day I’ll die? Does this person truly love me? What is meant by truth?” Abstraction is overwhelming, because intangible, invisible, and I guess I find that it’s only understandable if we can see it in relation to something concrete. Going back to an earlier question, I think it’s why people create gods and depict them as human; it’s much harder to have faith in something that we can never prove exists. Anyway, I think the artistic impulse is about giving abstraction a concrete form that temporarily holds it at bay – contains it, or seems to. A poem, for me, is a way of making the abstraction of fleeting experience and sensation into something that will stay in place for me. Each poem is a kind of snapshot of psychological or emotional gesture – an attempt to do what Wyatt wants to do in his poem “Whoso List to Hunt,” when he says he’s trying to hold the wind in a net – which is impossible, of course, as he knows. But that’s what each poem is, for me, an attempt to catch the abstract in the concrete. But of course, the problem is that words aren’t actually concrete either – so each poem is just the attempt to contain human experience, and if I’m lucky, only bits of that experience get caught, and only briefly, which is why I write the next poem. Right now it feels like an inversion of what Jorie Graham speaks of – to catch the world at pure idea; maybe I’m trying to catch pure idea in the context of the world. But even that feels unoriginal. Maybe it all goes back to Horace and the idea of a poem as a picture, a way of literally depicting the abstract experience of being human. Maybe everything comes down to Horace…
