the thought-and-gesture work of poems

Poems don't get written by spending one's time exclusively in books, in front of blank screens and pages; it's crucial to get out into the world, to experience it as fully as possible, and to pay attention to that experience. Doing so is also a useful distraction from the frustration of not being able to write, or to write well. So in addition to reading and trying to write, both in a disciplined way, I also make a point each day of going for walks (a dog helps). I'm also the one who cooks in the family - cooking count. Or the weather's too lousy and I don't feel like cooking, so I look for a steady few minutes at the weather from my window, or I close my eyes and listen to the weather that, when I can't see it, actually has its own music, not so lousy after all, I hadn't noticed, how hadn't I noticed this before? This doesn't mean my next poem will concern weather or putting a Bolognese sauce together or the bark of a tree I noticed while walking, but these all get added to the countless things I've noticed, smelled, listened to across a longish life and they leave a for-the-most-untraceable imprint on each thought and gesture that follows, including the thought-and-gesture work of poems. 

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "Ambition" in My Trade is Mystery.

the way flies attend horses

I used to equate winning a prize for writing with winning Wimbledon, but that's not right. Putting aside the possibility of bad calls by referees, putting aside luck - good or bad - to win Wimbledon is to have played the best game of tennis, albeit only on that particular day; today's champion could as easily be defeated tomorrow by the one who lost today. But winning a prize for art, far from meaning you were the best today, really just means that a randomly assembled group of humans and therefore subjective and each-with-their-own-biases judges came to an agreement - itself often uneasy - that your art was deserving of a prize. That doesn't make it the best or, to be honest, even good.

Prizes are part of the politics that attend art the way flies attend horses. They ultimately distract from what, as far as I can tell, art is most about: the urgency of and devotion to and sheer pleasure in the act of making some form of human expression for what it means to be alive in a human body at this moment in time.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "Ambition" in My Trade is Mystery.

temporary stay against the inevitable next stretch of wilderness

Poems, for me, are deeply private, as is the making of them. I've no idea how I do this thing, ultimately. Nor do I want to know. To be given a map or compass would prevent my getting lost - what, for me, the making of poems requires from the start; the act of writing is a way of finding a way forward into the next clearing, as temporary stay against the inevitable next stretch of wilderness, where with luck the next poem lies hidden.

- Carl Phillips, from the introduction to his essay collection, My Trade is Mystery.

transform, not translate

In the tension between [ongoingness and conclusion] lies the resonance without which a poem is flat, static, which is to say, is not a poem. This resonance can be frustrating for the reader who wants experience to be translated; but poems tend instead to transform, not translate - they are indeed translations of felt and thought experience into verbal presentation, but their business, as it were, is to transform experience so that our assumption about a given experience can be disturbed and, accordingly, made more complicated, deeper, richer. This doesn't mean that we as readers necessarily will feel better. But the purpose of reading poetry is not, to my mind, to be made to feel better, but rather to understand human experience more entirely; this kind of understanding leads to wisdom, not the good feeling that is finally a shallow version of the happiness that wisdom strangely brings in its wake.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "Little Gods of Making" in The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014).

the solution is impossible

Another reason for making - and this is certainly my own reason for doing so - is as a way of understanding not entirely but a bit more clearly what resists solution. I think it's important for the maker - the poet, to stay with what I now best - to understand from the start that solution is impossible, even as he or she nevertheless attempts it. A careful calibration of humility and arrogance is required, with maybe a healthy dose of foolhardiness and/or masochism, take your pick, thrown in. Or to speak from personal experience, I tend to begin writing a poem with a sense that I know how to navigate the territory I'm entering - it's not until the end, or more likely halfway through, that I remember the truth, abandon myself again to being lost, and just hope to arrive somewhere wiser, though no less lost, in one piece.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "Little Gods of Making" in The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014).

not everything gets written down

A reason to broaden the definition of political is because each individual is different, and our poems will necessarily reflect that. In a democracy, that seems to me to mean that those who must write as witness to the savagery of, say, war should do so — that’s part of the record of what it means to be alive right now in 2016. So too, though, is the intimacy between a parent and child, so too is the agony of private despair that can blind us to what also counts as part of life — joy, in its myriad forms. To be alive has never been one thing, any more than a period of history is. At the same time, people are complex creatures, and we manifest our sensibilities in many ways. Writing is just one of them. Which is to say, speaking for myself at least, my poems are simply how one aspect of my sensibility gets enacted; other parts might be manifest in how I dress, or interact with others, or by the hobbies I choose. Not everything gets written down, nor does it have to be. We should no more make assumptions about who a person is, based on that person’s poetry, than we should be assuming how they should write, and about what, based on who we think a person is.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "A Politics of Mere Being" in the December 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine. You can read the whole thing here.

correctly political

There are countless aspects to a self; race and sexual orientation are only two of them, it seems to me, neither the least nor the most 
important. It’s more accurate to say there’s a constant shifting of 
hierarchy, depending on any given moment in experience. Am I a gay black man when roasting a chicken at home for friends? Sure. But that’s not what I’m most conscious of at the time. Am I necessarily, then, stripped of political resonance at that moment? Or is not the sharing of food with others a small social contract analogous to the contract of giving and taking — of interaction — that we call citizenship in a democratic society? Is this a stretch? Can we only be political when we are speaking to specific issues of identity, exclusion, injustice?

Resistance might be the one thing that governs what we think of as political. And in that light, I’d hardly call roasting a chicken a political act (unless perhaps I were to roast a chicken and serve it defiantly to my vegetarian friends ... ). But who determines what the things we choose to resist should be? We’ve heard the term “politically correct” forever, it seems. But increasingly there seems a push to be 
correctly political. How this translates is that there are a small group of things that we — by which I mean poets of outsiderness, of whatever kind — are expected to write from and about, and it comes down to an even smaller group of identity markers (race, gender, sexual orientation, as I’ve mentioned), when in fact there are so many aspects by which identity gets both established and recognized. This is in no way to say that the identity markers I’ve mentioned aren’t immensely important; they just aren’t solely important.

- Carl Phillips, from his essay "A Politics of Mere Being" in the December 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine. You can read the whole thing here.