Carl Phillips, born July 23rd, 1959, is an American writer and poet. A graduate of Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Boston University. Phillips taught high school Latin for eight years. He has written 15 poetry books as well as a few prose books, and a translation titled Sophocles: Philoctetes. He has studied both Latin and Greek. In 1997, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, in 2000 he won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men, and in 2002 he won the Kingsley Tuft Award. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also won the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters among others as well. He’s also very down to earth and funny.  

I arrived 30 minutes early to Carl Phillips’s craft talk at the University of Houston on February 11, 2020. The room filled with familiar faces, UH’s undergraduate and graduate students in creative writing. His talk was charismatic and amusing. He discussed 3 poems, not his own, and took questions. What I learned is (1) be purposeful with the syntax and the interruptions we create within our poems, (2) tension building is important and effective, and (3) words are seductive.

The following evening he read his work at a public event hosted by the Menil Collection at the Cy Twombly Gallery. He explained that he would read 14 poems because there are 14 lines in a sonnet. These included “Gold Leaf,” “And if I Fall,” “Morphine,” and “Wild is the Wind.” Carl Phillips is insightful in person. He explained that poetry can be considered “long and extended meditations of what it’s like to be living in the world…[it’s] a steady construction of personal mythology.” He also also told us that “all poems are a form of questing” and we have the “right to want exactness and to interrogate what people assume.”

Carl Phillips is a busy man. He left Houston the next day so we conducted our interview via email on February 14th and 15th.

AMANDA: How did you discover your love of writing? Did you always want to write poetry? Does fiction interest you? Who are your influences?

CARL: Hmm. This turns out to be four questions…I suppose I discovered a love for writing just by reading, as a kid. I wanted to write down my own stories and thoughts, and my parents encouraged it. And no, I didn’t necessarily want to write poetry at the start, but my mother wrote poems as a hobby, and that surely had an impact. I’ve never wanted to write fiction, as an adult, though I read it all the time. And as for influences, that would be a very long answer, if I really answered it. The short answer is the Greek tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides, all of archaic Greek poetry especially Sappho and Archilochus, Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Robert Hayden, Randall Jarrell, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Brigit Pegeen Kelley, Rita Dove.

AMANDA: Do you feel you have a particular style or certain themes you like to write about?

CARL: I do seem to think in lengthy sentences, often with inflected grammar (i.e., the verbs and their subjects move around), which might have to do with my studying classical Greek and Latin, but is just as influenced by the sentences of prose writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton…For subject matter, I write a lot about desire, the body, sex, ideas of morality, the tension between what people say we should do and what we actually want to do.

AMANDA: Do you feel that teaching craft benefits your own writing?

CARL: I feel that teaching craft—and everything else—is immensely beneficial to my own writing, since it makes me especially mindful of how poems are built, and I return with a keener eye to my own work.

AMANDA: Your poetry seems to be very philosophical. Would you say that you express the knowledge you already possess through your poetry, or that you develop those thoughts as you write?

CARL: I agree that the poems have become more philosophical. It might have to do with age, lol. But in terms of how that comes about, I’ve always thought of a poem as a space within which to wrestle with what can’t be resolved—love, for example. Sex. Etc. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say a poem is a form of questing, of journeying through experience toward something like understanding, even if it’s only a temporary understanding. So I enter the poem not knowing my subject or direction, and go by instinct forward.

AMANDA: Given your personal background (sexuality and ethnicity in particular), I imagine there being trials and obstacles that you may have encountered. Do you have any advice for writers facing similar struggles? Would you agree that your poetry has opened doors for the writers hoping to make an impact as you have?

CARL: My advice is always to write the poems you absolutely have to write, without regard for how others will receive them. That’s the only way to write honestly, I believe. And then it’s important not to have expectations about audience. I really have only written for myself, which means in the beginning that to write was a way of understanding myself and the things I was grappling with. I didn’t even think I’d be sending poems to magazines or having them in books. And not every reader has been a fan of my poems, by any means. But I am gratified to realize that there are readers out there, and especially gratified to know that my poems have opened doors for other writers but, more importantly, for other people who aren’t writers at all. I’ve been told that my poems have helped people feel seen, and less alone—and that’s given them the courage to move forward. I feel incredibly lucky to think that’s true.

AMANDA: Personally, I struggle with being shy. After watching you perform your poetry so genuinely, I wonder if you would have any advice on public speaking and what to do if something unexpected occurs while performing?

CARL: I am incredibly shy! I am still nervous, to this day, whenever I walk into my classroom and start speaking. But I began as a high school teacher, and I knew that I had to pretend to be confident if I wanted to keep the attention of 30 high school kids for five periods, five days a week. Which is to say, it involves a bit of acting. Reading one’s own poems in front of people is of course scarier, because it’s more personal. I’m glad that I am across as confident, but I am pretty terrified when I’m reading poems for people. The only slight help I’ve found is to have a glass of wine before the reading, but I’m not advising that…

AMANDA: Do you ever think you will run out of things to say?

CARL: I used to think I’d run out of things to say, but I realize that that’s probably only possible if I run out of things to think about, which doesn’t really happen to people until they die, I guess. I imagine we keep thinking, all the way to the end, even if no one can tell, and even if we lose the ability to articulate our thoughts. But there’s still thinking. I believe poems are an ongoing record of what it’s like for one person to be alive right now—so as long as I’m around, I imagine I’ll have some thoughts about it.

AMANDA: Congratulations on your new book! So stoked to read it. Should we be on the lookout for more?

CARL: I’m always just working on the next poem, as opposed to writing the next book. So, I have about a book’s worth of poems that I’ve written since Pale Colors in a Tall Field—at some point, I’ll sit down and see what poems seem like keepers and I’ll see what they shape themselves into, as a group. All poets have their own pace. So far, I seem to have a new book every two to three years—by that calculation, the next book should be in 2022 or 2023. If the world still exists.