Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen.

Since the publication of his first book, In the Blood (1992), Carl Phillips has generated a body of poetry that is singular for its demanding intimacy, its descriptions of the dissonant energies within a self, and its beauty. Phillips has now published thirteen books of poems, which have situated him among the most influential of contemporary American poets. Phillips’s poems wrestle with themes that seem especially urgent today—identity and race, sexuality and sexual politics, morality in human action and thought. But his poems also feel coolly adjacent to the present, as though—like other poets of great interiority, from George Herbert to Emily Dickinson to Li-Young Lee—he is thinking about timeless questions. If it is often the case that poets, over a life of writing, become more autobiographically revealing in their work, Phillips has always maintained the perhaps paradoxical quality of being candid and private at the same time. During our interview, he mentions that “My Bluest Shirt,” a poem from Double Shadow (2011), was informed by the death of his mother, though it doesn’t explicitly mention her. When asked whether he minds the reader not knowing the elegiac origin of the poem, Phillips says no. “I think that’s one of the fun parts of being a poet,” he says. “You can sort of stitch things into the poem that only you get.”     

Phillips was born in Washington State in 1959, to an African American father and a white British mother. His father’s career in the air force took the family to various bases in the United States and abroad before they eventually settled in Massachusetts. Phillips attended Harvard College and received graduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston University. His father continues to live on Cape Cod. After his mother’s death, Phillips says, his father started taking electric guitar and painting lessons, and remarried at eighty. “It’s a new chapter,” he says wryly. Though Massachusetts has remained a kind of home, Phillips has lived in Saint Louis, Missouri, for over twenty-five years, teaching at Washington University. His oeuvre now includes a volume of selected poems, two books of prose, and a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. His next collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, will be published in 2020. Since 2011, Phillips has been the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. 

This interview took place over two hot September days in Saint Louis. On the first morning, Phillips picked me up from my hotel driving a crayon-yellow Jeep. He and his partner live in the Central West End area of the city, in a town house built in 1903. The house is elegant, with colorfully painted walls and bright rugs. On one wall was a triptych of watercolors, reminiscent of Cy Twombly, that abstractly depicted the Orpheus and Eurydice story. In front of two French doors stood a pair of brass cranes salvaged from a fountain, several feet tall and green with age. Beyond was a backyard almost completely taken up by stands of high bamboo, which contributed to the atmosphere of cozy remove. Phillips is tall, handsome, often boyishly casual in dress. But a little like his poetry, in person he can be measured and watchful. We talked in his dining room, which remained cool and dim through my visit. Phillips’s brawny hound, Ben, kept us company while we talked. Except for the insistent, clearly habitual requests for feeding and walks, Ben slept.

INTERVIEWER

You interviewed the poet Geoffrey Hill for The Paris Review in the late nineties. What do you remember of that experience?

CARL PHILLIPS

I was terrified. He had been my teacher at Boston University, where he was quite intimidating—very exact and precise about everything. In class once he asked me to speak on something, and I began, “I feel,” and he interrupted, “I’m not interested in your feelings, I’m interested in your thoughts.” The overall effect was frightening. 

Apparently he had refused to be interviewed for The Paris Review for some time, and then asked for me, specifically, to be the interviewer. I didn’t think I could say no. It was a little tense the first day—it was hard for me to see him other than as my professor. Also I find his work difficult, so I had a lot of questions and I worried he’d think I hadn’t read it thoroughly. But it all improved after the first night. He and his wife threw a dinner party for my then partner and me, and Geoffrey got a little drunk. He walked into a closet thinking it was the bathroom. The dog went berserk. I also learned his wife and I had danced at Harvard’s freshman mixer many years earlier. The next morning was more relaxed. I think Geoffrey felt a little foolish, and he seemed, to me, more human, having revealed that side.

INTERVIEWER

One of the questions you asked was about the difficulty in his work. Your own work is intensely lyrical, often without the narrative coordinates that might help a reader navigate the poem.

PHILLIPS

I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art. I’m not trained in visual art. I often see things in a museum and don’t know what to make of them, but I still have an experience, a response to what I can see. Likewise, I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives. I think of many of my poems as emotional gestures. Context isn’t always essential—or maybe it’s that I resist context as an absolute. I like what happens when context begins to wobble a bit. 

INTERVIEWER

Given how complicated Hill’s work can be, I loved his claim that “I am as a poet simple, sensuous, and passionate.” He also describes Milton and Coleridge as poets of the “sensuous intellect.” Your work makes me think of a variant of that—the intellectually sensuous.

PHILLIPS

I’ll take it! I sometimes feel I’m simply writing out the way I think and move through the world. To me, it seems ordinary. I remember, early on, not understanding why people thought there was any unclarity. The poems seemed, if anything, too blatant, at least in terms of subject matter. Which I suppose can be its own form of difficulty. Combine that with long sentences and complex syntax, and maybe what you get is something intellectually sensuous. 

INTERVIEWER

You’re often described as a master of syntax. Could you talk about models for your syntax?

PHILLIPS

Playing with syntax is something that I feel I’ve always done, but it has to have come from somewhere. I lived in Germany for four years when my father was stationed there. In fifth grade I started studying German. Conversational German was required, but I was so excited about the language that I ended up taking classes with adult soldiers at night, learning the actual grammar of the language. It was my first encounter with an inflected language, where the verbs, for example, often appear at the end of a sentence. It was also my first experience with a language whose nouns have different word endings to announce whether a word is the subject or the object of a verb, for example. In English, when we see a word like dog, we don’t know whether it’s the subject of the sentence or belongs to a prepositional phrase like over the dog. But in German it’s immediately clear. I think that’s where I, as a very young kid, got this idea that sentences could be rearranged. Later, when studying classics, I read a lot of Cicero, including his books on oratory, which is where I learned that how we deliver information—how we arrange it—can have psychological effects on the listener, or reader.

INTERVIEWER

And how do you approach syntax now? 

PHILLIPS

Well, syntax is the thing that allows for manipulation in a sentence, in a way that grammar doesn’t. Syntax allows us to move blocks of text around, stall the delivery of information, establish hierarchies. Its ability to give only so much, then to switch directions, teasing the sentence out—that’s like foreplay. You decide when you’ll draw the readers in, and when you’ll release them, and for how long. And just when they think they’ve been released, you can bring them back in again. To me this is very erotic. It’s like seeing someone across the room and deciding you want him. First you have to get his attention, then you need to hold it and draw him closer to you. I often describe poems as little systems of restraint and release. The prioritizing of, say, noun clauses over verbs, withholding the action, the crux of the sentence, establishes a power structure—though which has more power, the prioritized noun or the verb shrouded in mystery? It’s a bit like the ambiguity that hovers over the power dynamic in BDSM—who actually has power, and who just appears to? And that’s so much of what eros is, as well.

INTERVIEWER

Sometimes the endings of your poems don’t feel like closures but like juncture points. There’s no hard click, just a gesture toward a continuous inquiring.

PHILLIPS

Yes, a constant pushing toward and into what isn’t known. I’m not able to write toward a known subject. I’m often in a situation that I think would be a good subject for a poem, but that’s not what ends up getting written. I feel as if I start in a kind of wilderness, and I’m sort of making a way, a crossable path through it. Eventually I can realize where a poem came from—but that’s rarely what the poem is about. It’s more as if the poem is the psychological or emotional precipitate of the narrative event or backstory, which doesn’t have to be an event, it could be something like fear, or joy. Many poems are the psychological, emotional by-products not of a single experience but of an amalgamation of experiences. At the end of the day, I come back to something Ellen Bryant Voigt once told me, that poetry is not the transcription of experience but the transformation of it.

In terms of closure, early on, I was influenced by Louise Glück’s work. I think of her early work as having very strong closures, throwing down a gauntlet. I used to aim for that in my own poems. But at some point—it may have had to do with studying  Jorie Graham’s work—the idea of a closure implying a next chapter seemed right, or more right for my own work. I want readers to feel at the end of a poem as if something has been consolidated, if only briefly. But then to realize, Oh, and . . . To hover there. I think that kind of closure is more faithful to the idea of an ongoing quest. 

INTERVIEWER

Your father was in the air force, and you’ve written about having an itinerant childhood. How do you think that might have affected your work?

PHILLIPS

For a long time, we moved to a different base every single year, always in the middle of the school year, it seemed. So there was that awkwardness of not knowing the other students, not fitting in with them, since they’d already formed their groups.

Constantly moving also contributed to a sense of marginalization that I already felt, being biracial. From kindergarten on, I would go to school and people wouldn’t know what I was. My mother would come to the school and there were teachers who didn’t believe she was my mother.

Somewhere in all of this, I began keeping journals and writing stories and poems. My mother wrote poems, just for the family, so that was something I’d grown up knowing about. Writing became a way of building a portable, reliable world. 

INTERVIEWER

I wonder whether this constant movement is related to restlessness, because you’ve written about restlessness. I wonder whether restlessness has to do with the idea of looking for a home or a kind of safe ground to be on.

PHILLIPS

I think they’re very connected. On one hand, I feel this real imperative toward restlessness, as if that is the only way to live. But the other effect of having moved so often as a child is that it’s made me want to find stability. I’ve been in Saint Louis for twenty-five years. Rather than dating, I meet someone and I decide, This is it. I suppose in that way I do aim for closure. Which is the enemy, of course, of restlessness.

INTERVIEWER

What about home? What does that word mean to you?

PHILLIPS

I don’t think I have a real understanding of home the way most people do, people who can actually say they’re from a place. Although I’ve lived here so long, I don’t feel as if Saint Louis is home. But I feel that this space, here, in this house, is home, as shared with my partner and my dog. I think sometimes maybe home comes down to the few trustworthy souls of one’s life in a space over which one has some sort of sense of control. I often think of home as Cape Cod, where my father retired, and where I went to high school. I’d lived there about twenty years before I came here. Those were formative years, plus there’s the ocean, which has felt like home since the first time I saw it—swimming in it, but also just having it there, as a constant presence, but a restless one. Like the best kind of relationship, maybe.

INTERVIEWER

Your father was a black man from Alabama and your mother was a white woman from London. How did they meet?

PHILLIPS

He was stationed at Ruislip, an air base near London. As I understand it, my mother was hanging out with some friends who were trying to meet GIs for a fun time—I want to say I mean something more wholesome than that sounds, but I have my suspicions. Only in the last decade did I learn that my parents lived together for two years before they were married, which was shocking to me, considering the era, especially for a biracial couple. They got married in 1958 and moved to Washington State, where my father had been reassigned.

INTERVIEWER

At what point did you become aware that you were biracial? 

PHILLIPS

I have this memory of being in a store—I was probably five—and a woman stopped my mother to ask where she had gotten my sisters and me, from what country. I couldn’t figure out why she was asking that. I don’t recall my mother’s response, but I do recall her telling us that we were her children and we shouldn’t worry about other people’s ignorance.

Obviously I knew my parents were of two different races, but this didn’t seem strange to me. Why would it? Though from an early age I understood whiteness was the default. There were no black people in the big Sears Christmas catalogue. There weren’t any people of color in the books I read. I didn’t think about it. I noticed, then didn’t. The awareness really began with going to school.

INTERVIEWER

And where was this?

PHILLIPS

Portland, Oregon. My kindergarten teacher, who was black, pulled me aside to speak to me. I suppose she could tell that I was smart—I was the only child who knew how to tie his own shoelaces. And she said, You’re going to help these kids along. You’re going to be a model, but you’re still going to have to work harder than the others because of being black. No one had spoken to me like that. It was frightening, confusing.

INTERVIEWER

Was race discussed at home? 

PHILLIPS

A little bit. My parents made a point of having us see movies with black actors, like Sidney Poitier. They would say, We want you to know, this is something that is possible for a black person, to be an actor. I guess it was their way of trying to find examples, role models. Oddly enough, I also remember my father telling us kids not to speak the way he did but to listen to my mother. I didn’t think much about that at the time, except that maybe she spoke better English. 

INTERVIEWER

She had a British accent. 

PHILLIPS

Yes. And now that I look back on it, it’s almost as if he was saying not to sound black.

INTERVIEWER 

Did your parents have a good marriage? 

PHILLIPS

They probably thought they had a better marriage than they did. It was very much a fifties marriage, the husband is head of the household, the wife has her place. My mother fulfilled the role of wife, but she hadn’t been that kind of a person back in England—she’d been quite wild. The marriage was a difficult thing for her. She always seemed restless—not that I thought that then. It looked like constant irritability, a lot of yelling. Also a lot of—well, one doesn’t really like to speculate about one’s parents’ sex lives, but my sense is that my mother was done with that. 

It all culminated after my sophomore year in college, when my mother had an affair with a cousin from England, who was my age, and who stayed in my room with me for the summer. It became apparent that this relationship was happening, right in front of everybody, and it was very, very bizarre. I had a landscaping job in a neighboring town, and my response was to live out of my car, or with whichever coworker would take me in for the night. My father’s response was to disappear. I’d returned to school when my mother called the dorm and told me my father was gone. He’d left a note saying goodbye, and no one knew where he’d gone. Meanwhile, my sister, who was supposed to begin college, went to England with the cousin. And suddenly they announced that they were getting married and she was pregnant. 

INTERVIEWER

And they’re still together?

PHILLIPS

No, they got divorced maybe a year after the child was born. 

The finish of it is, the following summer my other sister was getting married, and my father appeared at the wedding. As it turned out, he’d been with relatives in Alabama. After the wedding, my parents disappeared for a few days, and when they came back, they were together again, with some changes. There was going to be wine in the house, which apparently my mother wanted. They were going to go out every Friday—for dinner, to dance, or to have some nightlife. But almost immediately my mother got ill, some form of rheumatoid arthritis. It’s as if as soon as she discovered her vital self, she was physically weakened. 

INTERVIEWER

But that assertion of self seems so marvelous.

PHILLIPS

Yes. That’s a thing I have in common with her, this idea that you should trust what your body says, and it’s never too late to at least try to be who you need to be. 

But the family dynamic—which had always been about trust within the family—that had exploded. I decided I would never share anything that was important to me with my parents again. Which was too bad, because I’d been very close with my mother. My reaction was harsh, I realize now, but at the time, I didn’t—I couldn’t—give her credit for being a regular human being, not perfect. 

INTERVIEWER

What a drama! I’m thinking of lines from your poem “On Restraint.”

Weary of extravagance, one remembers with
fondness some painting in which the artist
had not forgotten how to strike a right 
balance between decorum and pain. 

PHILLIPS

Maybe that’s what it’s all about, negotiating a relationship between decorum and pain. I believe very much in decorum, in not showing a lot of your pain and throwing it on others. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel it. It just all seemed so shocking to me. And still is, in a way. I’ve not spoken of it publicly before. To me, my mother had failed to show decorum. Also it felt like a failure of one’s responsibility as a mother, which somehow I thought should come before how you felt as a person. That was the old me, who also believed you get married to or partnered with somebody and you stay forever, no matter what happens, which of course isn’t always how it is.

INTERVIEWER

You studied classics at Harvard, right?

PHILLIPS

Yes, though I went there to major in biochemistry and become a veterinarian. 

INTERVIEWER

I love that.

PHILLIPS

That was my goal. But I’d taken Latin in high school and at graduation my teachers made me promise to take a course in ancient Greek my freshman year. Just try it, keep your hand in. I loved the course. It was hard, but I found I didn’t mind the hours that I’d spend doing these rudimentary translations. One night I was working on a chemistry problem set and burst into tears. I couldn’t solve the problem and I thought, I hate this. I hate chemistry. I hate that I feel this way. The only thing I love is my Greek class. So I went to my adviser and announced I was switching majors. 

INTERVIEWER

So an engagement with the classics has been there from the start. 

PHILLIPS

Yes. I read Sappho in translation in high school. It seemed strange that it was so old, but so immediate. Besides the encouragement of my Latin teachers, a real incentive to learn Greek was to be able to read Sappho in the original. But once I was a major, the Greek tragedies were what really fascinated me, the particular moral crossroads at which who or what we are comes into conflict with who society insists on us being. Antigone, for example, has to bury her brother because of love and familial duty—yet the king has made his burial illegal because he’s been part of a band of traitors. How can any of this be resolved? She can either betray herself or betray the state. And though it wasn’t conscious, the tragedies probably resonated with my experience as a biracial person. I’d spent much of my life being told I wasn’t really black or that I was trying to be white, when I was simply myself. Meanwhile, though I didn’t understand myself to be gay, I was aware that I had occasional sexual attractions to other men, but it had been so hammered into me that sex between a man and woman was what was normal—or more bluntly, that sex between two men was somehow disgusting at best, immoral or evil at worst. Which is to say, studying the tragedies was probably the beginning of what I would end up writing from and about, the restlessness of not being able to square the self with society’s expectations.

INTERVIEWER

When did you actually start writing poems?

PHILLIPS

I wrote poems as a kid and in high school, the way a lot of people do. They were no good, of course. At Harvard I sent some poems to the literary journal, and they took one of them. Frankly, they were just overly dramatic versions of Plath and Ted Hughes. But I was encouraged by the acceptance of the one poem, so I decided to comp for The Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate literary magazine. Comping was what they called it—it took me months to realize that it stood for competing. 

Being on staff made me question whether I was a writer at all. The other students were quite sophisticated, many from Manhattan, with parents who had gone to Harvard or other colleges. I was the first person in my family to go to college at all. Once someone mentioned a poem in The Atlantic Monthly and I asked what that was. I’d never heard of The Atlantic Monthly. How would I have? I felt very in over my head.

When I graduated I stopped writing for maybe eight or nine years, which coincides with most of the time that I was married—to a woman, whom I loved and cared about. We married two years after graduating together. 

INTERVIEWER

This was during the eighties, after you left Harvard.

PHILLIPS

Yes. I was teaching high school Latin, first in Amherst, then in the Boston area, and finally in Falmouth, where I had first learned Latin. I thought teaching was terrific. When you teach Latin you’re usually the only Latin teacher in the school—I was the only full-time one. So it meant that I had many of the same students from ninth grade all the way to graduation. In that sense, they grew up with me. 

Then I just started writing out of the blue. I understand now that the impulse to write again came from my finally beginning to understand that an attraction to men was not a phase. To be clear, I’d never have gotten married if I’d understood my queerness. It was such a different time . . . Let’s put it this way. Some people in my position would go to therapy, others might commit suicide. I sometimes think the poems of my first book were written as a rescuing force, a way to work out these seemingly insurmountable, irresolvable feelings. 

INTERVIEWER

But you’re describing your writing as an extension of and a kind of working out of pain. That is what Plath does in Ariel, more or less. You had that kind of model. 

PHILLIPS

Yes, I did. Then, one day Martín Espada came to the school as a visiting poet. He offered to do a workshop for any interested teachers after class. We wrote for fifteen minutes, then he looked at our work. He pulled me over and said, You seem like you’re writing real poems. Are you a writer? I said I wrote them for fun. I didn’t do anything with them. He told me there were state grants in Massachusetts and I should apply. So I applied. Months went by and I didn’t really think about it. Then I got this letter saying I’d received ten thousand dollars. It never occurred to me that I could send poems somewhere and get money! 

INTERVIEWER

What I love about the story is that you do what you do, and then somebody who is not you names it. You’re doing this writing and Martín Espada says you’re a poet.

PHILLIPS

The first thing I did was buy a computer, which was a big deal back then. And they had these summer classes at a place called Castle Hill in Truro, Massachusetts, taught by Alan Dugan. I decided to go every week during summer break. I didn’t know that Dugan could be very harsh in the workshop and could refuse to even talk about someone’s work if he felt it was a waste of time. I got to the class and Dugan told me to read what I had. I read a poem and there was just silence. And then Dugan said, This is a complete poem. This is wonderful. Others should take note. I felt embarrassed. And terrified. And relieved. I went to the class a second summer, and Dugan asked me, Have you put these together for a manuscript? It had never occurred to me. Why would it? I was a high school teacher, very happy with that, and poetry seemed a nice hobby. 

Dugan said there were contests and directed me to the book Poet’s Market. I was so naive, I thought, I’ll enter this contest at Northeastern University, because it’s in Boston, and I live in Massachusetts, so maybe I’ll have a chance. And I won. I feel as if my whole career has been a series of lucky situations, especially now that I see how it can often be years, for many people, before a manuscript gets published.

INTERVIEWER

With that book you were part of a watershed moment for gay poetry.

PHILLIPS

Around the time of my first book, Mark Doty’s My Alexandria appeared. That was a very important book for me. And within a few years were first books from Timothy Liu and Rafael Campo. To write about having sex with someone of the same sex, to write about same-sex love and vulnerability—these were very new things in poetry, as far as I could tell. It’s something that gets taken for granted now, but it’s great that something like this can be taken for granted. Not that any of this means it’s not still very frightening, even dangerous, for many people to speak openly about who they are, and to live openly as they are. For many people of my generation, there was only the hetero model—so what to do when you have the freedom to make your own model? 

INTERVIEWER

In one of your essays you say, “Art begins in the particular privacy of exile. What is required to be an authentically original artist is an inability to think conventionally—this, coupled with a for-the-most-part unconscious unawareness that one is thinking differently in the first place.” The motif of unconventionality seems an important one in your poetry and prose.

PHILLIPS

I’ve always thought that’s what poetry was for, a space for unconventionality, risk, disruption. I really resist what seems a human impulse toward what everyone has agreed on as normal. I don’t understand that in life, and I truly don’t get it in poetry. In this way, poetry has seemed analogous to what it used to mean, at least, to be queer. One of the exciting things to me about coming out was the lack of a model for what queerness might be, especially what a queer relationship might look like. That lack meant a certain disorientedness, maybe, but also a wild freedom to define family and selfhood for oneself. But just as so many gay men, anyway, have moved toward a more traditionally heterosexual model—marriage, children, monogamy—poetry, too, has sometimes seemed to me to be far more conventional than it needs to be, or maybe even should be. I get it, the more you conform, the more people recognize what they see, and the more easily they accept and reward it. But conformity bores me, as does predictability. I want stability in my life, sure, but on my own terms. And I don’t go to poems for that stability.

INTERVIEWER

Poetry is a radical thing. Is that true?

PHILLIPS

I think it is. And a dangerous, because almost holy, thing, and therefore not to be dealt with lightly. Poetry’s not a box for storing unexamined experience, but a space instead—a field, really—within which to examine experience and to find that the more we examine it the more we’re surprised or disturbed by what we see, things that don’t go away. I think that’s the resonant part. But I understand that it’s harder to write that kind of poem. Harder, too, to read it.

INTERVIEWER

With each new book, do you feel that you’re embarking on something totally new, or does it feel like an extension of what you’ve been doing?

PHILLIPS

The thinking in my new poems feels like an extension of what I’m always doing. But how a poem gets built has changed over time. I’ve often been very much about control in poems, controlling things so that, even if I don’t want closure, things collage together in a certain way. I’ve always thought it odd for a poem to go a bit off the rails toward the end, as if that were a mistake. But in the last few years, I’ve been more interested in letting poems go where they need to, even if that means never returning to ideas that were being developed along the way. This past summer I revisited a lot of Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s work. Her poems so often seem like these weird journeys where we’re going somewhere and then a very strange thing happens and she leaves it there. I’ve also learned a lot from Kathleen Graber’s poems, where apparent non sequitur is a strategy for arriving, incongruously, at connection. My newest poems are very invested in storytelling as a kind of unraveling, poems that proceed by and often end in loose ends, rather than anything even vaguely like resolution. Unraveling seems maybe more true to how our lives are. We like to think they’re compartmentalized and neat, but it seems to me that life’s actually about a lot of spillage that we’re trying to hide from ourselves and from other people. I feel as if these new poems are just saying, Go with that. Maybe I’ll end up thinking this is nuts. But right now it feels very new and exciting for me, and somehow true. 

INTERVIEWER

So you’re allowing slippage.

PHILLIPS

Yeah. And unpredictability. And mistake, or what might look like mistake. And a sort of suspense to things. Kind of like Scheherazade, saying just enough to get the king to stay interested enough, in her case, not to kill the storyteller. She gets to live because she refuses to entirely deliver her story, she refuses predictability and conclusion, which wins her another day of life, since the king wants to know how it all ends. 

INTERVIEWER

How does a poem begin for you?

PHILLIPS

Usually it happens while I’m doing something mundane and routine, walking the dog or cutting vegetables for dinner. A line or a word will come into my mind and I’ll write it down in my notebook with the idea that I want to build with this. After a while there’ll be a couple of pages of these kind of lines, words, fragments. And there’s eventually a night where I think if I actually focused on it, I might be able to make something of these pieces. But there’s no plan as to what to write about. It feels like stumbling in the dark toward a different dark, with these different pieces as stepping-stones, maybe, or walking sticks. Which all sounds very mystical, I know. It’s also the case that once I know I’m finished, I’m finished, but I still won’t know for days what exactly I’ve written about. I just know I’ve moved somewhere else that I needed to get to.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any rituals that go with your writing practice?

PHILLIPS

When I taught high school, I’d block out every Sunday morning for writing, but that’s because there was no other time for writing, so I had to make time. It happened to be Sunday, but it had nothing to do with Sunday being a day of worship for many people. So that was a kind of ritual, I suppose. For a while I had a house on Cape Cod with a garden shack that got converted into a writing studio. So there was the ritual of going into a particular space to write, but the time was random. Now I just write on the couch in my study or in the living room, whenever I feel I have an idea that could go somewhere, which is more often than not late at night. But I can’t make myself write at a given time. And frankly, I don’t want to. There are so many other things in a day to do, that I want to do, or have to do, besides write poems.

INTERVIEWER

Can you say more about your composition process? Does it always begin in your notebook?

PHILLIPS

I write everything with pen and paper in notebooks. Large ones, which allow me to write very long lines if I need to. I usually end up with something like five to ten handwritten drafts of a poem before I think I’ve got the basic shape and sense of where lines need to be broken. That’s when I’ll go and type it on the computer. But I’m afraid to start on the computer. It makes a draft look finished already. Or something that had looked fairly neat when handwritten looks more ragged-edged on the screen and I want to tidy up. The screen can make me doubt what I feel I had to carve out on paper. 

INTERVIEWER

A lot of your poems take place in natural environments or landscapes. A reader might get the impression they’re allegorical places, but they’re real, and not always pleasant.

PHILLIPS

I’m very literal-minded, and have never intended anything in my work to be allegorical. The hawks in the poems are the hawks that land in my backyard, even here in the city. The other thing is that people tend to romanticize nature, and to connect it to an earlier time, a more innocent time. They don’t give the natural world credit for being a place of great violence, the fight for survival on the part of animals, the unpredictability and destructiveness of a storm, or of the ocean. I’d say if the landscapes in my poems aren’t always pleasant, it’s because they’re real.

INTERVIEWER

One thing you do is situate gay experience in the rural landscape.

PHILLIPS

I get frustrated with this idea that queerness can take place only in urban spaces—as I get frustrated with a general impatience, among the gay writers, and not just writers, I know, with people being closeted. It’s as if a lot of us have forgotten that there are places, the majority of the country, that are not urban, and with that there’s a forgetting that it’s not so easy for everyone to just come out and be accepted. For people in more rural places—but also right here in Saint Louis—queer experience happens more often someplace hidden, and has to. An overgrown field, the woods, these are perfect places for a sexual encounter, especially when there’s no gay bar for miles, or where an app is more likely to let you know the nearest guy is forty miles away. It may be the case that a lot of queer poets, once they understand their queerness, move to urban environments, thinking to find a more open-minded community, but I think living a while in a sophisticated city can make one forgetful of how hard it still is for so many people to be who they are. 

Moving to the Midwest has taught me a lot in that regard. Because I think there are a lot of Midwestern queer poets who feel unrepresented, who feel as if the poems they see in anthologies don’t reflect their own experiences. Poetry has forever been tied to either coast, with the Midwest dismissed as flyover territory. But of course people have experiences here and have bodies with which to have those experiences. 

INTERVIEWER

Somebody might say, it’s different if it’s a brown body, or a black body, or a white body. I’m thinking of your essay “A Politics of Mere Being,” where you write about issues of identity and poetry. It feels like there’s an ongoing reckoning that every poet I know is facing in relation to large national and social energies. Do you make an effort to bring that into your work or do you take it on faith that it’s going to show up in some way?

PHILLIPS

I agree the discussion has become much louder of late. But really, it’s been around since I first started writing. Early on, I was told I was not a black poet, that I wasn’t writing black poetry. I was also told I wasn’t writing the right kind of gay poetry, meaning I wasn’t addressing aids specifically. And yet I was addressing mortality and loss and fear, things not only not specific to aids but not specific to black people or to gay men. Human, rather. I also felt this way about Frank Bidart’s work—poems that are queer, but not in the ways I’d have expected. I trust those poets who simply keep moving ahead, confident that what they’re saying is what they have to say, and that other things will come and go. Robert Hayden is another model. He’s not just a black poet when he writes about the Middle Passage. Something like “Those Winter Sundays” never addresses race. But he’s still a black poet. I take heart from those models. 

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in how this expectation to be the political self in addition to the poet self is brought on poets, usually poets of outsider status. 

PHILLIPS

Yes, and yet it’s such an old situation, isn’t it? I’m thinking of the debate between Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Hughes arguing that the only acceptable language for black poetry should be the vernacular he heard on the streets of Harlem, Cullen meanwhile thinking that to out-Keats Keats might be a way to prove that blacks were the equals of white poets, Cullen again asking in “Yet Do I Marvel” why God would “make a poet black and bid him sing.” Or I think about how Hayden was treated by the Black Arts Movement poets, as if he’d somehow failed to be correctly black. I wonder how much of this has to do with the white gaze and its expectations, and how much also comes from within our own communities. I took heart from discovering Rita Dove’s early work, poems that showed me you can write about race sometimes, and it’s okay to write about things that aren’t specific to race. 

INTERVIEWER

How do you see your work in terms of queer poetic history?

PHILLIPS

What’s encouraging is that now that I’m older, there are a lot of—queer, in particular—poets of color who tell me that I’ve actually been a model of some kind. I realize now that writers like Rickey Laurentiis and Phillip B. Williams came here to Washington University specifically because of their attraction to my work, and because they felt there was some kinship with how I navigate race and queerness as a poet. I think that there’s a large group of poets who are facing the same dilemma, where they are interested in writing, say, something metaphysical, and wondering if that’s okay. I feel lucky to have understood early on that I can write only the poems I can write. I feel like I can be there in the way that someone like Rita was for me. 

In terms of the political self and the poetic self, I also try to keep Dickinson and Whitman in mind. Whitman wrote about so many things, but when there was a civil war he actually wrote about it and engaged in serving as he could. Meanwhile, it can often seem as if the Civil War never occurred during Emily Dickinson’s life. Civil war was obviously in the air and affected Dickinson’s sensibility. Her poems are a record of interiority coexistent with, among other events, the Civil War. They remind us that while war was going on, people were doing such daily things as walking a dog by the shore. Or—and—they were meditating on what the afterlife might be. Part of her obsession with death must have had to do with knowing people who died, those who came home wounded.

INTERVIEWER

So, to bring Auden into this, do you think poetry makes anything happen?

PHILLIPS

I think it definitely makes things happen. I’m reminded of Rita Dove’s poem “Geometry,” that opening line, “I prove a theorem and the house expands.” A good poem makes me feel as if I’ve seen the world in a way I hadn’t before, and been asked to question my earlier assumptions. Or I’ve been shown a part of the world that I didn’t know existed. That’s a big change. It’s interior, but it’s a big change because it changes how I then continue to see the world, but slightly revised, as I move through it. A poem should provoke, however quietly. In provoking our thoughts, in challenging our assumptions, it can make us more reflective human beings. 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve mentioned a number of writers already. Who are other influences that matter to you?

PHILLIPS

Discovering William Carlos Williams in the late eighties was a pivotal moment—I’d never read him, and I hadn’t realized that one could write so sparely about such seemingly ordinary things—a woman sitting and enjoying plums, for example. Shortly after that, I started reading actual living poets. One of the first books of contemporary poetry I ever read was Lucie Brock-Broido’s A Hunger. I encountered Marie Howe’s The Good Thief, Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s To the Place of Trumpets, and Pamela Alexander’s Navigable Waterways.

I read these books over and over again, I’d never seen poems like them. I think it’s interesting that all four are by women. I love the clarity of Marie Howe, which can seem at first as if she’s written whatever thought just occurred, but the sentences are so muscular. And then the utter strangeness of Lucie’s language, from another time, seemingly, and yet brought to bear on very contemporary experience. In Brigit Kelly’s first book there’s already a weirdness of vision, and an unquestioned impulse, on the poet’s part, to trust it. Alexander taught me that not only did verbal play not have to undermine seriousness in a poem, but that humor in general could be a useful counterpoint to a seriousness that might bog a poem down. But then there were all these big sentence makers, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Moncrieff’s translation of Proust. So it’s not like there was one single model. Dugan casually told me once that it was obvious I had read Cavafy, and I told him I had no idea who that was. But I immediately bought some Cavafy, who became another model for precision, for speaking straightforwardly about desire, for tenderness that doesn’t have to succumb to easy nostalgia. 

INTERVIEWER

I’m curious about how the classics continue to inflect your work. How do the early poets like Sappho strike you now?

PHILLIPS

I don’t revisit Sappho very often, to be honest. I spend more time rereading Marcus Aurelius—maybe he’s an influence, or maybe I’ve just grown old enough to see how his work resonates with my life. It’s hard for me to see the classics in my own work, but maybe I’m too close to it. 

INTERVIEWER

It’s part of your DNA as a poet. You begin with the heat of Sappho and you move into the cool stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. 

PHILLIPS

I sometimes think that, back when I was so caught up in Sappho’s work, I was myself not the most erotic person. So there was a voyeuristic pleasure in reading Sappho. In this sense, maybe I’m not revisiting the hot poets because I’m busy with my own erotic life. Perhaps that’s an odd state of affairs for someone almost sixty, but there we are. To be sexual is a sign of still being alive in the world. It’s not the only way to be alive, of course, and I should be clear that I’m not talking about promiscuity—not that I judge promiscuity one way or the other—but I mean being sexually imaginative. Sex as an ongoing part of the quest that is life itself . . . Do you know that ode of Horace—I think it’s book 4, ode 1—where he’s an old man, whatever that meant back then, and it’s a prayer to Venus, basically saying, Why are you doing this to me? You can see I don’t have any hair anymore. I’m done with love and desire. So why is it that now I’m haunted each night by this young man running across the fields? Why have you made me an erotic person at the very time when I’m supposed to be done with that? I love that. I love when poems resonate across centuries, making me feel a bit less alone in my maybe not-so-unique desires.