There is the career that he planned and the career that's happening on its own. So says poet Carl Phillips, associate professor of English and of African and Afro-American studies in Arts and Sciences. The Olympian leap from Falmouth, Mass., where Phillips taught high school students Greek and Latin, to Washington University, where he now directs the notable Creative Writing Program, is nothing short of fate, he says.
If so, destiny has struck a deal with literary success, and the classicist, still a bit confounded by his rapid ascent, is making the climb gracefully with the agility of a cat.
Phillips' first book of poetry, "In the Blood," received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1992. Submitted on the advice of a friend, the collection explores issues of race, sexuality and mortality.
"We write to communicate things to other people, but poets also write to communicate something to themselves," Phillips explains. "I was taken aback when the book, a sort of outing of myself, first appeared because it revealed a lot of things that I hadn't yet known about myself."
Critics initially hailed the collection as a bold treatment of highly charged, explosive homoerotic poetry infused with allusion to ancient Greek and Roman texts.
Influenced by the metaphysical poets as well, Phillips' work transcends gender to explore the point where the flesh and the spirit intersect. He writes of a contradictory world of dreams and desires "in which everything seems to contain its opposite in some distressing way." He continues: "Happiness doesn't require memorializing. We tend to meditate on the disappointments because they are harder to figure out."
Praise resulting from a subsequent book, "Cortège," issued three years later showered the poet and his words with the literary equivalent of gold dust. The work was named a finalist for a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. The acclaim established Phillips as an accomplished, highly innovative poet.
"I admire him immensely," says Robert Pinsky, U.S. poet laureate and professor of English and creative writing at Boston University where Phillips studied under Pinsky. "Carl is a wonderful teacher, a learned man, and a tremendously gifted poet who already has established an unmistakable voice and subject, rhythm and cadence."
"In the Blood" moved poet Marilyn Hacker to write that Phillips possesses "mandarin grace and surpassing elegance of formÉ." She continued: "Phillips refuses to write what might be expected of him on any subject, whether it's gender, race, faith, or morality. His reticence, his refusal of polemic, remind me sometimes of the young James Merrill, even of Auden."
We've just pulled out of
a dream sequence ...
At this point
I'm about to look up and see
lives and buildings occurring
behind you; I haven't yet
said my next line,
>
that the skyline is no longer
your body by the handful;
strictly speaking,
we've only just entered
the neighborhood of the climax,
but this is where it should end,
the music lurching in, like unwanted
police backup, each of us
nervously passing our weapons
between us, the two of us
dissolving, as the door falls down.
Phillips graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin. Two years later, he earned a master's degree in teaching in Latin and classical humanities from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By the time "In the Blood" won the Morse Prize, Phillips had left an eight-year teaching career for the doctorate program in philology at his alma mater Harvard.
The critical recognition brought on by the prize validated Phillips' belief in his work. "While I had written poems as a teen-ager, I began, at this point, to take the writing seriously," he recalls. "I left the Ph.D. program to write and take time out."
The timeout, albeit brief, ushered in the career that is unfolding on its own. Within months, Phillips had enrolled in the master's in creative writing program at Boston University. In 1993 -- the same year he completed his studies and won an Academy of American Poets Prize -- he came to Washington University on a three-year visiting professorship.
Phillips was named a Lilly Teaching Fellow in 1995 but declined the award to spend a year as a visiting assistant professor and the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard.
Shortly before returning to Washington University, he was given a second Lilly Fellowship. Early tenure, however, prevented him from accepting the award reserved exclusively for non-tenure faculty. Last fall, Phillips was handed the reins of the University's Creative Writing Program, recently ranked in the nation's top 10 creative writing programs by U.S. News & World Report. Last month, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his distinguished achievement and promise for future accomplishment.
In the swirl of his evolving circumstances, Phillips remains centered, focused, committed.
"Helping students make connections in literature and life is exciting," he offers. "One of my students arrived from a history class thrilled that she could talk about Greek life we had studied through discussions of the "Iliad." She was genuinely pleased that things were clicking.
"The graduate writing students can be different. They come in much more knowledgeable and confident, more experienced as writers," says Phillips. "The challenge there is to help them figure out and channel strengths they may not yet have recognized in themselves."
The students feel that they are in highly capable hands. "Carl connects our work to a larger craft É of poetry consistently moving us to grander ideas," says Heidi Lynn Nilsson, a first-year master's of fine arts (MFA) student in the graduate poetry workshop. "He is an excellent reader of poetry who makes a point of being there for us and doing twice the work that is required. He is very thorough."
MFA student Ross Martin, who graduates this spring, calls Phillips "one of the 15 hottest poets writing right now." He adds: "He's a master at manipulating language -- sensitive, subtle, strong. He is why I came to the program."
"We had moved every year of my life until I was 10," relates Phillips. "You soon start to fashion a world that is portable. You're constantly severing ties, moving into a place only to leave it. The idea that something doesn't last has been reinforced. I suppose this is one way for a writer to come about."
In his office, Phillips turns to his library, pulls out a book of poems by Robert Hayden, flips to a work titled "The Tattooed Man," and reads: "'All art is pain, suffered and outlived.' This is my motto for writing."
For Phillips, the making of poetry is a sacred act, difficult to teach outside of the mechanics of form and function.
"The vision part is something that each person comes into privately, usually after a lot of work, thinking and living," he explains. "There is a train of thought you cannot create for a person any more than you can teach epiphany -- that sudden snapping off of the breath for which so many poets are remembered."
One sees pictures of Dante:
in Byzantine profile, looking about
as visionary as the next unremarkable bird;
frozen in an encounter with Beatrice on a
significant bridge or some tumbledown
strada, about to lose her all over again.
My own picture is more plastic:
the maestro, leaning stiffly out
from the roofless carriage of exile,
has his eye on the hands of a particular
young man just off of the roadside, lifting
the salvageable pieces of fruit
from the ground, and in a bucket he has brought
for the purpose, rinsing each separately
free of dirt, then paring away the soft,
inedible portions.
It is another of those
afternoons when he can hardly endure
the ride home, he's that eager
to put it all down, that certain that each
of the man's beautiful gestures must
in some way concern the soul.
Phillips' third collection, "From the Devotions," is slated for January 1998 publication. "The poems," says their creator, "question the validity of devotion to the body, to God and to a relationship at this time in the century."
This summer, Phillips will embark on his next work: a prose book pairing the American landscape with meditations on contemporary American poetry. Specifically, he will explore the former's influence over the latter. Photographer Doug Macomber, Phillips' partner, will make the images, and Phillips will fashion the words.
If there is an epic hero in Phillips' poems, it is the poet himself. An artist of imposing stature, his destinations are vast in scope, his actions valorous, his style elevated and his poetry recounted with an objectivity that swings in and out of his lines like the gods and goddesses in ancient Greek works.
The Fates very much included.
--Cynthia Georges "One sees pictures of Dante:" © 1995 by Carl Phillips. Reprinted from "Cortège" with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Please send comments and suggestions to: