The Sacrament of Language
An Interview with Carl Phillips
The author of twenty books, including the recently published Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020, Carl Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He served as series editor for Yale Younger Poets from 2010 to 2020. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips' other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012. We corresponded in early 2022.
JASON MYERS: The word “truth,” and its variations, appears throughout Then the War. I’m interested etymologically in the connection between truth and troth, which gives us betrothal. How do you see the desires and affections of our bodies, and who we commit, however faithfully, them to, leading us to truth? How does poetry illuminate or satisfy the pursuit of truth?
CARL PHILLIPS: Aha, two questions disguised as one question! I don’t know that our bodily desires and affections lead us to truth, exactly – maybe they lead us to the inevitable next step in our ongoing evolution as bodies and sensibilities that, in order to evolve, depend on the other – other bodies, other sensibilities. For example, I may understand myself in a certain way; but when I engage with another person, I am shaped by that person, by my resistance or attraction to how that person thinks and feels through the world, other people and things become part of how we grow, sort of how the body adapts to weather. Likewise, we are shaped by the ideas we encounter – if those ideas are different from our own ideas, the new ideas challenge us to reconsider our own position, our assumed notions of the world around us. This might be where poetry comes in – it invites us into a different sensibility from our own; this doesn’t necessarily illuminate the truth, but it allows us to rethink what we have, up to now, meant by and assumed about the truth, and to pitch our assumptions of the truth against another’s assumptions. Not that I even know what the truth is, exactly…
JM: The centerpiece of Then the War, the sequence “Among the Trees,” reads to me like both fables and spiritual autobiography, through the lens of particular trees and forests. I’m also intrigued by the form, in which you eschew your more regular stanzaic patterns. Can you tell us how this sequence was composed? And talk about the ways particular landscapes, flora and fauna, inspire and inform your poetic practice?
CP: “Among the Trees” began as a commissioned essay for a tree-themed issue of Emergence magazine. I’m not good with commissions, since I prefer not to know where I’m going when I write, so I figured I’d just start writing associatively, any thoughts that occurred about trees – this led to some childhood memories of falling from a tree, to more adult memories of cruising the woods for sex, and to my gradual realization that I’ve always lived among trees in some way or another. Along the way, I laced the pieces with excerpts from earlier poems of mine that addressed trees. By the end, I realized I’d written fourteen sections, which made me think of the essay being vaguely in conversation with the sonnet.
It was an unexpected decision, when I decided to include this piece in Then the War. I’ve always been intrigued by how Lowell includes that long prose ‘interruption’ of autobiography in Life Studies, so that was on my mind – but of course, it’s hardly new, anymore, to mix genres in a book of poems. I didn’t want this to feel like an essay, though, so I decided that each section would have its own page, which would make it appear as a fourteen-part prose poem; that’s the form, ultimately.
I don’t know that I really have a poetic practice…Except to try to move through each day mindfully, trying to be attentive to what I hear and see and feel – which means I’m attentive to flora and fauna and landscape, but I don’t think these shape my practice. They’re more the context within which whatever practice there is gets conducted.
JM: In the first poem in your chapbook Star Map with Action Figures, “And If I Fall,” cathedral is both a noun and a verb, a concrete site of worship and an imagined place of song, if not sanctuary. You play with the relationship between imagining (the Septuagint calls humans imago dei, the images or imaginings of God) and making. The Greek word from which we derive poetry means to make, and I’m curious how you think about the relationship between the making of poems and the making of other objects like, say, cathedrals? Perhaps another way of asking this is: how do you make the imagination tangible? What collections of poetry are your cathedrals?
CP: Well, for me imagining is a form of building; to imagine a thing is to assemble a group of ideas, images, impressions, and to arrange them into something coherent. I can think, for example, of flesh, vulnerability, speed, violence, a truck, and a deer, and out of those I begin to imagine not just a deer being hit by a truck but a relationship between violence and vulnerability, which leads me to think about the role of coincidence, ideas of innocence, the nature versus machine…
People speak of writing poems – I prefer the idea of building a poem. That’s how writing feels, for me, as if I have these floating parts that I’ve collected in notebooks, and then if I’m lucky I start to see how some of the parts might fit together, which then leads me in unexpected directions – which is to say, the assembling of parts is a kind of imagining, but it also sparks imagination beyond the immediate process, if that makes sense. What I hope for, in a finished poem, is (to quote myself) “a sturdiness that can last,” and this of course is what we want from a cathedral, or from a machine, or from song – something we can reliably come back to when we need it.
So I don’t really think of poems, or books of them, specifically as cathedrals. But I do think of them as, at best, sturdy, reliable containers of ideas, provocations, sensations. I could name hundreds of books of poetry that work that way for me. One that I return to monthly is Linda Gregg’s To Bright to See.
JM: Your Instagram cooking show provided so many of us sustenance and delight throughout the pandemic. When did you first come to the joy of cooking, and what if any connection do you see between that and your writing? In a review we recently published, Leah Silvieus shared this exquisite theological reflection: In The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist, Angel F. Méndez-Montoya writes that “there is a relationship between sabor and saber (savoring and knowing). Perhaps the library and kitchen are in fact united by one and the same splendid desire: the desire to both savor and to know.” How do you see this relationship between savoring and knowing enacted in your work?
CP: I mentioned earlier how we are shaped by our engagement with the world around us – and that engagement is conducted mostly via the senses – what we see and hear, but very much also what we taste. We know cilantro by how it smells when we rub it between our fingers and by how it tastes on the tongue. So yes, there’s a direct correlation between the senses and knowing. In my own work, I suppose this idea plays out at the level of sound and image – how a word or line feels in the mouth, how the images appear in the reader’s mind, how the poem looks on the page, how the line and stanza breaks enact breath; it also works at the level of actual subject matter, I suppose, since I’m often talking about how it feels – physically – to move from one space to another, in actual time and in memory.
As for the joy of cooking…I’ve always liked to cook, even as a kid, or at least to do the kid’s version of cooking, helping my mother cut cookies, that sort of thing. I didn’t really come to love cooking until I was grown up. My real foray into cooking was purely economical – I needed to figure out how to make things, since it is cheaper to cook at home than to go out all the time. And then I just became fascinated with the idea that a bunch of raw ingredients can be brought together and treated in such a way as to equal something physically satisfying. There’s a very clear connection, for me, between writing and cooking, both involving that act of building that we talked about, both having as their goal something reliable and sustaining. It took me a bit longer to understand the relationship between cooking and love, though that idea was always there right in front of me. But this is where the cooking show came in. I have long enjoyed making and sharing food with others – it’s a form of communion that feels ancient, almost sacred. It speaks to something especially human, the sharing of food – I’m sure there are exceptions but it’s my sense that wild animals tend not to share food, it’s more about individual survival. Sharing seems to require a self-consciousness that’s specific to humans…To have a cooking show, especially during pandemic, seemed a way to be communal with others even though we were in isolation from each other. For me the show is an act of love – and it has proven to be the catalyst for a love that has come back to me from viewers.
JM: I love the way you speak of cooking and eating as a communal expression of love. Poetry is so often solitary, in its composition and in its reading. Do you think of it as a feast, too, a way of gathering beloveds together?
CP: I do! I think my original love of reading had to do with feeling that I was not only in the company of the author of a book, but with the people and animals and places included in that book. Meanwhile, especially in the early days when everything I read came from a library, I’d be aware that others had checked out and read the book before me, which would make me think about the different ways we might read the same text. And as I get older and find myself rereading a lot of books that I read years ago, I find I’m also in company with my younger self, I can remember what made no sense to me then, or how it made a different sense from what it does now. All kinds of communion!
JM: Your essays on Herbert and the Psalms, among others, have informed so much of my own thinking on the relationship between poetry and prayer. Could you tell us about, to borrow William James’ phrase, your varieties of religious experience? What makes a piece of writing sacred or spiritual or religious?
CP: Well, I’m pretty much a heathen, though no one seems to believe me! I am fascinated with the idea of faith, with the idea of putting trust in what isn’t entirely knowable – but this could as easily be deity, love, sex, otherness. And this has led to my reading a lot of things that come from the long history of faith – mythology, poems by Herbert, the Old Testament, Taoist poetry and prose…I don’t believe, say, in the Greek gods, but I’m intrigued by what makes people need to believe in those gods, and what enables them to do so. What keeps them free from doubt? My love of Herbert has entirely to do with his restlessness within his faith, the sense that he both believes and resists what he believes, which is also how I read Dickinson. On a more secular level, what is it that allows us to trust another person? If we commit to a person in love, and we decide to be faithful to each other, what is the thing that makes us trust that person when they leave the house and say they’re going on a drive for an hour? Without following them, we can’t know exactly what they’re up to, whether they’re cheating on us, whether they’re getting drunk at the park, who knows? And yet we’d be lost if we couldn’t trust, even though to live a life is to learn pretty quickly that trust can be misplaced. In which case, what allows us to keep trusting? What is faith? What is belief?
I don’t know how to answer – directly, at least – your second question about what makes for the sacred, spiritual, or religious in a piece of writing. I don’t really see writing in that way. But here’s an indirect answer. Michael Palmer visited a class of mine, years ago, and spoke of the sacrament of language. He went on to explain that words are powerful, physically powerful, and that the handling of words is in some sense an act that requires great care and attention – almost as if each word had a sort of holy charge to it, and to mishandle language would be a form of disrespect for a power that’s beyond our human knowing. The idea is that we are privileged to be entrusted with language. It’s our duty – call it sacred if you wish – to proceed responsibly, and maybe especially humbly. So Palmer speaks of the sacrament of language. And in that context, I think there’s a kind of holiness to the act of making. But I can’t explain it. I don’t think things like holiness are meant to be explained.
JM: I love the idea of language as sacrament! In your poem “Fine” you write: ‘How does a sentence,//just like that, become prayer? What’s prayer anyway?” I was reminded of a time I was asked to give an account of my devotional life and I mentioned morning walks with my dog and my spouse (this was before I had a child, too), and the people interviewing me raised their eyebrows as though walking meditation isn’t an ancient practice. I think we all confine ourselves with narrow definitions of what a prayer can be, what a poem can be. This is my roundabout way of asking, who do you write for? Do you have an audience in mind when you’re building a poem? And how do you resist what you expect of yourself, what others might expect of you?
CP: Well, maybe because I was always moving from place to place as a kid, I seemed often to be alone, the new kid at school, not really tethered to a group of friends. So I grew up spending a lot of time in my head, all the more so because back then there weren’t cell phones, social media, things that keep you attached to the larger social world. So I’m not naturally social. And when I write, I’m writing for myself, as I try to push a way forward around and through the latest version of conundrum. Poetry is a way for me to understand a part of myself a bit more clearly in relation to the world but also in relation to other selves that I’m always traveling with, that we’re all always carrying with us. Writing a poem feels like a conversation with and an interrogation of myself in a given moment. I think if I had any other audience in mind, I might be intimidated to write what and how I do. As for resisting expectations, well, my only expectation of myself is to write honestly and without flinching, but I already do that anyway, instinctively – it’s who I am. Once I had something like a ‘career,’ I became aware of others’ expectations of me – to write a certain way about particular subjects – but because I believe that writing is a personal quest, and because I believe that I’m writing not for a career and for audience satisfaction but – almost literally, it can seem – for my life, I can’t spend time worrying about how others might feel about what I’m doing. It would be like trying to accommodate people’s expectations of how I should walk or breathe.
JM: What are you teaching right now, and how does teaching affect your own artistic practice? Do you have advice for writers in the early stages of their practice?
CP: I am teaching a graduate poetry workshop this semester – last semester was a seminar on the poetic sequence…For me, a huge part of teaching is learning. Working with ten poets for a semester, I get to learn about ten other ways of seeing what a poem might be. I also learn about other writers from my students, as well as learning new things about poems I thought I already knew well. I can bring in a poem I’ve taught for years, and a student will see it in a way that I’d never considered. So teaching expands my thinking, helps make it more athletic and wide-ranging. It’s also the case that I feel a bit fraudulent having students bring in poems every week, if I’m not actively writing myself. So teaching serves as a kind of encouragement to stay fluent as a writer.
As for advice…ha! Well, I used to say things like “Read as much as you can, and daily” or “Pay attention to everything, no matter how seemingly unimportant.” And I still stand by those. But I realized that the subject required more consideration than that. I’m just now in the production phase of a prose book coming out this September, which is entirely about the writing life at all stages of that life – not so much advice, maybe, as ways to think about subjects that attend the writing life: ambition, stamina, politics, practice, those are some of subjects. It’ll be out this September – My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing. I like to think of it as a kind of mashup between Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. We shall see!