His work is about trying to find a clear path amid the confusion of everyday life. Instead, he describes his process as pushing forward with the mind into unknown areas. Yet, he does not write with a subject in mind. In Then the War, Phillips writes from the landscape of violence and conflict that has defined the past few years in the United States. “Those aren’t resolvable, but I write in order to make at least some temporary sense of what is always eluding us.” “I believe that poetry exists as a way of giving shape to what’s shapeless – for figuring out ways to grapple with the big abstract parts of life like love, death, morality, sex,” Phillips said. Phillips’ fifteenth book of poems, Then the War: and Selected Poems, 2007 – 2020, is emblematic of the endless nature of this work, looking forward and reflecting on past work at the same time. It is a quest that is no less meaningful for the fact its resolution is always just outside of our grasp. Of this poem, Phillips says he was contemplating the pressure on poets to be political, on how much is politicized, and, also, the degree to which tenderness can be its own force.Carl Phillips, professor of English, tells his students that writing poetry is a quest to make sense out of the confounding. Brown’s killing was an inflection point in racial disparity discussions and the continued marginalization of Black people in America. Louis, the city where Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in 2014. He is a professor at Washington University in St.

Phillips was, however, thinking of Greek tragedies, which he studied at Harvard as a classics major. The collection was released in the UK on February 24th, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, making its title seem prescient. His many accolades include the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014, and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Poetry in 2001.įor Oprah Daily, Phillips reads “Fixed Shadow, Moving Water” from Then the War. From The Devotions (1998) and The Rest of Love: Poems (2004) were both finalists for the National Book Award. Two of them, Wild Is the Wind (2018) and Double Shadow (2001), won the L.A. Carl Phillips has published 16 volumes of poetry, the most recent being Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (FSG).

Then the war carl phillips