[APPLAUSE]
This is a wonderful night.
This is Carl Phillips's first time with us.
And I hope it's first of many.
But our shop talked the other night.
We felt so pressed for time and had so many things
I wanted to discuss that I'm going to make this very
short to give him maximum time to share
his work Carl Phillips's first book of poems, In The Blood,
was published in 1992 and immediately received
the Samuel French Morse Award.
In the 20 years since, he has published 10 poetry
collections.
Most recently, Double Shadow, which won the Los Angeles book
review.
He's also published a book of essays and poetry,
which I see over here, Coin of the Realm
and a translation of Sophocles, Philoctetes.
[LAUGHTER]
I know I blow it.
[LAUGHTER]
You could just fill that in later.
[LAUGHTER]
And there's a new collection of his poems called Silverchest,
which will be out in April.
Phillips was elected a chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets in 2006,
and he's judged the Yale Series of Younger Poets
Prize since 2010.
He cites the ancient Greek and Roman
writers among his early literary influences,
and he taught high school Latin for nearly a decade.
He's currently a professor at Washington University
in St. Louis.
First and foremost, Carl Phillips
is a lyric poet rooted in straightforward forms
of classic themes.
His poems cut deep into the core and crux
of the human condition, in his words,
by parsing dark and difficult distinctions.
Relentless in his determination to say the unsayable,
Phillips does so with his mastery of syntax,
juxtaposing contradictions, questioning incongruities,
creating resolution where there was none.
Even his punctuation works over time with its brackets,
dashes, colons, and ellipses, freighted with power to shape
and even replicate what seems formless.
He's intrigued by the ideas of restraint and release,
both on the page and with the body.
The tension between opposing forces
as in the restless choir than any human life
can be sometimes cast forth all over again
its double shadow, no risk and no faint hardness.
Phillips takes us to places we've never been before
from life as a recklessly fed bonfire
to a place where love lies deciduous asleep.
He takes us through gorse and thorn and bracken,
recreating such rough passage in the route of his poetic line.
So when we come upon a clearing in which logic drives
a traditionally beautiful poem, a poem like Speak Low,
its authority and clarity are well
earned pleasures for speaker and reader alike.
Phillips's poetry can be difficult.
It is difficult, often complex.
But then so are the questions he asks, questions of metaphysics,
epistemology, as well as the universal themes he pursues
with honesty and fearlessness.
If you can agree with Robert Hayden
that all art is pain suffered and outlived,
then you will agree with me that we are in the presence tonight
of a master artist, a major artist, one
whose poetry beyond all else is breathtakingly beautiful.
Please welcome Carl Phillips.
[APPLAUSE]