WEBVTT

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It's my pleasure to introduce
our visiting poet tonight, Carl

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Phillips, who I am excited
to welcome back to Tucson

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and so happy to host back
here as a friend and as a poet

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that I deeply, deeply admire.

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And this is an
introduction for him

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before he'll come
up and read poems.

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Most of you will know at the
beginning of Dante's "Inferno,"

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I hope.

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"Nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita"--

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the poet Robert Pinsky,
in his translation,

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has rendered these lines as
"midway on our life's journey,"

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"midway on our life's journey."

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And this beginning
is a famous example

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of the literary
device of in media res

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and beginning a story
by not beginning at all.

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Instead, we start,
as much as we start,

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by jumping fully into
the middle of things.

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The situation can be
a bit disorienting.

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And the tension to
quickly become oriented

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becomes a kind of urgency and
downward thrust through a text.

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And the reader is
compelled forward

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into the story to understand how
things may or may not resolve.

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It's the most lyric of
moves, acting outside of time

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in a way.

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And it creates
the most narrative

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of responses of figuring
out what comes next.

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The next lines of Pinsky's
"Inferno" translation

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go like this.

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"Midway in our life's
journey, I found myself

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at the edge of a dark
wood, the right road lost."

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So here in the
space of two lines,

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we have a finding and a
losing happening right away

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as we began, or kind of began.

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In Carl Phillips's poems,
across now 14 collections,

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they often work, those
poems, in those collections,

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like small "Infernos"
themselves,

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starting in the middle of
things, working their way out.

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A Phillips poem is a
fundamentally lyric space.

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Take, for example, at the
beginning of the poem,

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"The Sea, the
Forest," which ends

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his most recent collection,
Wild as the Wind.

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And it goes like this.

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"Like an argument
against keeping

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the more unshakable
varieties of woundedness

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inside, where such
things maybe best belong,

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he opened his eyes in the dark."

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Where does the
metaphor start there?

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Is the right road
somewhere to be found?

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Are we on it or off it?

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It feels like maybe
there's a dark road nearby.

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And what an
incredible description

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to imagine opening one's eyes.

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To read a Carl
Phillips poem is to be

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reminded that we're forever
somewhere in the middle part

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of our lives.

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And I've taken a great pleasure
in reading his work always.

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So many of his poems
reinforce this in ways

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as they make their own way.

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Phillips is a really
syntactically singular writer

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and a master of
loading a sentence

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with the cargo of the
poem's emotional freight

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and then spreading that across
the lyric sensibility of how

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a poem splits down its lines.

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The results are remarkable.

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The poems speed up.

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They slow down.

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They pivot as one clause
or phrase modifies

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that what comes before,
forcing us to constantly move

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and travel with the
poem's unfolding.

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As units of sense, his sentences
oscillate like kaleidoscopes,

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moving and reforming,
and then turning

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in the light of a reader's mind.

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You can punish your
enemies or thrill

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your language-loving friends
by asking them to diagram one.

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[LAUGHTER]

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There are other thrilling
movements in a Phillips poem.

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He uses what lyric space makes
possible to move between often

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radical opposites.

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So the poems often feel like
a record of one man's approach

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to an experience
of, or an attraction

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to each side of a binary.

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Tenderness and cruelty,
the wild and the banal,

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myth and memory, of
finding and being lost,

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of radiance and ordinary light--

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a favorite poem of mine.

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Ultimately, that's
what you're signing up

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for when you enter a
Carl Phillips poem,

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to move and to be moved.

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Charles Simic, who was
here at the Poetry Center

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a couple of weeks ago, said
in one of his comments,

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and this is his quote, that
"lyric poems perpetuate

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the oldest values on Earth."

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"Lyric poems perpetuate the
oldest values on earth."

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Here you all are.

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Here we all are
mid-way on this journey

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where we find ourselves.

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Thanks for being in the
middle with me right now.

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We're about to perpetuate
the oldest values on Earth.

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How exciting is that?

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Please help me welcome
back to Tucson my friend

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and amazing poet Carl Phillips.

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