It's my pleasure to introduce our visiting poet tonight, Carl
Phillips, who I am excited to welcome back to Tucson
and so happy to host back here as a friend and as a poet
that I deeply, deeply admire.
And this is an introduction for him
before he'll come up and read poems.
Most of you will know at the beginning of Dante's "Inferno,"
I hope.
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita"--
the poet Robert Pinsky, in his translation,
has rendered these lines as "midway on our life's journey,"
"midway on our life's journey."
And this beginning is a famous example
of the literary device of in media res
and beginning a story by not beginning at all.
Instead, we start, as much as we start,
by jumping fully into the middle of things.
The situation can be a bit disorienting.
And the tension to quickly become oriented
becomes a kind of urgency and downward thrust through a text.
And the reader is compelled forward
into the story to understand how things may or may not resolve.
It's the most lyric of moves, acting outside of time
in a way.
And it creates the most narrative
of responses of figuring out what comes next.
The next lines of Pinsky's "Inferno" translation
go like this.
"Midway in our life's journey, I found myself
at the edge of a dark wood, the right road lost."
So here in the space of two lines,
we have a finding and a losing happening right away
as we began, or kind of began.
In Carl Phillips's poems, across now 14 collections,
they often work, those poems, in those collections,
like small "Infernos" themselves,
starting in the middle of things, working their way out.
A Phillips poem is a fundamentally lyric space.
Take, for example, at the beginning of the poem,
"The Sea, the Forest," which ends
his most recent collection, Wild as the Wind.
And it goes like this.
"Like an argument against keeping
the more unshakable varieties of woundedness
inside, where such things maybe best belong,
he opened his eyes in the dark."
Where does the metaphor start there?
Is the right road somewhere to be found?
Are we on it or off it?
It feels like maybe there's a dark road nearby.
And what an incredible description
to imagine opening one's eyes.
To read a Carl Phillips poem is to be
reminded that we're forever somewhere in the middle part
of our lives.
And I've taken a great pleasure in reading his work always.
So many of his poems reinforce this in ways
as they make their own way.
Phillips is a really syntactically singular writer
and a master of loading a sentence
with the cargo of the poem's emotional freight
and then spreading that across the lyric sensibility of how
a poem splits down its lines.
The results are remarkable.
The poems speed up.
They slow down.
They pivot as one clause or phrase modifies
that what comes before, forcing us to constantly move
and travel with the poem's unfolding.
As units of sense, his sentences oscillate like kaleidoscopes,
moving and reforming, and then turning
in the light of a reader's mind.
You can punish your enemies or thrill
your language-loving friends by asking them to diagram one.
[LAUGHTER]
There are other thrilling movements in a Phillips poem.
He uses what lyric space makes possible to move between often
radical opposites.
So the poems often feel like a record of one man's approach
to an experience of, or an attraction
to each side of a binary.
Tenderness and cruelty, the wild and the banal,
myth and memory, of finding and being lost,
of radiance and ordinary light--
a favorite poem of mine.
Ultimately, that's what you're signing up
for when you enter a Carl Phillips poem,
to move and to be moved.
Charles Simic, who was here at the Poetry Center
a couple of weeks ago, said in one of his comments,
and this is his quote, that "lyric poems perpetuate
the oldest values on Earth."
"Lyric poems perpetuate the oldest values on earth."
Here you all are.
Here we all are mid-way on this journey
where we find ourselves.
Thanks for being in the middle with me right now.
We're about to perpetuate the oldest values on Earth.
How exciting is that?
Please help me welcome back to Tucson my friend
and amazing poet Carl Phillips.