Carl Phillips

Professor; joint appointment with African and African-American Studies

Office Contact Information

Mailbox:

Campus Box 1122
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Email:

phillips@artsci.wustl.edu

Research Specialization

Poetry writing; African-American literature; Twentieth-century poetry

Courses

L13 522: Poetry Workshop (SP2006, FL2006)
L13 522: Poetry Workshop (SP2006, FL2006)

Biographical Information

Professor Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Speak Low (2009) and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006. Other books include his translation of Sophocles's Philocetes(2003) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004). His new book, Double Shadow, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2011. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has received honors that include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Library of Congress. In 2006, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to contemporary poetry and the writing of it, his academic interests include classical philology, translation, and the history of prosody in English.

Writing Excerpt

Luck

What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until – innocent,
with art for once

not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next

in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid

between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through

air a path invisible, but there ...
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,

it is the unsubstantial – that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it – that most bewilders,

even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more

than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,

his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,

later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.

From Carl Phillips, The Tether, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
This poem first appeared in The Nation.