Carl Phillips
Sandra & Gary Sojka Visiting Poet, 2010
Tuesday, September 21

Question & Answer Session:
4 p.m., Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building

Poetry Reading:
7 p.m., Bucknell Hall

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Speak Low, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Double Shadow, forthcoming in 2011. He is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, and a translation of Sophocles's Philoctetes. His awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award in Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Best Gay Male Poetry, several Pushcart Prizes, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was named a Chancellor in 2007. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

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Carl Phillips

In a Perfect World

 

Equally, the black lake that the skiff sails across,
and the skiff also. Wingbeat. A belief in evil
having not yet displaced entirely a belief in the power
to turn evil away. Laughter. Any number of small
voices in a field unfolding. Patterns like the one
where arrogance leads to shame, shame to anger,
until from anger-via the suffering called loss, called

grieving for it: at last, compassion. Hoofbeat. Bluegrass.
Persuasion slowly brushstroking its way back into
what had seemed the world. A shadow prowling
the not-so-clear-anymore perimeter of Who says so?
A single mother-of-pearl stud catching parts of the light—
for now, holding them. Troy is burning. Let us
make of what's left a sturdiness we can use to the end.

 

from Speak Low (FSG)