October 2, 2019
A Record of What It Meant: An Interview with Carl Phillips, Author of The Art of Daring and Coin of the Realm
This post is the twelfth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
October 31, 2013
Carl Phillips and the Post-Epic: Thoughts on Double Shadow
If someone asked me to guess what it might be like to read the translated papyri of a failed, pre-modern dystopia, I’d tell them to read Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow. […]
October 31, 2013
The Stars Did What They Do: “Heaven and Earth,” Considered
“Heaven and Earth,” the penultimate poem in Carl Phillips’ Double Shadow, offers up vertigo, suffering, and fear—and all in the first four lines. The poem’s title, perhaps, alludes to the […]
October 22, 2013
Fox. Man. Jesus.
Two Carl Phillips poems, “Almost Tenderly” and “Fascination,” won’t leave me. I’ve memorized them, talked to friends about them, written about them a little (here & here & here). Both […]
October 17, 2013
In “Almost Tenderly,” Imagining the “It”
In the Carl Phillips poem “Almost Tenderly,” included in his Double Shadow and also Kenyon’s Radiance Versus Ordinary Light: Selected Poems by Carl Phillips, a scene unfolds inside an “It.” […]
October 8, 2013
On “Fascination,” Part 1
My first Oxford English Dictionary was given to me as a gift sometime in the late Eighties by a pair of young artists who knew I wanted to be a […]
October 6, 2013
Thoughts on “Sky Coming Forward”
(You can find “Sky Coming Forward” in Phillips’ collection Double Shadow, or in the Fall 2010 issue of The Kenyon Review.) I won’t call this poem deceptive — maybe just coy. The title […]
September 30, 2013
Thoughts on “Fascination”
For the month of October, the KR blog will feature posts on the poetry of Carl Phillips, this year’s recipient of The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Specifically, we’re reading […]
July 21, 2012
from A Field Guide to North American Blurbs
As I’m preparing two blurbs this weekend, I’m looking at a lot of blurbs and thinking about the genre. Maybe there are some observations to be made about the varieties […]
March 14, 2012
Daylight Savings & The Movable Dawn: A Postscript on the Aubade
About as soon as I posted my dialogue with her on the aubade, Tarfia sent me a link to Kenyon Review Writers Workshop faculty member Carl Phillips’ own “Aubade: Some […]