Poet Carl Phillips, professor of English at Washington University, was honored Monday with a Pulitzer Prize for “a masterful collection that chronicles American culture as the country struggles to make sense of its politics, of life in the wake of a pandemic, and of our place in a changing global community.”
The author of at least 18 books, Phillips, 63, won for “Then the War: and Selected Poems 2007-2020,” published last year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He’s long been admired and won various prizes since he came to St. Louis in 1993.
“At this time in my career it’s maybe especially gratifying because it feels like a signal that my work remains relevant,” Phillips said by email Monday, pointing to the fact that the book contains both new and selected earlier work. “It feels like a confirmation that I have been steadily writing well, continuing to evolve.
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“I like to think the book resonated because I write about what it means to live in a human body at any given moment in time — that’s something that we all are experiencing differently and together.”
The citation for the Pulitzer Prize says that “’Then the War’ is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started.”
Besides the new and selected poems, the collection also contains a lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and a chapbook, “Star Map With Action Figures.”
Finalists for the prize were “Blood Snow,” by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books), and “Still Life,” by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s).
In a Post-Dispatch story in 2004, Phillips, who lives in the Central West End, said that he grew up on Air Force bases. He went to Harvard to be a veterinarian but didn’t like science classes like organic chemistry. He switched to classics and later taught high school Latin.
Phillips didn’t start writing poetry until he was about 30. He relatively quickly received encouragement and a Massachusetts artist fellowship. Soon, he was being mentored by poet Robert Pinsky in the writing program at Boston University. Pinksy also urged Phillips to try teaching in the creative writing program at Washington University.
In 2004, Phillips said: “Poetry is a way to drive a wedge between myself and things I find unbearable. To me, success is nailing down some kind of question. Some poets find success in publications, getting reviews, etc. But for me that’s not the purpose. I write poetry in order to live.”
Among other honors, Phillips received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2002 for “The Tether” and the Jackson Poetry Prize in 2021.
Abram Van Engen, chair of the English Department at Washington University, said: “Carl Phillips is a unique talent with a gift of insight that flashes out from gorgeous melodies across his work. The Pulitzer Prize recognizes this rare and abiding combination of music and wisdom — a mode and a mood, a singular voice, that draws his readers (like me) to each new poem he writes. I’m thrilled for Carl and honored to be his colleague.”
Other poets associated with Washington University have won the Pulitier Prize in their field. Mona Van Duyn won in 1991 and Howard Nemerov in 1978.
Carl Phillips, professor of English, reads “Dirt Being Dirt” from his home in St. Louis. The poem, originally published in 2017, explores “the idea of refusing to change the self,” Phillips says, “even when it’s understood as deeply flawed, given that we have to believe in something.” This video is part of a larger series that celebrates the contributions of poets and poetry at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Dirt Being Dirt (transcript)
The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking
straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have
foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon,
it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly
ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless: the tuxedo’s corsage,
fog when lit scatteredly, swift, from behind—swing of a torch, the lone
match, struck, then wind-shut…How far is instinct from a thing
like belief? Not far, apparently. At what point is believing so close
to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss,
finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding
the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.
https://poets.org/poem/dirt-being-dirt
https://english.wustl.edu/mfa-program
https://english.wustl.edu/people/carl-phillips
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