Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips reflects on an accidental life in poetry

| Special Issues Editor

Pulitzer prize-winning poet Carl Phillips speaks to an audience about his work. (Bri Nitsberg | Student Life)

Carl Phillips, Professor in the Poetry MFA Program at Washington University, spoke about his journey of self-discovery through poetry writing during his talk, “Pressure Against Emptiness: On Making, Being Made, and What is Made” for the first lecture in the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture series, April 1.

Phillips has been teaching creative writing at WashU for thirty years and recently received the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his collection of poems “Then the War.”” 

Despite the numerous accolades he has received and the wide span of his teaching career, he told the audience he originally went to college to become a veterinarian and that he never intended to pursue writing as a job. 

“When I did start writing poems as an adult, I felt I was writing quite literally to survive,” he said. 

He discussed how carrus,the Latin root of the word “career,” translates to wooden cart, and said he finds the meaning of the root fitting, considering how a wooden cart’s utility and lack of glamor could be viewed as a metaphor for his career as a writer. 

“A career is how we carry ourselves incidentally across and through,” he said. “A career in poetry means a life spent making: making objects, yes, but also making as in making a way forward.”

Phillips mentioned that his first poems were written in college when he was still closeted as a gay man and said he was overly imitative of the style of Sylvia Plath. He said that  he felt as though he couldn’t claim ownership over the poems that emulated Plath. 

“I was just trying to inhabit one manifestation of her life,” Phillips said. “I didn’t understand my own life enough to write about it.”

He said the first poems he could truly call his own were written during his marriage to a woman as a way of dealing with the realization that he was gay.

“In the early days of writing poems, the story that was unbearable was my queerness, and my poems knew that, even if I didn’t at the time.” he said. “Closing each poem, I realize now, that I was constructing a world within which, and a language with which, a crucial part of myself could find a voice and make space for itself.”

In reference to the use of poetry as a medium for self-discovery, Phillips described his writing process as an act of surrender and leaning into the unknown. 

“I think I write poems as temporary counterweights to mystery,” he said. “Should it come to whittling my addictions, I’d hold on hardest to mystery, but too much mystery or too much consciousness of it and I’m overwhelmed.”

In an interview after the event, first-year Zachary Nowacek said he resonated with Phillips idea of using writing as a way to combat uncertainty. 

“I think I’ve experienced something similar where I’ll write things down that I’m thinking about and it helps me work against what I find stressful or what I don’t understand,” he said. “It was nice to hear that from somebody who’s working through these things but is really good at it, instead of me just writing down a little checklist.”

During the Q&A portion of the talk, Phillips said he doesn’t consider 90% of what people call poetry actual poetry because most poetry doesn’t transform the reader’s experience of life.

“I sometimes think, why did somebody feel like they had to write this?” he said. “This is simply transcribing life as we already understand it.”

Sophomore Jebron Perkins said they found the lecture relevant to discussions in their poetry writing class on how poetry fails to perfectly encapsulate the human experience. Perkins said they appreciated Phillip’s vulnerability, both in his lecture and his poetry.

“He was very willing to be open to the audience, and I think I want to embody that more in my poetry,” they said. 

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