CARL PHILLIPS: THE PURE PLEASURE OF LANGUAGE

I’ve found myself becoming increasingly engaged by the poetry of Carl Phillips. His language often reminds me of the pleasure I’ve gotten from great prose stylists like George Eliot and Henry James, they of those wonderfully extended sentences stretching on and on for pages until the narrator gets to the heart of the matter. I’m a slow reader and tend to enjoy getting lost in those sentences, losing track of the plot. Phillips’s poems often make me feel like they’re on the way to a story, but leave me off in an Edenic grove where I can experience the pure pleasure of language. Here, Phillips often seems to say, is where the essence of our lives is, beyond the stories we make up about them. In a stunning couple of lives in “For Long to Hold,” he can shake off our preocccupation with what’s beyond the here and now:

I keep
making my way through the so-called forests of the so-
called dead

Notice how, in a recent poem you can hear online, the poet undoes the power of Aeolus, that mythological blowhard, in favor of the actual wind:

What’s meant to be wind emerges from what’s

presumably a god’s mouth, as if  people

thought that way, once, as I have read they did,

though I have never believed it. 

“[But] the wind is the wind,” he writes later. That’s all we have, and it’s more than enough.