Old school fiction and classic poems
Carl Phillips still finds it odd to say that he won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his collection “Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.”
Yet it is hardly the longtime poet’s first award. Phillips has won a long list of them for his previous 12 collections and two books of criticism, and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award four times. Phillips began his career as a classicist, studying Greek and Latin as an undergraduate at Harvard University, and later taught high school Latin. He lives with his partner in St. Louis, where he has taught at Washington University since 1993.
BOOKS: What are your reading habits in the summer?
PHILLIPS: It pretty much stays the same. I block out four hours each night for reading for pleasure, from after dinner until about midnight. That happens no matter where I am.
BOOKS: What are you reading?
PHILLIPS: I just finished Hua Hsu’s “Stay True,” which is a memoir about his college friend who was murdered. I was reading it along with “The Late Americans,” Brandon Taylor’s novel about college students. I also usually have a book of poems. I’ve been rereading Jill Osier’s “The Solace Is Not the Lullaby.” I wanted to revisit her poems because of their brevity. I’m also rereading Barbara Pym’s books. I reread them all every year. I discovered her back in ’92 when there was a revival of her work. I wasn’t originally a fan but I now find something restful in the quiet of the 1960s-70s England that she portrays.
BOOKS: Which of her books would you recommend people read first?
PHILLIPS: “Quartet in Autumn,” which is about four people who have worked in the same office for years and the way they have become a kind of family for
‘I block out four hours each night for reading for pleasure.’
better or worse. It’s also a book about mortality.
BOOKS: Which genre do you read the most?
PHILLIPS: I read poetry all the time but I read a lot more fiction. I prefer fiction with fully fleshed-out characters or that fleshes out a world. I don’t want to go back to the landscape tradition per se but what I always loved about those kinds of novels is feeling like I’m there. Here I am with Brontë on the moors.
BOOKS: Which authors do this for you?
PHILLIPS: Some of them are very old school, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Dickens, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin. I read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” as part of an online group led by the novelist Yiyun Li. We read 12 to 15 pages a day. Talk about a world. I wouldn’t have thought that I would read that book and now I’ve read it twice in two years.
BOOKS: Which poets do you regularly read?
PHILLIPS: There are favorites who I’ll read everything by, like Jorie Graham and Robert Pinsky, who was my teacher at Boston University. There are individual books I return to, such as Linda Gregg’s “Too Bright to See.” I read Pamela Alexander’s “Navigable Waterways” every month because I admire how the poems unfold. I’m interested in poems that don’t work like anyone else’s. I’ve recently been rereading Elizabeth Bishop to see if I could appreciate her more. I appreciate certain poems immensely, but you don’t have to love everything someone writes.
BOOKS: Do you still read any of the Greek and Roman classics?
PHILLIPS: I still read Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Homer’s “The Iliad,” which might be the thing I’ve read the most ever. I read these in translation, not in Latin. Just when I convinced myself that I hated “The Odyssey,” Emily Wilson did a translation that changed my whole understanding of that book. She’s the first woman who ever translated it into English, and she brought in things which male translators glossed over, which made for a more fully dimensional text.
BOOKS: What are your reading habits? PHILLIPS: I used to think it was a crime to not finish a book. Now if I’m halfway through a book and I’m losing interest, I set it aside. I can always give it to a student. The funny thing is some students’ reactions. They will stare at me as if they don’t know what to do with this object I just put in their hands.