In Place of Memory, Belief  

In 1990, the poet and tenant lawyer Martín Espada visited Falmouth High School on the southwest corner of Cape Cod. He was there to lead an informal poetry workshop for faculty, which included a Latin teacher named Carl Phillips. A Falmouth alumnus, Phillips had earned his BA in Classics at Harvard, and, after obtaining a graduate degree, had returned to Falmouth, where he advised the school’s Latin Club and literary magazine.

Phillips enjoyed teaching Latin—“a nice, safely dead language with hard, fixed rules,” as he called it—but had grown impatient with the administrative grind of teaching, which included monitoring school hallways. Espada’s workshop offered him a modest artistic escape. Although Phillips had written poems at Harvard and served on the poetry board of The Harvard Advocate, poetry was a “hobby,” secondary to his teaching. Recently that hobby had “suddenly and unexpectedly” become something more: a furnace of discovery. Espada noticed Phillips’s talent. After the workshop, he pulled Phillips aside and said, “You seem as if you actually really write poems.” Espada urged him to apply for an artist grant.

Phillips listened, and was awarded $10,000 from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He bought a computer to replace his typewriter. He wrote more poems, and, encouraged by the poet Alan Dugan, whom he met at a pay-per-session workshop, he sent a manuscript to the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Rachel Hadas selected his book for publication; In the Blood was released in 1992. Phillips would later quote H.D. to affirm his long apprenticeship to the art: “You may ask forever, you may penetrate / every shrine, an initiate / and remain unenlightened at last.”

***

Great teachers see us better than we see ourselves. Hadas was my teacher at Rutgers, and had remarked that I seemed like a Jesuit, long before I told her of my discernment for the priesthood—that is, the process by which one discerns whether to enter the seminary. All it took, apparently, was reading a few of my poems, and hearing me speak in one class about Gerard Manley Hopkins.

My classmates and I were convinced of Hadas’s divining powers, but her reading of Phillips’s anonymous manuscript is downright preternatural. “Internal evidence would seem to indicate [that the writer] is a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men,” she notes in the book’s introduction. She was correct. At the time, Phillips was married to a woman. Writing the poems that became In the Blood was a revelation of his sexuality.

Despite the accuracy of her perception, Hadas warned against the “reductiveness of such terms” of identities—a caveat Phillips has echoed, in response to readings of his work content to isolate him as gay, Black, or biracial. The daughter of famed classicist Moses Hadas, and trained in the classics herself, Hadas was perhaps Phillips’s perfect audience, and her framing of his debut remains one of the best critical analyses of his literary project.

She describes Phillips’s work as “universal and private, lurid and hidden, transcendent and terrestrial,” and notes that his “contradictions” scaffold In the Blood. The epigraph from Romans 8:15 that opens the book—“for what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I”—is not an affirmation of belief. Rather, it is an establishment of chiasmus. While reading Phillips’s manuscript, Hadas imagined the author “composed, like his poems, of pained contradictions—eros tugging against anger, despair, isolation,” even as the “verbal texture of the poems” was “silken smooth, their tone rueful, amused, urbane.”

Thirty years later, Phillips remains a chiastic poet. Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), his first book after receiving the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, reveals an increasing comfort with syntactic delay and how meaning is polished through hesitation. “Pattern” in poetry, Phillips argues, “is a system of restraint and release.” His poem “Sunlight in Fog” affirms his vision, with its first sentence meandering across five lines:

                Maybe what a river loves most 
about the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it— 
is their willingness or resignation to being 
           mere context for the river’s progress 
or retreat, depending.

The ligature of his first sentence is the dual anticipation of thought and grammar. We think in words because we think through words; the method is the material. Phillips’s skillful gambit is to contrast an adverb of possibility (maybe) with the muscular force of nature, and to present a river’s shape and speed as dependent on the surrounding banks. Yet the speaker questions the strength of the banks, interjecting a phrase of opposition—“willingness or resignation”—whose difference in meaning is notable. In placing the phrase between em dashes, the speaker establishes a pattern in the poem, a tendency to follow assertion with qualification.

Linearity in poetry can often be mistaken as a vehicle for directness of thought, and directness is often mistaken for truth. Phillips questions all. The poem’s early em dashes cradle a qualification; the first sentence is worth pondering, but gently. Embodied through a personified “river-love,” the poem’s route continues along this possibility, as Phillips remains in nature with the cattails and reeds.

The natural scene finally incarnates the river again with expression, or the possibility of it, before the arrival of a surprising ellipsis in the second stanza. Although the ellipsis is syntactically slow, the content shift after it is marked: “I’ve forgotten / entirely what it felt like to enter his body / or to be entered by his.” The narrator remains fixed on his man of memory, how his face “routinely” became “blurred by the river’s motion, like an / inside-out version, psychologically, of a painting / where the model sleeps beneath a portrait / of himself not sleeping, if that makes / any sense.”

Although Phillips is certainly a poet of the natural world, his rendering of nature feels less allegorical (as distinct from the real), and more like an affirmation of how the wilderness subsumes us. The poem has already established the river as a force, quite literally, of nature, and its refrain here has a psychological function. Yet the phrase “if that makes / any sense” in the third stanza is curious. It is followed by the poem’s second ellipsis, and the work’s concluding lines: “Not, I mean, that he wasn’t capable / of love, but that—like history already mistaking itself / for myth again—he loved a river.”

The grandness of the poem’s conclusion is startling. Poets often reach wide in their denouements, yet Phillips makes the stretch feel almost inevitable. His chiastic manner creates a unique profluence in his work; the deep, private, internal musings of his speakers are so acute, they encapsulate the world. A poet of devotion, Phillips’s belief is not in God but in belief itself.

***

In 1999, nearly a decade after he first devoted himself to poetry, Phillips drove through a blizzard to interview the poet Geoffrey Hill. The esteemed, Oxford-educated, English poet had been Phillips’s teacher at Boston University. When In the Blood was published, Phillips left his teaching position and returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in classical philology. His second time there was brief. Deciding instead to study poetry with Robert Pinsky, Phillips entered the single-year MA program at Boston University.

There, Phillips enrolled in Hill’s “The Poetry of Religion” course, where he first read George Herbert, John Donne, and two Jesuit priests: Robert Southwell and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hill revered the Elizabethan Jesuits. When he offered a seminar on Hopkins the next semester, Phillips enrolled. He only had one other classmate.

Hill was a “formidable” teacher, Phillips recalled. The three-hour classes included “having to recite memorized Hopkins poems to [Hill], being loudly corrected at each mispronunciation.” Phillips quickly became enamored with Hopkins; each poem “seemed its own language.” Hopkins’s strangeness is often confounding, but with enough reading his work becomes hypnotic.

“Hopkins’s sentences,” Phillips told me in an interview for Image Journal in 2022, “often work like thickets of agony. To read them is to feel a self trying to fight a way clear of that thicket, toward something like clarity, resolution.” Immersed in the priest’s letters and diaries, Phillips became

convinced that this had to do with Hopkins wrestling with a queerness that, as a Catholic priest, he could hardly have embraced or even let show 
. . . Which explains—for me—his complicated relationship to God. A struggle to square his instinctive impulses with a religion that Hopkins knows forbids those impulses, and yet a religion to which he is absolutely committed.

Phillips has never been a Christian, let alone a Catholic. Yet his camaraderie with Hopkins is deep. (Curiously enough, Hopkins began writing poetry again in 1875, at 31, the same age Phillips was when he began anew in 1990.) At Oxford, Hopkins was trained in the classics. He applied those lessons toward a reading of the ancient Greek philosopher and poet Parmenides, whom he believed argued that “all things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it.” Instress, coupled with inscape—the unique, proportional elements of all things—offered Hopkins an idiosyncratic vision of the natural world, anchoring his poetic approach.

From 1882 until his death from typhoid fever in 1889, Hopkins taught Latin and Greek: first at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and then at University College Dublin. Hopkins was a skilled classicist, winning academic awards at Highgate School through Oxford, but his Jesuit superiors noted that “his mind runs in eccentric ways.” The tedium of scoring endless examinations threatened to suffocate his artistic impulses.

Hopkins wrote several poems in Latin, and most importantly, the ancient tongues seem to have influenced his verse in English. In Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical Background and Critical Reception of His Work (1966), Todd K. Bender argues that Hopkins’s apparently unnatural syntax is best understood through the Greek concept of hyperbaton, in which a logical ordering of words is replaced by expression of “inflection rather than position.” Hyperbaton is characterized by syntactic dislocation, as well as a tendency for “interrogatives, relatives, and conjunctions [to be] postponed.” Bender also notes that the Latin propensity for “associative rather than logical” transitions among poetic topics explains the often-surprising routes of Hopkins’s poems, such as “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.”

These startling transitions also jump out in Hopkins's 1881 poem “Inversnaid.” From the first stanza, he transposes a “burn” (a Scottish word for a fast-moving brook) and a horse: “This darksome burn, horseback brown, / His rollrock highroad roaring down, / In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam / Flutes and low to the lake falls home.” Mostly subsumed, the horse becomes the water: “Degged with dew, dappled with dew, / Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through.”

Like Hopkins’s work, Philips’s demands and rewards close reading; his recursive syntax and unique associations require focus. Phillips often parries questions about the difficulty of his poetry. Perhaps that is why, during his interview with Hill, he asked his former teacher about artistic difficulty. “Human beings are difficult,” Hill told Phillips. “We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes.”

Scattered Snows, to the North demonstrates the power of a chiastic, ancient syntax as a vehicle to express a speaker’s complex musings, and to simultaneously elevate the tenor of those thoughts. “Regime,” the book’s first poem, begins: “As I took off /my clothes, I / watched him taking // his own off.” The plain intimacy of the opening shifts halfway through the fourth line: “The sound / of rain was for / once not the sound // of wind shaking / the rain steadily loose / from a stand // of river birch.” A well-arranged book of poems teaches readers how to encounter the work, and “Regime” establishes that Phillips’s speakers will make deliberate but marked shifts. The poem concludes: “It’s hard / to believe in them, / the beautiful colors // of extinction; but / these are the colors.”

Bodies, then, are replaced with the texture of sound. Likewise, the anticipation of intimacy is replaced with the poem’s frank conclusion: wind shaking leaves, like rain, off the birch. Sex yoked with death; we see Donne reflected in these lines.

“Regime” is one of the shorter poems in the book, so these movements are comparatively subtle. “Before All of This,” a longer poem, begins:

                And as usual, early summer seems already to hold, inside it, 
the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons whose 
diminished music we’ll soon enough 
lie down in—surprised, a little, to feel at all 
surprised . . .

Nature is the compass by which Phillips guides his truth. “Meanwhile, how the wind sometimes makes / the slenderest trees, still young, bend over // makes me think of knowledge conquering superstition, I can almost / believe in that—until the trees, like / fear, spring back.” Fear and other emotions are elemental: “I can almost / believe . . .” Rather than by reason or belief, he is guided by a form of spirit. The presence of two ellipses announces unfinished thought, leading to the ambiguous ending, bereft of final punctuation: “Whatever the reasons are for the dead / under-branches of the trees that flourish here, that the dead persist / is enough for me, it’s enough. // The air stirs like history / / Like the future // Like history.”

The cadence of those final lines recalls those of Robert Penn Warren, another writer formed by classic literature. (As the scholar Victor Strandberg notes, Warren is a Christian writer influenced by that tradition, but much more so shaped by classical work, which offered him “instruction and inspiration.”) Warren’s “Evening Hawk” ends: “If there were no wind we might, we think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.”

Again, Phillips’s chiastic syntax enables him to achieve both depth and breadth in his work. He can deeply render lust and love, as in “Artillery”: “It’s like a habit with you—your idea of tenderness— / leading the blameless a little more blameward just so / you yourself can feel a bit less lonely: In what world / is that tenderness?” The speaker, although he disagrees with his lover, “made no argument.” It was early twilight, when “above us / the thunderclouds had begun clambering over / the mountains like sluggish bears just done wintering.” Though striking, the bear simile is anchored in the atmosphere and tone of the piece. It stakes the poem in a peculiar and narrow moment, while also calling attention to the language. Within that jarring act, Phillips offers his conclusion: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”

Questions, ellipses, em dashes: Phillips’s punctuation reveals a poetic mind comfortable with detailing the movement of thought. We might think of language in utilitarian terms: How can I best and most clearly communicate my thoughts? Through his ancient syntaxes, Phillips suggests directness and clarity are neither possible nor perfect in art.

In Scattered Snows, to the North, windows are openings of both sight and emotion. In “Vikings,” Phillips considers the etymology of “window” as “wind-eye, for the god to see with / and at the same time, through.” The speaker, admitting that he “used to hate etymology,” unpacks its usefulness when “after sex with strangers,” he would lean “hard against the upstairs window” and watch them “make their half / proud, half ashamed-looking way wherever.” He would turn from those men, and look outside at a leaf-filled yard, and “I’d / leave the window open, as I do now — if closed, I open it — / then pull the drapes shut across it, which of the many I’ve tried / remains the best way I know, still, to catch a wind god breathing.”

In contrast, “Refrain” begins with a different view: “My fortress has many windows.” Later, in the final stanza, Phillips writes: “My fortress is cold and windless; it’s a choice, / not to step from it. I believe in gift as much, I think, as I believe / in mastery. Even your mistakes were delicate.” As Phillips closes doors that he previously opened, Scattered Snows, to the North demands to be read as a book, not as a disparate collection of individual poems.

Ultimately, the uniting song of the book is contemplation of a belief without the divine. There are telling lines in “Searchlights”:

    All at once, the tiger lilies were out and we’d come too far, world 
versus what I’ve called the world versus what I’ve made of it 
and shaped to my taste, favoring, instead of the sky’s edgeless 
statement about vastness, the sea’s mixed set of questions whose 
only answers, finally, are the questions themselves

Phillips recalls the sentiment later in the book, in “Mechanics”: “It’s as if / the mind somewhere / means to shut down memory, / that way preventing us from / understanding too clearly / our own unhappiness, and / in place of memory, offers up / belief.”

Perhaps best understood as a Jesuit without belief, Phillips is a classicist-poet in the vein of Hopkins, whose instruction by Hill offered a language of devotion that he could apply toward desire, love, and contemplation. His myriad devotions—to nature, to sex, and to truth—are no less prayerful than those of religious believers. The result is a poet whose work carries sublimity and timelessness, and whose syntax carries an ancient strangeness and heft.