Observable ReadingsPoets Carl Phillips and Marianne Boruch Bring Their Sweeping Power and Surprise to Observable Readings on Monday, Oct. 4
Thursday, September 09, 2010 at 08:05 PM
Carl Phillips has been an important national figure for years, bringing credit to Washington University, St. Louis, and to the art of poetry. His considerable output of poems (11 volumes, including Double Shadow, forthcoming next spring) reflects a voracious creative energy and bountiful intelligence, all the more remarkable when one consider the demands of his public appearances and his central place in the graduate writing program at WU. He holds a joint appointment as professor in both the African and Afro-American Studies and English Departments.
His poems "explor(e) the spaces, moods, and metamorphoses of desire" (Boston Review), moving deftly between natural, domestic, sensual experiences into spiritual, metaphysical, and classical dimensions. He draws on his background in classicism for many of his ambitious and architecturally complex poems, and that learning and respect for tradition gives him sweeping power. Yet--and this is part of his grace and generosity--his wit, his ease with common speech, and his desire to be clear and precise reveal his pleasure in the reader's pleasure. He respects us and he gives his best to us.
Carl Phillips has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Pastoral (2000) and the Lambda Literary Award for From the Devotions (1998). He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Cortége (1995) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for In the Blood (1992). In addition to numerous individual honors, his poems have been chosen eight times for the annual Best American Poetry series. Phillips is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), and the translator of Sophocles' Philoctetes (2003). To hear an audio recording of some of Carl's poems, click here. To hear Carl talk about his new book Speak Low and read poems from it, click here.
In a recent interview, Marianne Boruch described her writing process this way: "I like to say I'm of the begging-bowl theory of poetry. You put out your begging bowl and see what drops into it." The result is a poetry of surprise and discovery, poems that pay careful attention to the sensory world and the responses of the body and mind to it.
Whether meditating on a hawk feeding on a grackle ("The Hawk") or on a leaning, empty ladder ("Ladder Against House"), the poems slip smoothly between the exterior and the interior, between the things of the world and our meager apprehension of them. Boruch is interested in dream, and in what we see when we wake up and look out the window.
Marianne Boruch teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency program at Warren Wilson College. She has written six books of poems, most recently Grace, Fallen From (Wesleyan, 2008). Her Poems: New and Selected was published by Oberlin College Press in 2004. Additionally, she has written two books of essays on poetry: Poetry's Old Air (University of Michigan, 1995) and In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (Trinity, 2005). Her work has been recognized with two Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies at Ragdale, the McDowell Colony, The American Academy in Rome, and elsewhere. Click here to read some of Marianne's poems. To hear an interview with her, click here.