CARL PHILLIPS is the author of Pastoral, published by Graywolf Press, and three previous books of poetry, From the Devotions (also published by Graywolf Press), Cortège, and In the Blood, which won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. He has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.
"Writing poetry is a very quiet, solitary sort of activity. One writes with no expectations beyond the poem itself, and I sometimes forget that the poems are going to go out into the wider world." --Carl Phillips in the Washington University Record, October 22, 1998.
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There is a difference it used to make,
seeing three swans in this versus four in that
quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its
effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-departure; or,
about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind
of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,
something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not:
a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those saints
on whom the birds once settled freely.
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