Welcome. In this monthly newsletter, I’ll share and discuss a great poem, and offer a reading recommendation.
Up first is the title poem from Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips.
It’s a marvelous book, and also happens to be my reading recommendation for this month. (I featured the book as one of my must-read new releases in my monthly poetry column for The Millions—in which I discuss his poem “On Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing”)
I often feel invited into Phillips’s poems—sometimes this invitation is the result of his winding syntax, hypnotizing in its rhythms—or his careful mastery of narrative point of view. “Remind me,” this poem begins: a subtle but tender opening that establishes a connection between reader and art.
The em dash in the second line arrives like an early exhale that pushes the poem’s long first sentence forward—a syntactic rush of the horses freed. The release—the unbridled wildness—is a “loveliness,” but the narrator explains: “I'm / thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering / unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got / torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten.” It’s the type of Phillips line that I like to reflect on; his poems have those anchoring moments that are so appropriate to the content of the text, but can also be held with us elsewhere.
“I've reached that point in my own life,” the narrator says, “where there's so much I'd rather not remember, that / to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty.” The phrases in the lines that follow arrive faster, their content shorter: a heaving, perhaps, of recognition or resignation.
I think Phillips is a poet of maturity. That’s not to say that he isn’t funny, or clever. But there’s an earned wisdom in his verse, a measured contemplation. “I’ve reached that point in my own life” is a phrase that asks us to consider: where are we?
Are we in the same place as this narrator?
At this point in the poem, about halfway, I feel like turning backward to that first line again (what an incredible thing poetry does in its recursiveness, as if we are in a closed room with the poem, the ideas bouncing off walls like light off mirrors!). Now that first phrase before the em dash feels like a whisper to another, an errant moment of intimacy overheard.
In an interview with Callaloo, Phillips has talked about moving away from traditional narrative in his work, and being more interested in “seeing how narrative can be constructed intuitively from remnant.” In speaking about a previous book, From the Devotions, he talks about how some poems “contain disembodied voices working—seeming incidentally, not deliberately—in chorus.”
I feel those reverberations in the second half of “Pale Colors in a Tall Field”—you can see the narrator pausing, contemplating, asking (“Who said that?”), naming through negating (“No. Not that one.”)—as well as examining devotion and faith. “To me,” Phillips has said, “they’re the big metaphysical and existential questions—what’s out there, what should our relationship to it be? What will we gain or lose from believing in what we can’t prove to be true?”
The devotion that feels most absent in this poem is love; gone, perhaps, like those ghostly horses. “Wish around for it,” the narrator laments, “hard enough, you can always find some deeper form / of sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—mere / sorrow lay”—followed by an ellipsis, a masterful choice: a mind wandering (as we so often do when mere sorrow turns to a longer sadness). And where else do minds like this wander but to the soul: cast out, departed, or existing at all. And then the end, the essential frame for the poem:
“It was that long ago.”
I’m drawn to poems about all permutations of devotion, including ones by narrators who place that devotion far in the past—and this concluding gesture feels profound.
It’s a beautiful piece. Read the poem in its entirety (aloud, to feel its texture and care), and then get the book (among his others!).
***
Speaking of devotion, and how it intersects with creation: my essay “The Nuns Who Wrote Poems” appears in the May 25th issue of America magazine.
From the essay:
“In the mid-20th century, several nuns like Sister Wolff and Sister Quinn were writing ambitious poems and publishing them in renowned magazines and newspapers. Their writing garnered awards and accolades. These women were not the first literary nuns—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, O.S.H., a 17th-century Mexican nun, is famous for her iconic verses—but something of a minor literary renaissance happened in mid-century America and abroad. Although literary nuns tend to be overshadowed by poetic priests like Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and Robert Southwell, S.J., these women deserve attention.”
Thankfully, I’ll be turning the essay into a book—coming in 2023 from Fortress Press.
***
Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next month with another poem and book recommendation.
Be well.