Episode 50: Carl Phillips - "The desire for precision"

On today’s episode of The Poems We Made Along the Way Gregory Kearns speaks to Carl Phillips about the eroticism of line breaks, developing titles of poems, and poetry as a place to explore uncertainty.

Carl Phillips is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (Carcanet, 2024). Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). After more than thirty years of teaching at Washington University

Books and other things

Scattered Snows to the North: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800174337/scattered-snows-to-the-north/

Then the War And Selected Poems 2007-2020: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800172296/then-the-war/

Wild is the Wind: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538248/wildisthewind/

You can also use our affiliate link for Bookshop to find most of the books by most of the guests from the show. They are organised into lists for each series. If you use this link, we get a fraction of the money you spend: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/series-six-the-poems-we-made-along-the-way

We’d also recommend enquiring with your local bookshops or libraries as well.

Things to read/watch/listen/etc in relationship to this interview:

2017 Craft Talk Carl Phillips Palm Beach Poetry Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uq7vBGN54w

Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips on his work and the power of poetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_g8UcovyTI

Carl Phillips talks about his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGcHbi0iDLE