Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips

Professor Emeritus of English
Pronouns: he/him/his
research interests:
  • Poetry Writing
  • African-American Literature
  • Twentieth-Century Poetry

contact info:

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    CB 1122
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​Professor Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 13 collections of poetry.

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Phillips has also been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.  

Phillips' first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. In addition to contemporary poetry and the writing of it, his academic interests include classical philology, translation, and the history of prosody in English.

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books, most recently the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Macmillian, 2022). Other books include Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  His prose books are The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004), and he has translated Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2004).  A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, his other honors include the Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, for which he served as Chancellor from 2006-2012.  In addition to contemporary poetry and the writing of it, his academic interests include classical philology, translation, and the history of prosody in English.

Writing Sample

Foliage

Cage inside a cage inside a whispering so deep that
– And then just the two of us.  And you calling it
vulnerability.  And me calling it rumor passing
through suspicion’s fingers – ashweed, flickering
halo of the boy I might really have been once, tiger
lilies beneath a storm blowing into then out of
character, then back again, as if seasonal, summer
now, now fall.  But I know suspicion has no fingers.
Vulnerability’s just part of the trash that rumor leaves
behind.  Wait it out long enough, the trash shifts, it
always does, in that way it’s like memory lately –
I’m the fist of instinct, cool, unstoppable, you’re
the dogwood’s crucifix-laden branches, I’m the fist
through the branches, you’re the fist, I’m the branches…

From Carl Phillips, Reconnaissance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015)

This poem first appeared in Little Star

Courses

  • L13 541: Craft of Poetry
  • L13 522: Poetry Workshop

in the news:

Phillips wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Five poems to read for National Poetry Month

Faculty bookshelf: Reassessing state supreme courts

Carl Phillips combines new poems with selected works in "Then the War"

Back to Ampersand
Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020

Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020

Carl Phillips

A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the War

I’m a song, changing. I’m a light
rain falling through a vast

darkness toward a different
darkness.

Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest”; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started.

Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.

Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.

Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

Silverchest

Silverchest

Carl Phillips

“After / the afterlife, there’s an afterlife.”

In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we’re willing to commit fully to a life in which “I love you / means what, exactly?” In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It’s a risk, there’s a lot to lose, but if it’s true that “we’ll drown anyway— why not / in color?”