#2: Carl Phillips' 'Fixed Shadow, Moving Water'
If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution--
From Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Carcanet Press, 2022)
Where to begin with Carl Phillips? Even before he was awarded a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize this month, it’s been clear that he is one of the preeminent poetic voices of our time. What always strikes me is the rich and ever-shifting texture of his writing: how fluently and deftly he navigates the contours of lyricism, symbolism, language itself. And as the title suggests, this particular poem operates on multiple levels; there’s a sense of layering, and of fluidity.
bell hooks writes about the notion of a ‘love ethic’ as a core belief system governing our participation in politics, in activism.1 Like so much of hooks’ work, this concept offers a paradigm shift toward a valuing of interpersonal dynamics—of an ethos of care—as not only beneficial to, but moreover as essential to, the project of moving through the world. That’s what Phillips is carving toward here. The poem asks: to what degree, and to what ends, is tenderness a political act? Can the political be approached tenderly—and can we understand all of life, including the non-human natural world—as within the scope of the same body of care?
At its best, poetry doesn’t offer us new worlds but rather offers us new visions, transportive understandings, of the beloved and complicated world we already live in. This is the clearest explanation I can muster for why I find poetry endlessly interesting. It is simultaneously a transcendent and deeply political medium. This duality is what makes it necessary, even transgressive.
Wadzanai Mhute writes that to read Phillips’ work ‘is to understand his continuous striving and searching for meaning in a world that can be as tender as it can be violent.’ There are myriad ways to distill (or sublimate) power, vulnerability, violence, and intimacy. To me, the organising principle of this poem is an awareness of how these ideas intertwine and refract to reveal both the intricacies of social politics and intricacies of the heart. In mapping one, the other is implicated. What’s political to a fox or a pond, Phillips’ speaker asks—these living entities which exist outside our anthropogenic blinkers? The answer is: nothing. Or, we reconfigure our parameters and the answer is: everything.
And then to end a poem with an em dash—what a bold move. It’s an ambiguous invitation, or perhaps I should rather say an open-ended one. There’s a sense of imagination: an implied potential for undoing and remaking. Phillips uses the word ‘revolution’ in the poem, and imagination is the most revolutionary thing there is. Awhile back on a work assignment I interviewed sustainability activist Rob Hopkins, founder of the global Transition movement. Despite discussing climate, I came away from our conversation feeling shockingly hopeful. I ought not to have been surprised by this; after all, cultivating radical imagination is central to Hopkins’ work. He cited the iconic Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra as his biggest inspiration, and recounted a quote of Ra’s: ‘The possible has been tried and failed: now I want to try the impossible.’ It takes bravery and discipline to improvise—to experiment with the impossible. I think here of Ada Limón’s invocation in her poem ‘Dead Stars’:
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. Whatwould happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?2
Improvisation, adaptability, a belief in the radical world-building power of imagination, a willingness to expand the parameters of what seems possible: all central tenets in a creative practice, as well as in the quietly political act of facing one another—and the world at large—from an origin point of tenderness and care.
Until next time,
Maddy
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https://uucsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/bell-hooks-Love-as-the-Practice-of-Freedom.pdf
From The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)