His work is about trying to find a clear path amid the confusion of everyday life. Instead, he describes his process as pushing forward with the mind into unknown areas. Yet, he does not write with a subject in mind. In Then the War, Phillips writes from the landscape of violence and conflict that has defined the past few years in the United States. “Those aren’t resolvable, but I write in order to make at least some temporary sense of what is always eluding us.” “I believe that poetry exists as a way of giving shape to what’s shapeless – for figuring out ways to grapple with the big abstract parts of life like love, death, morality, sex,” Phillips said. Phillips’ fifteenth book of poems, Then the War: and Selected Poems, 2007 – 2020, is emblematic of the endless nature of this work, looking forward and reflecting on past work at the same time. It is a quest that is no less meaningful for the fact its resolution is always just outside of our grasp. Carl Phillips, professor of English, tells his students that writing poetry is a quest to make sense out of the confounding.
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