Carl Phillips is the author of ten collections of poetry, the latest of which is Speak Low (FSG, March 2009). He is a professor of English, African American Studies, and Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis. Our summer issue features three new poems by Phillips, who recently took the time to answer a few questions about his creative process.

1. The poems featured in this issue of VQR, as well as several other poems you’ve published in journals this year, do not appear in your newest book, Speak Low. You’re a notoriously prolific writer. Is this work ethic a quality you’ve cultivated? Or is this just what you do—a compulsion, perhaps—and you happen to finish poems relatively quickly?

Despite the outer appearance, I really am not a prolific writer. I write about once a month, during the course of a day. If I’m lucky, I end up with a poem a month, occasionally two. So, you can see that there is no compulsion—and there’s no work ethic—I used to write every Sunday morning, but that was over ten years ago. Now it’s just whenever I can. But I am naturally always writing in my head while gardening, walking dogs, cooking. A major aspect to my life, though, is my aversion to the telephone and to blogs and to e-mail. I find that I have a lot of time to think about writing, time that others spend blogging, calling each other to complain, gossip, rant, etc. I would say I live a quiet life, for the most part—and in the silences, the poems arise.

2. The three poems that appear in this issue hover around fourteen lines. While they would not be mistaken for sonnets, formally, was it your intention to recall the traditional sonnet, at least visually, or to play with the form?

Yes, this is deliberate—but it started out accidentally, when a few poems just ended up around that length.

3. Thematically, these poems seem to quietly deal with being adrift and lost—or losing something—and then returning to or desperately clinging to a kind of meditative hopefulness rooted in the natural world. Are these themes something you’re focusing on lately? How do you find your preoccupations are shifting as you continue to write?

I never decide ahead of time what to write about, but I believe that the changes in our lives necessarily affect the weather of our poems. My mother died last year unexpectedly. This naturally charges the air with a sense of loss, and yet the poems aren’t about my mother or her death. People have always thought that my poem “As from a Quiver of Arrows” was about the death of a lover, presumably from AIDS. I have not experienced the death of a lover from anything, not yet, and I have only distantly known one person—a friend of a friend—who died of AIDS. But my awareness of these issues, just as I was coming out as a gay man, surely influenced my preoccupation with mortality.

4. You’ve written a lot about restlessness as the force to pivot around in art—how do you think this problem or gift of restlessness fuels another writerly concern, obsession? Does it go hand in hand with being an artist, or more specifically, a poet?

Restlessness tosses us from one thing to another. Obsession is a focusing on a single thing. But we don’t know what our obsessions might be, until restlessness tosses us in their direction—some stick, and others don’t. Just as we meet many people in a life, but we fall in love with a handful, if we’re lucky. I think both restlessness and obsession go hand in hand with being an artist, but I also think they go hand in hand with being a human being who is truly alive.

5. You are an avid student and teacher of the classics, which informs your work, but can you talk specifically about how the academic study fits into your creative process, how you consider ancient Greek literature when you sit down to write a poem?

I rarely consider Greek literature when writing a poem—which I only seem to be able to do either lying down or standing up—never sitting. A couple poems in Speak Low mention something from the Iliad—I was teaching a course on that when I wrote the poems, so Homer was just sort of in the air. . . . The only aspect of classics that seems to have an ongoing influence in my work is the more inflected syntax, though that could equally come from my knowledge of German, and from my enjoyment of the sentences of George Eliot, for example.

6. How intimately are politics and poetry linked in your mind? Do you consider every poem to be a political act, by its existence as an artifact, or do you have to decide to write a “political poem?”

I suppose every poem is political in some way. If the reigning mode is a plainspoken style of English, for example, perhaps to write poems like mine is a political act, arguing for independent uses of language. To write a poem about love between two men is not, to my mind, political, but I suppose it is, within a culture of homophobia. I’ve been told I’m political for refusing to write about race—I’m not sure what it means to write about race, anymore than I can say why I’m occasionally still told that I don’t seem to write a black poem. What is a black poem? What is a political poem?

7. There has been a lot of discussion lately about the future of the printed word and the solvency of literary journals and publishing in general. As a writer who publishes extensively in literary journals both high- and low-profile, what can you say about the value and necessity of these outlets?

I think journals are essential, for reasons that I can’t entirely explain. Partly it has to do with my need to feel—physically feel—something in my hands, with pages, with a smell of new paper, or old paper, to it. To read things online is a totally detached experience, for me. I feel alone in the room, somehow. Maybe that doesn’t make journals technically necessary, but art itself isn’t necessary either. Without it, though, the fabric of life would lack texture.

8. What are you reading now, poetry or otherwise?

I just finished rereading Middlemarch. I’m trying to convince myself that Fulke Greville was a great poet, by reading the newly reissued selected poems of his, edited by Thom Gunn. And I’m reading a book from the nineteenth century on the exploration of the Colorado River and the canyons around it. And just last night I began a book of essays on food by—I think—Agnes Jekyll. I’m always reading three or four things at the same time, and they usually are very different from each other.

Thomas Wolfe, 1937 (photo by Carl Van Vechten).

In 1929, Thomas Wolfe—whom William Faulkner described as the greatest writer of his generation—published his novel Look Homeward, Angel to rave reviews. The Virginia Quarterly Review took notice of this young writer from North Carolina and began a tumultuous courtship to bring Wolfe’s prose to the pages of the journal. This courtship spanned three editors and numerous entreaties, though neither side ever evinced the least bit of reluctance. The delay appears to lie with Wolfe, who was a furious, tinkering sort of writer, a fact evident not only in the staggering volume of work he left behind at the end of his abbreviated life, but also in his correspondence with VQR. Plagued by the pressure of pleasing others, saddled with financial woes despite his success, and never far from his next deadline, Wolfe’s brief relationship with VQR reveals a writer who was constantly struggling to balance his life with his craft, though he remained exuberantly committed through it all.

James Southall Wilson was the first VQR editor to query Wolfe, about appearing in Charlottesville at the Southern Writers Conference in the fall of 1931, an event that brought Sherwood Anderson, Allen Tate, and William Faulkner, among others, to the city. In his reply, Wolfe confided that he did not feel worthy of being included in such an august group: “I have published only one book and am sweating and agonizing over another.” He was sagging under the weight of his novel-in-progress and feared losing traction:

I’ve worked [on] my new book over a year—I had all the material for it a long time ago, but it’s been hell getting it in sequence—arranging, revising, shaping—a few months ago I got it straight in my head for the first time, and now I’m plugging away as hard as I can every day . . . It’s very hard for me to get started, and when I’m started I hate to stop until I’ve finished. Also, meeting new people has a very deep and powerful effect on me—particularly interesting and talented people: nothing excites and absorbs me more, and for this reason I go nowhere at present while I’m at work.

(more…)

Polymnia Athanasiadi and Garth Fowden have just issued a statement beginning:

Our son, Iason Athanasiadis, arrived from Teheran at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport in Athens early this afternoon. We are delighted to say that he seems in excellent health and spirits.

We don’t have any further details at this point, but we are delighted and relieved to hear that Iason is safely back with his family and is healthy.

When his release was announced yesterday, Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting which was funding his work, discounted the charges by the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman that Iason was somehow engaged in illegal or unprofessional activities. “Iason is a consummate professional,” Sawyer said. “He brings to his reporting on Iran a deep knowledge of that country’s language, culture and people. We welcome his release.”

We heartily second Sawyer’s sentiments and will post further updates as details emerge.

The Associated Press reported earlier today that journalist Iason Athanasiadis has been released by Iranian authorities after being held for more than two weeks:

State television quoted a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Hasan Qashqavi, as saying that Iason Athanasiadis had been released in, what he described as the framework of Tehran-Athens ties.

There were no details on Athanasiadis’ location.

Athanasiadis, a freelance reporter who had been working for The Washington Times, was arrested on or around June 19. Athanasiadis, a dual national with both Greek and British citizenship, is believed to be the only foreigner taken into custody by Iranian authorities in the post-election crackdown that has swept the country.

In the wake of the disputed June 12 presidential elections, Iran detained hundreds of journalists, bloggers, and activists.

Iason was working on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and was also working on a longer piece for an upcoming issue of VQR.

According to Bowker, “275,232 new titles and editions” were published in the United States in 2008. That’s far more books than can be reviewed by all publications, blogs, and other forms of media. And so the challenge for book-review outlets is to sort through the mass of unsolicited books that arrives every day, the e-mails from authors and PR reps, and the various other articles and notifications announcing the publication of new and interesting titles. (VQR, I’m told, receives about twenty unsolicited books a week.) Of course, the large publishing houses have an advantage in getting their books into the hands of reviewers and assigning editors, but even they struggle to get their authors the attention they very likely deserve.  With that in mind, what is the best way to connect editors and writers with the books that interest them? And does every book deserve a review?

The second question raises the related concern of whether publications have an obligation to their readers to review a certain kind of book. I thought about this recently when I saw that Salon.com, a generally excellent and diverse online magazine, decided to give review space to L.A. Candy, a novel by Lauren Conrad, formerly a star of the “The Hills” reality show on MTV. The piece is a blend of profile and review, discussing Conrad’s preening at her book signing in New York and her efforts to expand beyond the facile role of reality-show star. The review portion of the article calls the book—which had a co-writer, Nancy Olin—”surprisingly entertaining, if somewhat vacuous.” We also learn that it’s filled with clichés and that “many of the book’s plotlines and characters will seem very familiar to watchers of ‘The Hills’.” But these features are somehow redemptive, as they cast the novel as “one of the most bizarrely meta projects in recent memory: a novel partly inspired by the events of a partly scripted reality show, purportedly written by one of its stars but more likely ghost-written by a novelist pretending to be her.”

It’s likely not reviewer Thomas Rogers’ fault—did he ask for this assignment?—but these comments attempt to lend a seriousness and complexity to a subject that does not deserve or strive for any. Certainly great writers have come from unexpected places—from poverty, unusual professions, strange backgrounds, or from beyond the grave (John Kennedy O’Toole and Emily Dickinson among them). Reviewers and editors should always keep their eyes open to this kind of unorthodox or overlooked talent. But did anyone actually think that this book would be worthwhile and that a publication like Salon.com should review it? For all the joys of mixing high and low culture, this is something else entirely—a respected publication digging gracelessly into the gossip-rag market. It’s especially disappointing because there are so many fiction writers out there who want desperately their books to be reviewed by a high-traffic, intellectually engaged site like Salon.com, and by one of its many good critics, such as Laura Miller. (And again, Thomas Rogers appears to be a fine critic, far better than the material dumped on him.)

If publications are looking to reinvigorate book review sections, there is much that can be done besides adopting the cable-news/infotainment ethos. Various publications have experimented with graphic reviews, such as one in the New York Times by Alison Bechdel. That same newspaper assigned television critic Ginia Bellafante to review Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a novel in which the text is strewn with charts, maps, images, and various graphics. It’s a quiet but inspired choice: Bellafante is someone who specializes in analyzing images, and she used that experienced critical eye to write a considered, thoughtful review.

There is some room for improvement at the paper of record. The NYT Book Review (a separate section from the daily review) has received some criticism for its infrequent attention to literature-in-translation, and the paper’s two book-review sections continue to assign separately, meaning that some high-profile books are often reviewed in the daily paper by Michiko Kakutani and in the Sunday NYTBR supplement by another critic. Given the dearth of review space out there, it’s inexplicable that one paper would choose to review the same book twice.

Finally, in a June 12 review, the NYT tasked Janet Maslin with merging two of the more meaningless distinctions in contemporary literature—chick lit and summer reading—by reviewing 11 (!) books together under the title “The Girls of Summer.” Maslin initially claims to consider the concept of chick lit a useless, generic label, just as a character in J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement does, yet she then uses variations of the term eight times in a 1,725-word piece. She also engages in a reductive, sprint-to-the-finish style of reviewing these books, in which she offers a “crib sheet” of why they are essentially all the same. We are told that their covers use similar iconography and that ”any of these books might contain the following sentence”—it doesn’t really matter what that sentence is; it’s absurd that a critic would so lazily lump these books together after posturing towards open-mindedness.

Most writers put a lot of time, heart, passion, and effort into their books. Editors and critics should do the same when considering what and how they review—and whether they respect their audience.

Iason Athanasiadis was detained in Tehran on June 17 while returning from reporting on the fallout of Iran’s elections. He was working on a grant from the Pulitzer Center and reporting for the Washington Times and GlobalPost; he was also working on a longer piece for VQR. The last e-mail VQR received from him, on June 15, was typically brief—given the circumstances of his reporting. “I’m well,” he wrote. “Very intense here.” We were worried about Iason, but he lived in Iran for three years—from 2004 to 2007—and, for anyone who has met him, his love for the country is clear. (The first time we met in a café near the Library of Congress, Iason patiently showed his photographs of Iran to my chatty six-year-old son. How could I not be won over instantly?) Before preparing to leave Iran, Iason filed one last report for GlobalPost. His love for the country’s people is clear: “After three years of living in Iran and learning Persian, this was a tough story for me to cover,” he wrote. “Not only because of the difficulties thrown in the path of all foreign journalists by the circumstances, but also for the sadness with which I watched a country I have deep affection for disintegrate and turn to strife.”

Today we’ve received the hopeful news that Iason may be nearing release. This from the AP:

The head of a small right-wing party says he has received assurances that the Iranian government will soon release a Greek journalist arrested last month in Tehran. LAOS party head Giorgos Karadzaferis says Iran’s ambassador in Athens told a party official Thursday that Iason Athanasiadis, who was reporting for The Washington Times, would be freed “in the next few hours.”

Everyone at VQR lauds this decision. Iason Athanasiadis is a friend of the Iranian people and a remarkable reporter, who has done a great deal to aid cultural understanding between Iran and the English-speaking world. We eagerly await word of his safe return.

How on earth can we understand the news, reported this week in The Sun, that at least a dozen Michael Jackson fans have committed suicide since his death? It’s easy to scoff, it’s easy to point to past histories of mental illness. But neither of these responses really get at the sorrow of these grieving fans. Perhaps the best means of comprehending the Michael Jackson suicides—and his legacy in general—is through the lens of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which itself inspired a wave of suicides across Europe.

What does the King of Pop have in common with the main character of an 18th century German novel? Quite a lot, in fact. Jackson redefined fame and life in the public eye; while Werther was one of the most influential fictional characters in literary history. Goethe’s book spawned an international spectacle unlike anything seen previously. All over Europe, young men and women were struck with “Werther fever.” They wore his trademark blue tail coat and yellow vest, they used eau de Werther, and they committed suicide with the book clutched in their hands. In the words of Theodore Sarbin: “Werther, a fictional character in a novel, had been transfigured to become a model for living and dying.” The popularity of Werther can be attributed to a number of factors, but the most important was his sentimental view of the world. Take for example, Werther’s letter to his friend Wilhelm:

When I pass through the same gate, and walk along the same road which first conducted me to Charlotte, my heart sinks within me at the change that has since taken place. All, all, is altered! No sentiment, no pulsation of my heart, is the same. My sensations are such as would occur to some departed prince whose spirit should return to visit the superb palace which he had built in happy times, adorned with costly magnificence, and left to a beloved son, but whose glory he should find departed, and its halls deserted and in ruins.

This excessive sensitivity, the feeling that the world is just too much too bear, is an essential component of Michael Jackson’s lyrics as well. Compare Werther’s letter to the lyrics of the Michael Jackson song “Childhood,” which he wrote and composed himself:

I’m searching for the world that I
Come from
‘Cause I’ve been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart…
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities…

Unlike Werther, Jackson’s sentimentality extended outwards also, encompassing the sum total of suffering in the world. This universal empathy is evident in the lyrics of “Earth Song,” which Jackson also wrote and composed himself.

What have we done to the world
Look what we’ve done
…
Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war
Did you ever stop to notice
The crying Earth, the weeping shores?

While it is hard to imagine taking one’s life over the death of a pop star, Michael Jackson clearly meant a great deal to a great many people. Comparing his fans to the fans of Werther might help us better understand his legacy in general, and what he meant to those who were compelled by his death to take their own lives. As Goethe wrote in his preface to The Sorrows of Young Werther: “Thou, good soul, who sufferest the same distress as he endured once, draw comfort from his sorrows; and let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.”