Without Conceit
A review of Wild Is the Wind, Poems by Carl Phillips (USA),
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
by Dana Delibovi
I confess. I’m a sucker for the poetic conceit. Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz mastered the conceit: desire as greenscape, unrequited love as the death penalty (“Verde embeloso…,” “Pues estoy condenada…”). So did her devotee, Octavio Paz (“Estrella Interior”), and so of course did John Donne, often with wondrous absurdity, as when he likened sex to mutual flea bites (“The Flea”). These are sometimes called “metaphysical conceits,” which may explain my weakness for them. I’m poet moonlighting as a professor of philosophy. So I sit perplexed in my pleasure when reading the poetry of Carl Phillips, including his fine, fourteenth book, Wild is the Wind. Phillips always resists conceit. Within each poem, he cracks his images asunder: Start in the shadows, end in reflected light; man the oars of the galley, then stare at the bounding deer. It’s fractal poetry— faceted, irregular shapes that mirror the wild irregularity of the world. As such, Phillips’ work is, like the world, unpredictable and even volatile, but held together by astonishing, fleeting beauty. |
To see the nature of Phillips’s enterprise, look at how he names. He named Wild is the Wind and its titular poem for a jazz standard, jazz itself being another fractal art form. In the song, lovers are things tossed in the wild wind (a lovely conceit, actually). The analogy stops there. In the namesake poem, no wind blows, and not a leaf flutters. Memory of love, stated plainly, is implicated as the wild thing. Phillips even tells us in the last stanza that he’s tossing away any metaphysical conceits:
...For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what’s been lost is that tears wash out memory and by extension, what we’d hoped to remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn’t explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier truths most resist?... |
Here, with a nod to Donne’s “A Valediction: of Weeping,” Phillips declares that elaborate conceits might just ruin the poetic moment. Real memories would get shoe-horned into the metaphor, all for sake of being thorough. The need for explanation—for the logic of the conceit—would prevent expression of the mysterious, inexplicable, and true.
Despite my passion for the conceit, I have to agree with Phillips. When he rejects the relentlessly logical metaphor, truth comes forth. Witness the evocation of paradox, that truest of states that also defies logic, in “Brothers in Arms.”
Despite my passion for the conceit, I have to agree with Phillips. When he rejects the relentlessly logical metaphor, truth comes forth. Witness the evocation of paradox, that truest of states that also defies logic, in “Brothers in Arms.”
The sea was one thing; the field another. Either way,
something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable was a word like any other lies far behind me now... |
The “inconceivable” deserves a special place. That place can’t be mapped to a tight metaphor of either sea or field, to regions that are either crossed or uncrossed, or to zones that either make us happy or do not. We have to entertain both sides at once, even if paradoxical; we have to entertain, for instance, being happy and unhappy at the very same time. In formal logic, such a paradox—“P and not P” simultaneously—is inconceivable and false. But for Phillips, that same inconceivable paradox is a truth to live in. True paradox abounds: our single world is divided into multiple objects; we should follow moral rules, but often have to break them to be moral. Since logic withers before every inconceivable yet true paradox, we don’t need the logical poetic conceit to express it. To illuminate paradox, we need instead the fissuring, fracturing, and sometimes conflicting images that Phillips gives us.
By understanding Phillips as a poet who shuns the conceit, I can begin to understand the way he titles his poems. Often, his choice of title has been opaque to me. “Revolver” carries no gun. “Rockabye” is lit with fireflies then darkened with storms; there is no baby, no treetop, no bough, no cradle. But titles make sense when I stop looking for the metaphor of a conceit and embrace the fractal in Phillips: the poem as a reflection of our actual, unruly world.
“Revolver,” for instance is about a man’s face that was “a festival” of feelings turning and turning, amidst leaves that “swam the air” and animal desires to either come close or move away. A poetic conceit would make the man's face a gun, and that gun would be pointed at us, chamber spinning to shoot off moods and glances, lethal to our souls. Phillips’ way, instead, is to gather loosely the disparate shards of a moment in time, so that the imagery incites a re-experiencing of that moment.
To say that Phillips’s poetry is without conceit carries a double meaning: ethical as well as literary. To lack conceit is to be modest, to shun arrogance, to practice humility. Phillips’s poetry in Wild is the Wind embodies these virtues. No poem is overlong. All are spare, and not a line wastes the reader’s time. Throughout, Phillips recognizes his limits, as a writer and as a human being, so movingly expressed in “Craft and Vision”:
By understanding Phillips as a poet who shuns the conceit, I can begin to understand the way he titles his poems. Often, his choice of title has been opaque to me. “Revolver” carries no gun. “Rockabye” is lit with fireflies then darkened with storms; there is no baby, no treetop, no bough, no cradle. But titles make sense when I stop looking for the metaphor of a conceit and embrace the fractal in Phillips: the poem as a reflection of our actual, unruly world.
“Revolver,” for instance is about a man’s face that was “a festival” of feelings turning and turning, amidst leaves that “swam the air” and animal desires to either come close or move away. A poetic conceit would make the man's face a gun, and that gun would be pointed at us, chamber spinning to shoot off moods and glances, lethal to our souls. Phillips’ way, instead, is to gather loosely the disparate shards of a moment in time, so that the imagery incites a re-experiencing of that moment.
To say that Phillips’s poetry is without conceit carries a double meaning: ethical as well as literary. To lack conceit is to be modest, to shun arrogance, to practice humility. Phillips’s poetry in Wild is the Wind embodies these virtues. No poem is overlong. All are spare, and not a line wastes the reader’s time. Throughout, Phillips recognizes his limits, as a writer and as a human being, so movingly expressed in “Craft and Vision”:
…Write what you must, then walk away from it is
not the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn, by any stretch, only one of the hardest. Witness, then blindness—that’s a way of putting it. To be clear, by blindness I mean the deepest blue possible, good cotton, not silk, the blindfold. |