Carl Phillips's "Delicately, Slow, the World Comes Back"

Thoughts on forgiveness and tenderness.

Delicately, Slow, the World Comes Back

So what if usefulness, thin as figment,
but sturdier, sturdy enough, seems the one gift
I’ve been able to give, that I didn’t take back. The bamboo

does its folding and unfolding thing anyway, under the wind,
across, over it. Hard to say how the parts that hurt in life,
most of them, ever come to pass. The wild dog in my head

that I keep for company, that I’d been told could
not be tamed, which is why I wanted him, I think,
or I think so now, becomes daily more tractable: I raise

my hand; he fairly falls beneath it. Half of me says I’m
the wrong answer, while the other says no, maybe
just more difficult, the harder one

to choose. The dog looks up at me,
then quickly away. Pretty soon, I’ll have broken him. Little prize;
bit of trophy. —And what will usefulness be then?

from Harvard Review, 43

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I love the work of Carl Phillips. Reading his work is like floating down a winding river at night, knowing that the water is guided by forces unseen, trusting that you will be safe in the water’s hands. This is in part because of the absolute fluidity of Phillips’s sentences, these meandering, searching things that move and fall from line to line, doubling-back and twirling forward all the while. But it is also because of the gentle honesty at the heart of the language. The vulnerability such searching allows. In many ways, Phillips’s syntax and rhythm and craft mirrors the very title of this poem: Delicately, Slow, the World Comes Back. And in many ways, it was that title that made me linger a little longer with today’s poem. Because I love it. I love it so much.

In an essay on the value of silence for writers, Phillips writes: 

Finally, it’s worth rethinking what we mean by writing—or any act of art making. Is it only writing when we have a pen in hand, or a nearby keyboard? I think writing includes much more than that: patience, attention, openness to the world past screen or page—to what’s findable there. These are, if not the act of writing itself, among the conditions, at least, that writing requires.

As long as I am living in language, as I like to put it, I count it as writing.

I think it’s that openness that guides the syntax of a Carl Phillips poem. It’s an openness that I like to live in, one where I feel at home. Today, as I write this, I’m feeling a little lost. Overworked, stressed, distracted. I feel myself bristling, anxious, holding a glass for just a second and then putting it down. I pick up my phone, flip through it, find myself watching myself flip through it as if I am outside of my body, wondering what I’m looking at, if I’ve looked at anything at all. I’ve found myself at a loss for attention because the world feels, as it does when I’m stressed, like something I’m not really living within, as if there’s a thin, warbling static between myself and the leaf I’m trying to touch, the one that hangs just above my head.

And maybe that’s why I turned to Phillips’s work, which requires the same kind of openness that he describes of writing. Or maybe it doesn’t require it; maybe it allows it. 

Read the opening lines:

So what if usefulness, thin as figment,
but sturdier, sturdy enough, seems the one gift
I’ve been able to give, that I didn’t take back.

These lines are peppered with pauses, full of gentle qualifiers and reminders. Usefulness is thin as figment. It’s sturdier. It’s sturdy enough. It’s a gift given. It’s a gift un-taken back. All of that is contained in one sentence spilling over three lines. I say spilling because at the heart of this opening is a gentleness, it seems. A gentleness not just with language, but with oneself. It seems spoken with a soft hand and a soft gaze. 

Notice, too, the music. Here are some lines that follow not long after:

Hard to say how the parts that hurt in life,
most of them, ever come to pass. 

These are not the lines that directly follow the poem’s opening. There’s a space between. And yet, that final word — pass — echoes with the back from the lines above. And this sentence, turning among just two lines, peppered with less pauses, feels a rhythmic answer to the lines above, the ones that open the poem. Somehow, these two moments call out and respond to one another.

And then, yes, let’s read the lines here. Hard to say how the parts that hurt in life, most of them, ever come to pass. It is so hard. Yes. Again. The gentleness. With language and with the self. The meandering. The way that correction — most of them — enacts a brain and heart that are thinking as they speak. I said earlier that reading a Carl Phillips is like being buoyed down a dark river. It is also like pulling soft-bristled leaves aside from a tree as you wander along a footpath. 

Think of this question at the heart of his poem “As from a Quiver of Arrows”:

Is it okay to be human, and fall away
from oblation and memory, if we forget,
and can't sometimes help it and sometimes
it is all that we want? 

Or this ending from his extraordinarily titled poem, “A Little Closer Though, If You Can, for What Got Lost Here”:

maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers
make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it,
versus having asked, and been softly turned from.
            They said it would hurt, and it does.

They said it would hurt, and it does. How such a line follows this image unraveling itself. An image of wildflowers moving toward a moment of being turned from. All together. Like humanness, which is a thing beyond description, and yet still we try. 

Maybe, in a way, Phillips’s poetry feels like what forgiveness might look like if forgiveness might look like a poem. There are moments in today’s poem that enact such a thing. Little asides, softened corrections. I think, / or I think so now. Half of me says…while the other says. These phrases that might be excised out of some other work for a lack of directness are actually the things that offer this poem its humanness. These are the parts of the poem that, as they accumulate, accumulate toward a wholeness that is as rich as it is complex. Forgiveness, I think, begins with honoring the complexity of a life, the way behavior — perhaps, if one is talking about behavior — might occur in a moment but begin somewhere long ago, in another room. And to forgive oneself is to engage, perhaps, in a mode of talking to oneself that feels full of commas. Because I think of a comma as something gentle. Like turning in bed while holding a pillow. But staying in the bed. Holding and being held.

Maybe what I wanted most of today was selfish. To just sit within the turning of Phillips’s work. And to let it turn in me. Because that is often not just what Phillips’s work does for me, but what any work of art transforms the experience of being in my body into. It transforms me into various experiences of being. Imagine the joy of that. To be a field sifted through with hands. To be the soil that runs between the fingers. And to be the field, once again, in that falling-through. That is how it feels, for me, to be moved. It is an almost literal experience, as literal as the metaphorical can be.

I think often that one experience of the world is that it happens to us. It moves, full of friction and sparks, along our bodies, and it jolts or satiates or occupies or bores us. It moves quickly and makes life feel, sometimes, choiceless. A room of screens without doors, and certainly without windows. Sometimes, I think, one way of trying to resist this feeling is to be as deliberate as possible with what we try to see, and to then try to make of what we see something important. And yet, even this form of resistance can be binding. It can run up against the walls of that room. It can feel locked in. It can certainly fail to acknowledge a way of being in the world that is open to every way in which the world might be.

This makes me think of this lovely, long paragraph in the aforementioned essay by Phillips:

Meanwhile, given that everything we write comes to us via the many lenses of the experiences we’ve accumulated across a life—we speak of trees, for example, according to what we know of trees by actual experience and through what we’ve experienced of trees in books, movies, nursery rhymes, and more—then everything we do is at some level research for the next poem. The key, I think, to this kind of research is again to keep it from being too self-conscious. To go to the beach, for example, and feel a need to take mental notes the entire time for the next poem is not what I mean. I mean simply going to the beach, maybe swimming, maybe not, listening to the gulls, falling asleep to the sound of waves, noticing how the fog at sunset makes the sunset less and more the point at the same time . . . In my own experience, this rarely translates into a poem “about” going to the beach. But what I felt there, something my brain stored that I don’t remember at the time seeing, smelling, or having heard—these are the things that end up appearing in a poem, often years later, and often I myself can’t trace my own idea back to its catalyst. I’ll admit, it is hard to explain this to university deans who ask me to quantify and itemize the research I’ve “conducted” while on sabbatical—equally difficult, explaining to a partner who’s been watching me apparently just stare out a window for ten minutes that this is part of the business of making. Difficulty explaining a fact, though, doesn’t change the fact.

Isn’t that something special? It resists the logic of capitalism — the one that says we must name when we begin to produce and name what we produce and name how much we produce, and then judge ourselves for all of it. It resists that logic and it resists so much else. This paragraph, like Phillips’s poems, enacts a language and politics of forgiveness. This way of thinking about process is also a way of thinking about our lives. It forgives us, in other worlds, for being ourselves. It says: it is okay to be a human, because to be a human is to enjoy one of the benefits of being human — to be aware, gently and kindly, of the world at large. To notice it. And to fall asleep within it. And to wake up into it. And to repeat this, over and over again, with one intention — to be among the world, and aware of the world’s among-ness.

I would like the world today to come delicately and slowly back to me. I could use it. On the subway home from work this evening, I slumped down in my chair and watched the harsh electric lights stream past like little sparks outside the window. I wanted to read, but couldn’t. I have been reading Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays, When I Was a Child, I Read Books. In it, she writes: 

Words like “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are overworked and overcharged — there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table in a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong, unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world. Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human presence in its mystery and distinctiveness.

First of all, isn’t it an absolute joy to spend time in the language of writers like Phillips and Robinson? With their turning syntax and their insight and their love, collectively, of the imagination?

Here, I feel Robinson in conversation with Phillips. I feel her asking us, instead of forcing our engagement with the world or having the world forced on us, to practice a kind of solidarity and allowance with the world. To say yes to it, in its myriad and beautiful ways, without insisting an explanation or a way of reckoning with it. I think she would call this, as she writes later, a form of “imaginative engagement.”

“We inhabit,” Robinson writes at one point, “a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” I think that I continue to read poetry because, so often, a poem acknowledges an idea of reality that is steeped in mystery and bewilderment. Because a poem asks questions. Because a poem meanders. Because it wonders. Because it self-corrects. Because it pauses. Because it revises. Because it continues. Because, in doing so, a poem teaches me — not intentionally, but sidelong, like the softest glance from the most gorgeous pup — something about forgiveness, or gentleness, or a way of being in the world (or in my mind, or in my body, which are also experiences of the world) that is more imaginative, and, in being such a thing, at odds with the parts of the world (or myself) that cause me the most anxiety or pain. 

At the end of today’s poem, Phillips asks us about the purpose of usefulness when we have broken parts of ourselves, or each other — parts, maybe, we once cared about or tended. This, too — a kind of forgiveness, right? This question? We must forgive the parts of ourselves that have the tendency to cause the wreckage. Only then can we be tender with who we are and who we meet and how we gaze at the world, and what we do with our attention, and what we do with our time, and what we allow ourselves to imagine. I crave that tenderness now, as rough-edged as I feel, as staticky and harsh. It is difficult, I imagine, to use Carl Phillips’s language above, to think of tenderness as useful. To prove it as such. We are given, I think, different objects and words to associate with use. Sharper ones, and more pointed. But this doesn’t change the fact, right? That you’d like to forgive something about yourself right now? And then treat yourself more tenderly? That you’d like that? That maybe, as I feel, you might need it. That it might be beautiful, even. That it is.

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