Carl Phillips's "Fist and Palm"

Thoughts on commas.

Fist and Palm

There are plenty who’d hardly
recognize me now, I used to be
that cruel, by which I mean

I was frightened mostly,
and now I’m mostly not. Joy,
if only flickeringly, each day

astounds me, the man I used to be
dismounts, relents for a bit,
before digging

his boots (streaked
with longing, my own
longing, what I can’t help) hard into

my sides again, into the man
I’ve become, his way of reminding me
we’ve only stopped for rest,

a short rest,
some water, we’ve
years to go, still, he has

his job,
I have mine. Speechlessness
is not an option, he whispers

into my ear, he spits
on the words themselves after,
as if to make them stay,

or just to make sure
I’m listening, but I’m always
listening, as I always obey: isn’t this

obedience, these songs I’ve
built from things too difficult
to speak of?



from Scattered Snows, to the North (FSG, 2024)

---

There’s a blurb by the poet Richie Hofmann on the back of the book today’s poem is from that reads, in part:

I couldn’t mistake these poems for any other poet’s work.

That sentiment encapsulates, perhaps almost exactly, how I feel about the poetry of Carl Phillips. It has such a specific kind of distinctiveness, almost immediately noticeable but immensely mysterious, a quality all its own that gives voice to complexity and then holds it, sometimes for the longest moments of time, sometimes for a sentence that spans a dozen lines. It’s a poetry that complicates as it clarifies, that clarifies what is complicated.

Here’s an example, from the opening of Phillips’s poem, “Western Edge”:

I need you 
the way astonishment, 
which is really just 

the disruption of routine,
requires routine. 

Or here’s another example, from “Fall Colors,” where Phillips describes a man:

much of my time I spend pretending I'm not afraid, negotiating this life
with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves
the handling of fires daily
daily handles a fire

See how the poem above holds the same word on each side of a line break? And see that dual repetition of routine in the other poem above? And how, when Phillips returns to the word a second time, it remembers the first time it was used, and it’s a little different for this usage? It’s a lot like music and a lot like life, this poetry that doubles back and repeats, this poetry that adds notes to the same song.

Notice how Phillips does this in today’s poem — right as the poem opens:

There are plenty who’d hardly
recognize me now, I used to be
that cruel, by which I mean

I was frightened mostly,
and now I’m mostly not.

Today’s poem is a mere three sentences, and this is its first. Look how much it holds. It holds recognition, and confusion. It holds cruelty and change. It holds fear and fear’s opposite — which is maybe safety, maybe peace, but probably neither, probably something else. All of these things — held in a sentence. It shows, at once, the person someone is and the person someone “used to be.” And it holds all of that.

I’m struck, as I read Phillips’s work, by all of this holding. I’m struck by the mere fact of it — that a poem can be this turning, repeating, doubling-back thing that accumulates as it goes on. And I think of how this poem accumulates not as wealth does, as some towering thing that erases all it towers over, but rather as snow does — patiently, slowly, like that Wendell Berry poem attests:

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.

The magic at work in Phillips’s poetry is that it seems to insist on deeper and deeper clarity, which means, at times, a deeper and deeper complication. This is why I love it, I think. It dwells in the very rigor of dwelling, which is somewhere in between discovery and lostness, like opening a door without leaving quite yet. Phillips attests to that in an interview he once did:

There’s an impulse towards the unknown to the wilderness, but it’s frightening to be lost. Bewilderment can be illuminating, but it’s also frightening before the illumination seems to me. But I think the alternative is to stay in what’s known. Then we never grow. We never discover possible things that could change us in maybe not always the best ways, but maybe in ways that could be good and important. It ties back to that whole idea of a poem resisting closure, yet you also want to get to an end, and it’s nice to have something finite.

Notice how peppered the above sentences are with words like yet and but, how so much of what Phillips says is the stuff of contradiction, the refusal to “stay in what’s known.”

Perhaps more than anything, I think that Phillips has developed a craft of poetry that enacts that contradiction between knowledge and mystery, which is the contradiction of life (how, if you’re living it, you’re trying to navigate all you don’t know with what little you do), and gives space and voice to it. It’s there in today’s poem. Here, read these lines:

the man I used to be
dismounts, relents for a bit,
before digging

his boots (streaked
with longing, my own
longing, what I can’t help) hard into

my sides again, into the man
I’ve become 

Today’s poem offers the image of what it feels like — and perhaps even means — to be alive. And that image is brutal, isn’t it? It’s the image of a man carrying the “man I used to be” on his back. But one is working the other. The carrying does not seem voluntary. The man of the present is being ridden by the man of the past, is being made to carry that figure across a great distance. And from the fact of this painful, unyielding labor, we are given the poem that sits in front of us. We are given this:

these songs I’ve
built from things too difficult
to speak of

And what is this, if not one definition — of many — of poetry?

And what is this, if not a more merciful way to consider any art that is made?

And what is this, if not a reminder to us that what we want from a poem, or a painting, or anything that’s made by someone else might not even be possible, given the difficulty of the fact of creation, and the difficulty, still and always, of the fact of living?

And what is this, if not a reminder, then, to be grateful that these songs exist at all And merciful, too, perhaps — in light of our shared obedience to these selves we carry on our backs. To all of our selves.

When I first read this poem, I was on a plane. And I had Phillips’s book with me. And I was reading it just before takeoff. And my wife was sitting next to me. And I reached this poem, and, after reading it, I immediately did that thing I always do when I want to return to a poem, which is to say I dog-eared it. And then I read the next poem. And then I turned back to this poem, read it again, and closed the book, and slipped the book into the pocket of the seat in front of me. And I looked out the window, and I closed my eyes, and I imagined the image of this poem as if it were my life. And it was hard to imagine, let me tell you. I imagined myself, sitting there, gripped by my past self. And I imagined him, too, gripped by a self from even further in the past. And then him, gripped too. And I felt the weight of it all. I felt it in my shoulders, my sides. And I felt how we bled into each other, and how we longed, and pined, and pained. And I wondered how many selves each self around me carried, and I knew, immediately and with great specificity, how hard this life is for all of this carrying, and how much harder it becomes when you realize what you carry, and have carried, along the way, because even pride in your ability to carry won’t lessen the weight of what you carry or the fatigue that has come with how long you’ve carried, and I knew, then, that there might be no greater task in life than wondering how to see people, really see people, for all they carry, and commit yourself to the work of lightening, however and whenever that work presents itself.

And so, I’d like to pay attention to how Phillips constructs this image of holding and carrying and pain and obedience and maybe, just a little bit, mercy for us. There are twenty-five commas in this poem. Thirty lines. Nearly as many commas as lines. This is typical for a Phillips poem. If you need one more example, here’s one, from “Record of Where a Wind Was”:

  We’d been walking
the beach, its unevenness

made our bodies touch,
now and then, at
the shoulders mostly,

with that familiarity
that, because it sometimes
includes love, can

become confused with it,
though they remain
different animals.

Phillips’s commas serve to define, advance, correct, clarify, and articulate what comes both before and after. In the example above, notice how the first comma begins to define the “unevenness” of the “beach.” And yet, notice, too, how it advances the poem into its next movement, as it is that very unevenness that makes “our bodies touch.” But it’s not a solid, forever-kind-of-touching, it’s only “now and then.” And then, later, notice how it is the commas that define “familiarity” as something that might include “love,” but then it is also the commas that complicate the possibility of love as a kind of confusion. Do you see what I mean! There’s a real beauty here. Each comma introduces a deliberate pausing, which then introduces a moment populated language, language that says something like let me tell you a little more what I mean while also saying let me say that a little more clearly while also saying no, no, that’s not exactly right.

A simple comma — it reminds me just how beautiful and complicated the world can be, that we can construct a single sentence that seems to go on forever about it all.

In today’s poem, these commas do that same work. I noticed it first here:

Joy,
if only flickeringly, each day

astounds me

That phrase set off by commas — if only flickeringly — does more than I can say. Without it, Phillips’s poem would read, simply: Joy / each day / astounds me. And though perhaps this is true, it also isn’t true. It certainly isn’t true enough. The definition and clarity that even a word like flickeringly allows for works almost like a remembered breath. Without that level of specificity, maybe you can’t find yourself — or anything. And then you remember to breathe, and you feel it all, your tight shoulders, your knotted muscles. It comes back to you, your body. And you let it go.

And so, when I think of today’s poem, I think of how this specific, deliberate work of craft communicates that part of being alive means carrying selves on top of selves — the selves we are carrying all these selves we used to be. It’s not unlike the way a sentence holds the phrases within its commas, and the way it holds more, and more, and more. Until it ends, and you see it, finally, this completed thing — holding all it held. There is a real joy that comes with arriving at the end of a sentence, which is to say within the present moment, having held all that such a sentence held — its commas, its phrases, its turns, its selves. It’s the same joy of trying to know someone, impossible task that is. But there’s real joy there, in that task. The joy of being surprised by an old friend, or seeing in someone’s eyes a different color as their face turns toward the light. These moments — they’re little phrases, set off by commas. They are moments of complication and clarity bound up in the clarity and complication of life.

When I think of how we learn from language, I think of something like this. This life cannot be one thing. Certainly not. And when I read a poem that enacts — not just through the image it creates, but through the craft of the image’s creation — just how much we hold in this life, then I can’t unsee the possibility of that holding everywhere. Such language transforms perception, and I become different for having encountered it. That’s a joy, even when its lessons are hard. And the lessons are hard. I’m sitting here, feeling the pain of past selves, writing from them and through them, writing with them, trying to hold it all. And you are too, I imagine. And that’s hard. It must be.

---

Some ongoing notes:

1. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

2. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.