This semester, four poets will visit Saint Louis University as part of a poetry-reading series sponsored by the English department and Professor Devin Johnston, Ph.D. The first poet, Carl Phillips, will read tonight in the Humanities Building.
Johnston said one of the reasons he arranged the readings was as a supplement for his class in contemporary poetry, but also to introduce poets to the whole SLU community.
“I wanted to pick people as aesthetically varied as I could, and also people at different stages in their careers as poets,” Johnston said.
He noted that Phillips and future reader Paul Hoover are more advanced in their poetry careers than Lisa Jarnot and Elizabeth Arnold, other readers who are in the beginning stages.
Phillips, author of six poetry books, including The Tether (2001) and Rock Harbor (2002), is an associate professor of English and of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University. Most recently his poem “White Dog” appeared in the Jan. 27 edition of The New Yorker.
Johnston said this semester he is teaching The Tether.
“It has a lot of coherence as a book,” he said, emphasizing common motifs of the falcon and the falconeer, as well as the tether as a devise associated with trust. “Trust tends to be one of his themes–trust and limits,” Johnston said.
“The line he used in poetry,” he said of Phillips, “is explorative and hesitant. There’s a lot of syntax that carries over from one line to the other. His poetry is sometimes spoken of as austere, but I think it is so much involved with someone thinking through complexities that it’s often quite emotional. And when I’ve seen him read before, that comes through.”
Phillips has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the Library of Congress and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He will read this evening in the Humanities Building, room 142, at 5:30 p.m. Hoover will read on Feb. 20, Jarnot on Mar. 20 and Arnold on April 10.
