An Ignoble Experiment: My Maybe Not-So-Unique Desires

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review.
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Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2018. Photography courtesy of Reston Allen.

This week, we've unlocked our Art of Poetry interview with Carl Phillips, selected from the archive by Morgan Thomas, whose story "Everything I Haven't Done" appears in our recent Fall issue.

We've also unlocked Thomas's story, which you can read alongside the interview. Thomas introduces the interview below.

A teacher once told me that memorizing poems would change my life. I was an eager student and set to the exercise immediately with a few pieces by Carl Phillips—and this did have a profound effect. Five years have passed, yet whenever I encounter a certain breed of dog—a Labrador or terrier—my brain still reliably chants, "the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable." I might whisper, "muscled animal, muscled animal, muscled animal," as I scratch the dog's chest. During a difficult summer, I would bike for hours, at intervals standing on my pedals and speaking the final line from "Gold Leaf" into the wind: "and say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair." For a time, a handful of lines from "Rubicon" became my shorthand for all that frightened me:

that streak of cruelty to
which by daybreak we confess ourselves resigned, by noon
accustomed, by night
devoted

I sent "Rubicon" to my partner in an email early in our relationship, insisting that this was a progression that we'd have to avoid if we were to last. They responded with a flippancy that concerned me at the time, but now seems like the only possible response to such a foreboding statement, reassuring me they were prone to neither cruelty nor habit. When we first lived together, if one of us spoke unkindly, I'd think "by daybreak resigned." I believed the poem was a warning, believed I might, through vigilance, craft a life free of cruelty.

A few years later, I finally had the chance to hear Carl Phillips read. Listening, I felt disoriented. The rhythms of the poems were different than the ones I'd settled on in my memorization. He read with deliberate matter-of-factness. No poet's voice, no great emphasis on the stressed syllables. The slant rhymes I used as a mnemonic trick were hardly audible. My disorientation progressed to embarrassment, almost horror. In his Art of Poetry interview, which appears in issue no. 228 of the Review, Phillips says that poetry is "a dangerous, because almost holy, thing, and therefore not to be dealt with lightly." Had I dealt lightly in applying the poems to my own life? Reducing to aphorism what was in fact its opposite?

I walked away from the reading determined to never again approach his writing so personally. And yet, when I reread his Art of Poetry for this newsletter, I reached the last paragraph only to find—like the turn so often waiting at the end of his poems to disturb me out of my premature complacency—Phillips making the exact sort of connection that I'd refused myself, reaching back to one of the odes of Horace and using it to describe his own erotic experience. Phillips says, "I love when poems resonate across centuries, making me feel a bit less alone in my maybe not-so-unique desires." My maybe not-so-unique desires—a phrase so sonically pleasant I've memorized it. I've been repeating it to myself for the last few weeks. I've drawn "desires" out over three syllables. I'm sure I've got the rhythm wrong.

—Morgan Thomas

INTERVIEW
The Art of Poetry No. 103
Carl Phillips

INTERVIEWER

The motif of unconventionality seems an important one in your poetry and prose.

PHILLIPS

I've always thought that's what poetry was for, a space for unconventionality, risk, disruption. I really resist what seems a human impulse toward what everyone has agreed on as normal. I don't understand that in life, and I truly don't get it in poetry. In this way, poetry has seemed analogous to what it used to mean, at least, to be queer … Conformity bores me, as does predictability. I want stability in my life, sure, but on my own terms. And I don't go to poems for that stability.

From issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

PROSE
Everything I Haven't Done
Morgan Thomas

On the seventh day, they approached her in the parking lot of the Safeway. She had bags, more bags than she could carry, her two-week provisions. She had set the bags down to reposition them when a voice behind her said, Can I help you with that?
Could it have been a coincidence? she asked me when she arrived home. Them being at the same Safeway at the same time?
Could be, I said.
I remember this moment—my housemate at the front door, the sanitizer she'd attempted to make from vodka and xanthan gum glopping off her hands—because right then the best friend texted me. This was a surprise. For six months we had not talked. She had needed space. I had been giving her space.
Hey, how are you doing? her text said. I read it again: Hey. How are you doing? I read it again: Hey. How. Are. You. Doing?
The words inflated in me a helium balloon, which made it impossible to attend to whatever my housemate said next, impossible to eat the potato I'd just baked, impossible to do anything but float around the house on tiptoe for hours, thinking about how I would respond.
I'm okay. How are you? I sent the two statements in separate texts just for the joy of sending them.

From issue no. 249 (Fall 2024)

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