Carl Phillips

Then like holding a mirror up to Apollo
and expecting his face there, when Apollo’s always been
faceless, obviously, being a god.
And the hand still holding the mirror up anyway.
And the face not showing.

There are countless aspects to a self; race and sexual orientation are only two of them, it seems to me, neither the least nor the most important. It’s more accurate to say there’s a constant shifting of hierarchy, depending on any given moment in experience.

To each his own urgency. Or hers. Or theirs. How is it not political, to be simply living one’s life meaningfully, thoughtfully, which means variously in keeping with, in counterpoint to, and in resistance to life’s many parts? To insist on being who we are is a political act—if only because we are individuals, and therefore inevitably resistant to society, at the very least by our differences from it.

I knew no poets, I had no teachers to tell me what to read or when to write, so I read what I thought I both needed and wanted to read, and I wrote when I could. Which is to say, a writing practice includes not only writing and reading, but the discipline as well, to maintain a commitment to writing and reading, for which there’s no magic recipe. If anything, I’d say the only real catalyst for discipline is a desire for what discipline can lead to. It’s been said before, of course, but if you really must write, you’ll find the discipline required to do so.

Writing is intuitive, personal, private, and must ultimately be self-directed. So too with a writing practice, which can maybe be likened to the invisible shapes we each leave in the air behind us as we move from one space to the next one. Those shapes are unique to each of us. There’s no right or wrong shape—just our own. Or maybe the air that contains those shapes is analogous to a writing practice, the context within and from which we leave behind us these records—the writing, that is—of having been here. Who can say?

When I say we are not the same, I mean we’re individuals, individual in our tastes, ambitions, disappointments; we carry inside us our own wildernesses, as particular in their obsessions as they are various in their surprises. These differences give context to the points of likeness between us; or—to go further—likeness and difference require one another, the way shadow and light do. Or like love, and its absence.

We tend to think of a writing community as a community of writers, but I find I still prefer the community that was the only stable one for me as a kid moving from one town to the next: not writers, but what they’ve written, and what I myself write in unconscious conversation—again, though, not with the writers but with what they made, guideposts along/talismans for/sometime distractions from the quest that all writers share but must accomplish differently, the quest of making meaning with language, not because we were told to, but because there’s no choice in the matter. It’s just who we are, and just as mysterious.