ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Lance Phillips
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
—From birth (1970) through about 1976 I lived, for varying amounts of time, in Germany, Las Vegas, NV and Del Rio, TX. From about 1977 through 1983 I lived in New Castle, PA, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. From 1983 to present (excluding two years of graduate school) I’ve been in Charlotte, NC.
No, poetry, or writing at all for matter, was the furthest thing from my childhood.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
— The writer who has remained a constant for me is Nietzsche. Other influences on me which haven’t waxed and waned much over the years are, strangely, most often painters. These are: the anonymous iconographers of medieval illuminated texts, Francis Bacon (I can still remember the day he died when I was an undergraduate and that Queen Elizabeth referred to him as that man who paints those awful pictures.), Cezanne, Anselm Keiffer, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp (a heavy influence), Jasper Johns and Jim Dine (Others which I’m probably forgetting.).
Other writers who are either always popping up or just about to or haven’t in a long time are: Eliot (at first The Waste Land, but more and more Four Quartets), Jon Anderson, Susan Howe (particularly, Singularities), Fanny Howe (beginning with The Vineyard and Saving History), Creeley, Olson (and behind him Henri Corbin), Anonymous middle English lyrics, Zukofsky, Oppen, Williams (of Kora in Hell), Meister Eckhardt, Thomas J.J. Altizer, John Dominic Crossan (his great book on parable), Celan, Holderlin, Artaud, Roger Giroux, Deleuze, Martin Buber, Levinas, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer (especially Notes For Echo Lake), Samuel Beckett (later work), Guy Davenport, John Cage, various writings on Zen, Thoreau, Barthes, Bataille, Pound and Stein. I’m sure there are lots of others but these are the ones to which I return, of course I’m always coming across others to add to the list.
Other things, let’s see, both my parents are nurses and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the body itself as landscape and am interested in it’s terminology and what constitutes it, that is to say how invasive procedures change one’s view of the body, how a knowledge of anatomy changes one’s view of the body. Lay people know things about the body’s structures and functions (sometimes in infinitesimal detail) which medical people would have been shocked by150 years ago. It’s possible to see images of the body in every conceivable position and eventuality with a few keystrokes, all this adds up to, at least to my mind, thinking of the body not as the conventional vessel it’s taken to be but as part of the process, part of what happens, the results of which are occurrences like Soul (pluralized, and an event rather than an object) and Self (disembodied, also an event).
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday life?
— Being called a poet has always made me rather uneasy. I don’t believe in Poetry and so don’t really like the idea of being referred to as its representative. I dislike the way poet, so often, smacks of hierarchy and priesthood. I suppose I started to think of writing as something I could do when I was about 20, though didn’t know then how it would be part of my everyday life; that didn’t really come until 1996 when my wife and I decided to have a baby. That’s when it struck me that the idea of being a writer didn’t take precedence over anything; it sort of just nestles into the way things happen.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
— I dislike classrooms and requirements. In fact if it wasn’t for my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) I’d have never made it to university, it had never occurred to me as something I should do. Still I ended up at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (1988-1992) as a Psych major, that is until I read The Stranger by Camus for a required Lit. class. After that I quickly became an English major and started writing within a year. From there I ended up at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1992-1994).
What was important about my education was almost always contact with a specific person or group. At UNC-Charlotte it was with Christopher Davis, the first person to take me seriously as a writer and to introduce me to contemporary writing. At Iowa it was Donald Revell in my last semester, but more importantly it was a small group of writers to whom I feel very close still and from whom I’ve learned immeasurable things, these are: Catherine Wagner, Martin Corless-Smith and Matthew Rohrer.
5) What is your goal with your blog? Who do you want to interview? Who has refused?
— I thought it would be interesting, useful, to have a record of public thinking about some aspects of writing, which cuts across geography and aesthetics.
I’ve tried to stay as faithful as possible to the initial idea of the blog, which was after contacting a group of about ten writers, to let those who have agreed to be interviewed recommend others they’d like to see interviewed. I have, on occasion, supplemented this process. I try my best to follow up any recommendation made, thus letting the blog perpetuate itself to a large degree.
I don’t think it would be appropriate of me to list those how have refused, in each case the writer in question cited a busy schedule and I have no reason to doubt this. It’s been only a handful.
6) What is your favorite food?
— A really well done marinara sauce that isn’t trying to knock you over the head with anything or avocadoes with balsamic vinegar.
7) Sports Team? or Activity?
— I don’t really like professional sports, though my son (8) did talk me into watching the Super Bowl this year because the Panthers were playing.
I used to lift weight some until my daughter (ten months old) started training to be an insomniac a few months ago.
8) Vacation spot?
— It used to be Pawley’s Island, SC, but that became too expensive. So we’re going to try out Holden Beach, NC next year.
9) Curse word?
— Never been much of a curser, except in intimate circumstances, that is extreme anger or passion when it’s seems necessary to transform language. I think a lot of cursing that goes on is only exaggeration and I don’t like exaggeration.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry and organic or synthetic process for you?
1. My texts are almost always formed by accretion.
2. Fact is that I think of all my writing (save some “fiction” snippets of late) to be of a piece.
3. I trust the text entirely. I know that it’s much smarter than I could ever be, so in that way it’s organic; it moves along mutating itself.
4. The synthetic parts are what I do impose: a time frame and a title. The time frame is usually 6-8 weeks for each text. The titles are always arbitrary, that is they have no referential value to the text.
2) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
— In a tiny corner of my living room beside a window from which I can see the front porch and yard. For my initial writing of the day I like it to be quiet and dark in the room (save the light from the laptop). Yea, I get up at 5am Monday through Friday, make a cup of black coffee, sit in the dark looking out the window until there are words in my head, when they start to congeal in some way I turn on the computer and type away.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?
1. All my titles are found, which simply means they’re words or phrases which I like and don’t necessarily have anything to do with a particular text, at least until they become titles.
2. I suppose in many ways all language is found language.
3. In the text I’m interested in texture, so often words or phrases from my reading gurgle up among those which I’ve written.
4. I like the idea of letting a word stand on its own in a text regardless of its source.
5. Any musicality in my writing is accidental; basically I think of the text as something to read on the page and not really spoken.
6. I’m much more interested in seeing what kinds of textures a text can sustain than in ideas of voice, narrative or any other drama for that matter, to that end I suppose what tension remains is precisely that, what exist between the found and the created.
Bio:
Lance Phillips’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from Fence, Aufgabe, The Gig, Slope, Gutcult, Chimerareview.com and theminimag.com. His first book, Corpus Socius, was brought out by Ahsahta press in May 2002 and his second, Cur aliquid vidi, is due December 2004 from the same. He lives in Charlotte, NC with his wife, son and daughter.
Links:
Work from Cur aliquid vidi (due December 2004 from Ahsahta Press):
http://www.gutcult.com/litjourn3/html/phillipsusing.htm l
