31 March 2026
In our last poetry workshop, Jonathan sent us on a Carl Phillips dive. First his 2018 essay Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax for At Length and then a handful of poems. “A Kind of Meadow” (2000) has been with me ever since. Very painterly. There's something about it that puts me in a place similar to Polke's Die Fahrt auf der Unendlichkeitsacht III (Die Motorradlampe) (1971)—every new door opens to a misdirect or redirect, but the flow of the whole remains cohesive and unencumbered. A particular example via enjambment in a middle stanza:
A kind of meadow, where it ends begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway darkness you were expecting perhaps
And that's the rhythm all the way through, of starts and stops meshing and trading places. Which happens verbally in the mouth, but also visually; bones, branches, and fretwork form a grid that dapples both shadow and light, shooting both through the length of the poem. Words examining themselves as they are produced.