Toward a Politics of Mere Being

From Poetry Magazine

by Carl Phillips

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry's current issue. Carl Phillips's poems "Stray" and "Wild Is the Wind" appear in the March 2016 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors' Blog.

When my first book of poems came out in 1992, I learned what it could mean to be seen as a political poet for no other reason than because of who or what one is. Rachel Hadas, who selected the book for publication, wrote a wonderful and uncannily accurate introduction, from which the publisher excerpted the following for the back cover:

Internal evidence would seem to indicate that [this] is a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men. The reductiveness of such terms is one lesson of In the Blood, with its ... constant dissolving of one world into another.

I say uncannily accurate because I had yet to acknowledge to myself, let alone others, my being gay; about the color part, I'd been pretty aware of, of course, all my life. Sexuality would end up being the primary lens through which my early work got read; and given how relatively new it still was to speak of queerness openly, and given the relative newness—and unknown-ness—about HIV and AIDS, the poems were seen as particularly relevant: political, let's say.

Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.