April 21, 2012: Dennis Phillips part 1

On Sat 4/21 we began part one of our interview series with poet, professor, director, editor, novelist, and surfer Dennis Phillips, who read from his recent collection Navigation (Otis). Craft constraints, lyricism, complex music, intention, language, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” meteorology, mourning, politics, sentimentality, fragments, presence in absence, pronouns, automaticity, prose poetry, the sea, and “rhythm and pacing" are just a few things we touched on during and after our conversation. Dennis Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Arena, Credence, Sand, and most recently Study for the Possibility of Hope (Pie in the Sky Press) and Navigation: Selected Poems, 1985 – 2010 (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). His work, both poetry and commentary, regularly appears in various national and local poetry journals. In 1998 he edited and wrote the introduction for a book on some of the early essays of James Joyce, Joyce On Ibsen. His novel, Hope, came out in 2007. Of Phillips Navigation, George albon writes, “There is rarely a moment when something remarked on in a poem is not contingent to something else, exerting a pull on the first thing and making it part of a warping sequence, just as the something else must also yield gravity to the appearance-field of the new arrival. One could in fact experience the work-line, poem, book, selection—as a progress of appearance-fields.”

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