Phillips - The art of daring : risk, restlessness, imagination

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2014 by Carl Phillips

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-681-1

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-093-2

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2014

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958014

Cover design: Scott Sorenson

Outdoors the leaves was rustling, different from when Id went in. It was coming on a rain.The day had a two-way look, like a day will at change of the yearclouds dark and the gold air still in the road

Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

In a matter of days, the backyard has filled with leavescatalpa, pear, chestnut, tower of pin oak, twist of dogwood: When did it become fall again? How did I get here? What is this place?

Life and art are of course different from each other, but their unavoidable relationshiplike that of a coins two sides sometimes, and other times like that between an image and the mirrors return of itmeans that art and life are forever part of the same thing. Hard to say what that thing is, exactly, not coin, not mirror.

I think restlessnessof imagination, but also bodily, by which I have mostly meant sexual, I see that nowis what brings us to that space where art and life not only seem interchangeable, for a moment they are so, space where they penetrate one another, space in which, caught between the two, we can be variously lost, broken, or we can summon that daring that can bring usloss and brokenness in towto unknowing. When I speak of unknowing, I dont mean ignorance so much as a kind of removal of all the trappings of presentationhow we present ourselves to the worldand an accompanying exposure of the usually hidden parts, what we hide equally from others and from ourselves.

Foliage hides the tree that we know in winter. Both trees are the same tree, arent they, the one sporting leaves, the one laid bare? Is what hides us any less valid than whats hidden? Is it any less difficult to look squarely upon our secrets than upon the ways in which we fashion a self for presentationliterature of course being one of those ways; literature as, also, the presentation itself

This book began as the three essays with which it opens. Id been asked to speak on art, and I figured the craft of poetry seemed appropriate: Id corral a handful of poems, discuss how they work and the ways in which how they work might contribute to how and what they mean. Soon enough, though, I realized how the poems shared restlessness as a subject (and often a method); more to the point, though, these were the poems that had attracted mewhich said what, about me?

As if distortion were preferable to reality. Isnt it sometimes? Do I still think that? I believe reality can become distorted past recognition, and its in these moments that only something like daring, a willingness to risk going forward when we hardly know where we are, can provide us the chance both for self-knowledge and for the making of art. Restlessness carries us to penetrationwe pierce the world as we knew it, the world as weve never known it pierces us, in turn, daring pushes us past this and then what?

Who can say which is better, the glory of foliage or the truth of whats left when the leaves fall away?

For the artist, life is more than a journey were on, its an active questingit requires stamina, risk, a sense of daring in the face of risk, the risk being many things: we may have dared for nothing, we may have lost more than we expected to, or we may triumphthat is, arrive at the art to which restlessness (ambition in its natural state), with luck, can toss us, but at a cost, one that can take years to be understood.

not what manner of end they came to

that part is legendbut to what degree, having found

you must, you must call it something, you will call it

inevitable. Deserved, even. Maybe worth what it cost.

So ends my earlier book of essays, Coin of the Realm. Ten years ago. This book is much less of a book on craft than that one was. It serves, I hope, as more a meditation on what it can mean to live a life through art, to make art from a life, or parts of it, andwhen art and life seem impossibly blurredto insist on a difference between living a life and doing more than that, instead choosing to dare a life.

A friend tells me we are, all of us, little gods of making, here on earth to make some part of us we can leave behind, a way of translating making into mademade as a kind of death, or closure, to the act of making. Its as if the trajectory of art were necessarily that of life itself, with art having perhaps more resonance than the body-in-death. Or perhaps its more accurate to say theres a different resonance, since the body-in-death has its own haunting, unforgettable, and often unbearable qualities, from which we walk away at last not unchanged.