Carl Phillips on His Love for Epigraphs

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Carl Phillips about his new poetry collection, Scattered Snows, to the North.

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From the episode:

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Mitzi Rapkin: Do all poetry collections that you write have an epigraph?

Carl Phillips: Mine do. Yes, I think people are very divided about it. I know there’s some people who rail against epigraphs and think that they’re pompous, they’re showing off what one’s been reading, or something. I love books, and I grew up being fascinated by epigraphs because they were another piece, another window, there was the book I was reading, but then the epigraphs were often by people as a kid I’d never heard of so I would then go look for that person’s work and wonder, you know, what did this epigraph come from? In the same way, I’m fascinated with notes at the back of books of poetry, because I’m interested in what the poet has been reading and often those have led me to discover new writers myself. So, I think of epigraphs as a way of being in conversation with the huge tradition with a capital T, whatever that is, the tradition of writing itself, and to me, including an epigraph is sort of an enactment of how I think we are always as writers in conversation with everyone who wrote before us. If we’re writing about love, so did Shakespeare, so did Dickinson, and even if we haven’t read those authors, we’re still part of a sort of a huge choir that’s been humming around this topic of love for centuries. So that’s why I do it.

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Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.  Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing; and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.