First draft: A dialogue of writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with authors of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and poetry, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First draft celebrates creative writing and the people who work to bring their carefully chosen words into print, as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Carl Phillips about his new collection of poems, Isolated snowfall in the north.

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From the episode:

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Mitzi Rapkin: Do all the poetry collections you write have a motto?

Carl Phillips: Mine is. Yes, I think opinions are very divided on this. I know there are some who rail against epigraphs and think they are pompous, just showing off what someone has read or something like that. I love books and was fascinated by epigraphs as a child because they were another piece, another window. There was the book I was reading. But the epigraphs were often by people I had never heard of as a child. Then I would look up that person’s work and wonder where those epigraphs came from. In the same way, I am fascinated by notes at the end of poetry books because I am interested in what the poet has read and often these have led me to discover new authors myself. So I think epigraphs are a way of entering into conversation with the great Tradition with a capital T, whatever that is, the tradition of writing itself, and for me, including an epigraph is a kind of enactment of how I think we as writers are always entering into conversation with everyone who has written before us. When we write about love, so did Shakespeare and Dickinson, and even if we haven’t read those writers, we are part of a kind of huge choir that has been singing about this theme of love for centuries. That’s why I do it.

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Carl Phillips is the author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently Isolated snowfall in the north And Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other awards 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 books of prose, most recently Mystery is my profession: Seven reflections from a life as a writer; and he translated the Philoctetes by SophoclesHe lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.