[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: It’s hard to find something original to say about the much-lauded poet, Carl Phillips. The oft-quoted and obvious-on-their-face facts are that Phillips is regarded as one of the most influential and productive of contemporary lyric poets and the recipient of numerous honors including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips is the author of fourteen books of poetry and his latest publication is Then the War: and Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Little Winter" by Carl Phillips.

Little Winter

       Little season, caught, or stranded, between whatever
inside us makes us each go on and the less predictable part,
more fragile, that makes us want to. Little fever-snow of
days when, just as certain colors, even now, can suggest a time
that you called innocent, more honest—though to think so
is itself dishonest, none of it was true, or for only some
was it true—you understand, and can almost admit it,

that the years and the energy you’ve spent forgetting someone
only mean you remember, still: at once more clearly and with
increasing inaccuracy until what’s false, being all you can see,
becomes the past that justifies
                                                        all the things you are. It’s
more than a bit, I think, like that question, If someone 
dreams about you, does it keep alive—to which
the only good answer is, In the end, will it matter? Just
this morning, what felt like signal flares being sent at random
from the mind’s high watchtowers—half-abandoned, now,
but still under guard against siege by barbarians—

turned out instead to be the light reflected off
the blade of a knife that a gloved hand, as if disembodied—
I couldn’t see a body—had extended, but to no one visible,
with the handle outward, as one does in friendship, or
toward an enemy in truce. Then the hand let go of it. And then
I was the knife, flashing, spinning downward, in a bright, bright sun.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 48



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