Why Poetry? Provost’s Spotlight Talk Probes the Poetic Heart of Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips speaking at the Provost Spotlight Talk, "Why Poetry?" on September 25. Photos by John Griffin.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Presidential Professor and Distinguished Professor in Stony Brook University's Department of English, is one of the most vital and versatile writers working today - a poet, essayist and translator whose work spans forms and continents, eras and disciplines.

The author of seven acclaimed books of poetry, prose and translation joined Stony Brook Provost Carl Lejuez for the September 25 Provost Spotlight Talk, "Why Poetry?"

"Rowan is truly a beloved professor and his work teaches us that poetry has an incredible power to help us see and understand things differently, to harness the wildly different forces of emotion and language to create something that is uniquely capable of revealing profound truths," said Lejuez. "He's a Stony Brook scholar who creates beauty unlike anyone else."

Phillips - whose forthcoming nonfiction book, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux - began by explaining the vague nature of his lecture's very title.

"When you title a talk 'Why Poetry?'you're already in trouble," he began. "The phrase doesn't stand still and won't behave. Spoken one way, it's a skeptic's question. Said another way, it's a believer's question. Why poetry? What strange power is it that we keep turning to in moments of wonder or despair whispered late at night? The question is old because the uncertainty is old, and every poet somewhere along the way has muttered it mid-draft, staring at the page."

Provost Carl Lejuez hosts Rowan Ricardo Phillips for a presentation and spotlight talk on Phillips's work with reception to follow.

Delving deeper, Phillips pondered the complex questions his students - and society - often ask.

"In a world drowning in words, poetry survives by asking for less," he said. "Not thousands of words, just a few. Not a torrent, but a drop distilled. One drop strong enough to change the bloodstream. It holds open a space where words can once again be trusted, where they can carry truth, where they can make human lives intelligible to one another in fractured times. It steadies us by showing that language can still bear meaning, that a small flame can last even in a gale."

Phillips added that poetry can unite us.

"To encounter a poem is to hear another voice, sometimes centuries old, sometimes close at hand, saying, 'I felt this, I saw this, I endured this.' And in that instant, the private becomes shareable. We realize we are not alone, and suddenly a bridge is built, made of nothing but air and syllables, yet somehow sturdier."

In an intimate post-lecture fireside chat, Lejuez asked Phillips about his earliest memories, and Phillips described the life-changing experience of his mother introducing him to Shakespeare.

"I grew up with my mother always reciting Shakespeare," he said. "But everything had a context. She had passages of Shakespeare for everything, good or bad. I was constantly amazed, not just by the beauty, but by her capacity for recall, that there were these rhythmic patterns that called me out, and that was kind of the power and the glory of the thing. Most people get Shakespeare in a book; I was getting it recited when I was 10."

Asked to name his own favorite poem, Phillips said that he didn't have one.

"I have a completely non-hierarchical mind, they're like my kids," he said. "They all have their function. They all do something for me. They all came out of responses you're reading. All your writing is residue of your reading. So I just don't have bests or favorites, and I prefer it that way. My favorite poem is the next one that I'm going to write."

Provost Carl Lejuez hosts Rowan Ricardo Phillips for a presentation and spotlight talk on Phillips's work with reception to follow.

Regarded as a highly respected educator, Lejuez also asked what Phillips learns from his students.

"I thought of my students when I titled this talk Why poetry?," he said. "I love my students because they ask the essential questions. 'Why is this? What is this? Can I do this? Can I be me and be accepted if I give myself to this?' I've had some very real conversations with students who are in a very complicated space just from choosing to study this. I always make a point of, if not mirroring, just remembering what that's like and also what these initial questions are."

Phillips also said he constantly learns different ways of approaching his craft as a teacher.

"I've learned different strategies for the ways in which old art can sound new, because their point of reference is not going to be the same as my point of reference," he said. "They teach me different angles and points of entry into art which are incredibly necessary parts of being. And I also come back to the sense of stakes. I think that students who study the arts are very brave and that there are a lot of stakes involved with that. There are certain things that you can study and feel like you've been thrust on a path that's not your own. And with poetry, the path is foggy and it's winding, but it's where you want to be."

Aminah Augustin-Muhammad '25, English, one of Phillips' students, is an enthusiastic believer.

"I've been looking forward to the event for weeks," she said. "I love poetry, I love writing, and I adore him as a professor. Everyone here got a glimpse of how he teaches. He answers questions that you already had, but also opens up new questions. He didn't just answer 'Why poetry?'Instead, he dissected the question itself. I love the way his mind works, and he does a really great job articulating it and putting it to words and taking us into his brain. It didn't feel like a lecture, it felt like he was talking to us each, individually, personally."

So… why poetry? After challenging the audience to answer the question for themselves, Phillips offered his own reason.

"Because it creates recognition, because it takes what is most fragile and fleeting and makes it durable, and because it allows us to say to one another, 'I see you,'" he said. "And that is why the candle burns. This is where that candle belongs when the world darkens. Poetry is the candle carried into the room. It does not cure the dark, it does not rebuild what is broken, but it allows us to see one another's faces, and from that recognition, face-to-face, everything else can begin. And that, in the end, is mypoetry."

- Robert Emproto
(Ellen Cooke contributed to this story)