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Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry
The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essays
The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."
The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
About the author
Carl Phillips
90 books217 followersCarl Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry.
He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.
His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.
His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 9, 2026
Carl Phillips’ poetry and his prose is both tender and startling too. If you read his words carefully, he will richly nourish your life. Promise.
August 14, 2007
The essay on the prose poem is good but far from the last word.
May 20, 2015
After reading Carl Phillips' collection of essays, Coin of the Realm, I see more clearly what draws me to his poetry. His poems aim at seduction of the reader, through beauty that comes from authority that, in turn, comes, from athletic thinking. There are fine essays here on individual poets, such as George Herbert and T. S. Eliot, and on individual poems, such as George Oppen's "Psalm," Gwendolyn Brooks's "A light and diplomatic bird," and Sylvia Plath's "Winter Trees." There is also a long substantial essay on the Psalms. These essays give a strong sense of the poetic qualities that Phillips value: besides beauty, a prayerful attitude akin to desire in its openness; an exquisite control.
Fine as these essays are, I prefer the essays on poetics, which are illustrated by a wealth of examples from a wide range of poets. In defending the use of association in poetry, Phillips also points out its limits, of final clarity and ultimate pattern. His examination of what makes a prose poem is judicious and thoughtful, in the course of which he throws out this gem:
In the essay "Abstraction on Parnassus: American Poetry of the 1950s" he looks at the poetry of Ginsberg, Levertov, Creeley, Orson, Berryman and O'Hara to show how the post-war Americans wrote on the assumption that content determined form. It is clear that Phillips sees himself in the same American lineage.
Most valuable to me is his essay "Boon and Burden: Identity in Contemporary American Poetry." He begins the essay by describing how his class responds to a poem by Langston Hughes called "Island." Before he reveals the name of the poet, the class dwells on its "existential" meaning. After he tells them that the poem is by Hughes, the class becomes certain that the sea voyage in the poem is a veiled reference to Middle Passage. When Phillips adduces the fact that Hughes was gay, the inability to reach the island becomes, for the class, a metaphor for socially enforced isolation. Phillips thus shows how poetic identity can narrow the interpretation of a poem. He is against such narrowing.
I also enjoyed his coming-out essay "Sea Level." His interview, however, I find evasive. The two essays on books and reading do not give anything very new.
Fine as these essays are, I prefer the essays on poetics, which are illustrated by a wealth of examples from a wide range of poets. In defending the use of association in poetry, Phillips also points out its limits, of final clarity and ultimate pattern. His examination of what makes a prose poem is judicious and thoughtful, in the course of which he throws out this gem:
... the lyric poem is a torso. Without the extremities of arms, legs, head, the torso has to serve as representative of all that's missing, has to resonate in the manner of Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo.
In the essay "Abstraction on Parnassus: American Poetry of the 1950s" he looks at the poetry of Ginsberg, Levertov, Creeley, Orson, Berryman and O'Hara to show how the post-war Americans wrote on the assumption that content determined form. It is clear that Phillips sees himself in the same American lineage.
Most valuable to me is his essay "Boon and Burden: Identity in Contemporary American Poetry." He begins the essay by describing how his class responds to a poem by Langston Hughes called "Island." Before he reveals the name of the poet, the class dwells on its "existential" meaning. After he tells them that the poem is by Hughes, the class becomes certain that the sea voyage in the poem is a veiled reference to Middle Passage. When Phillips adduces the fact that Hughes was gay, the inability to reach the island becomes, for the class, a metaphor for socially enforced isolation. Phillips thus shows how poetic identity can narrow the interpretation of a poem. He is against such narrowing.
I also enjoyed his coming-out essay "Sea Level." His interview, however, I find evasive. The two essays on books and reading do not give anything very new.
January 5, 2022
"Cardiology cannot yet account entirely for the broken heart."
June 4, 2008
The essays in this strong collection range from autobiography to close reading to anthologizing meditations. To my mind, the best essays are the most focused: an essay on the Psalms, another on George Herbert, a third on T. S. Eliot, and the quick, close readings of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath. Some pieces take up interesting topics (the use of myth and fable, association in poetry, the prose poem) and guide the reader on a tour of a half dozen or so relevant poems, offering brisk insights along the way--quite nice as appetizers, which is, I think, their intended purpose. Among these treatments of broader topics, those that explore questions of identity in the life of the artist--"Boon and Burden" as well as the title essay--seem the most fully realized.
April 27, 2009
Good so far, though I'm somewhat disappointed by the essay on associative poetry. He makes a strong distinction between the associative poem and the surreal poem by saying, essentially, that the surreal poem will always refuse meaning whereas the associative poem will always yield meaning-- what?
But the brief "The Case for Beauty" is persuasive, the essay on myth and fable in poetry is fascinating in the way he identifies various intertextual approaches by way of some wonderful examples. And I love the one on restiveness and the psalms.
But the brief "The Case for Beauty" is persuasive, the essay on myth and fable in poetry is fascinating in the way he identifies various intertextual approaches by way of some wonderful examples. And I love the one on restiveness and the psalms.
July 18, 2010
Some really lovely stuff here, especially in the book's first section. My favorite essays were less focused on Phillip's own work/the close reading of other poems and more interested in bigger questions of risk, association, audience, etc. Particularly good: "The Case for Beauty," "Myth and Fable," "No Rapture," "Sea Level," "Boon and Burden."
May 13, 2013
In this series of essays, Phillips not only explicates a number of poems, but critiques their particular value, both for the era in which they are written, and for all time. Along the way, he gently critiques the state of the art in contemporary times. In my estimation, he is quite fair, and infinitely compassionate.
July 27, 2010
Favorites: "Association in Poetry", interview with Nick Flynn, "Coin of the Realm."
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews