Specifically, it’s important not to be writing in order to get prizes, since art is subjective, as are the people who award prizes yet it’s also reasonable to be happy with winning a prize the point is to remember that the real business of making the best work you can is what ultimately matters: the best work for yourself – what you must write, regardless of public opinion.ĭo any of the survival skills in the collection-ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community-have great resonance for you now, months after the book’s initial publication?

What messages from the collection feel apt in this moment of celebration?ĬP: Probably the most apt would be the moment in “Ambition” where I speak about prizes being like flies to horses – my point, there, was that these things can be distractions, and that it’s important to keep them in perspective. My Trade is a Mystery shares lessons from your life of writing. In My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered.” In this Q&A, we talk with Phillips about his recent Pulitzer Prize, poetry’s impact on future generations, and continued reflections on a life of writing.

Then the War by Carl Phillips