These Indicium Tales

Lance Phillips

 

An extended bio from the author

 

 

My first memory is that of crushing a scorpion, accidentally, under my bare feet in Las Vegas; I was two or three years old. My second memory is that of a stray cat slinking through our door, open against the Texas heat, leaping to the counter and lapping at a dish of very soft butter; I guess I was three or four in Del Rio.

I was born on an American military base in Stuttgart, Germany, and grew up in Nevada, Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. My parents divorced when I was around five years old. After the divorce I didn’t see my father again for over twenty-five years; for about eight of those years I thought he was dead. He re-entered my life in 2001 then died in 2007.

I dislike classrooms and requirements. In fact, if it hadn’t been for my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) I’d have never made it to university—it had never occurred to me as something I should do. Still, I ended up at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as a psychology major—that is, until I read The Stranger for a required literature class. After that I quickly became an English major.

I came to writing very quickly. In the space of about a year I went from dabbling to cramming summer school credit hours in so I could attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall, to my great surprise. I guess what I was reading in that space of time drew me in, made the idea of writing palpable, attractive and seem important. I wasn’t much of a reader, aside from a brief infatuation with Chaucer in 12th grade English, until I became something of a writer and then I read everything I could. But what sticks in my mind are the following: Emily Dickinson, some Whitman, Emily and Branwell Brontë, T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land in particular) and Jon Anderson. Also a couple of anthologies: The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry and the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry (editor Jorie Graham), which introduced me to writers like Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Laura Moriarty, Alice Notley, Michael Palmer, Joan Retallack, Donald Revell and Gustaf Sobin. Finally, an experience with a wonderful friend and teacher put the icing on the cake. Our class met at his house for an end-of-semester class/party and were sitting on the floor passing around a box of Capt’n Crunch while he read to us from the new (this would have been I guess winter 1991) APR. It was a section from Susan Howe’s Singularities. I was 21 and utterly hooked.

What was important about my education was contact with a specific person or group. At UNC–Charlotte it was with Christopher Davis, the first person to take me seriously as a writer and to introduce me to contemporary writing. At Iowa it was with Donald Revell in my last semester, but more importantly it was with a small group of writers to whom I feel very close still and from whom I’ve learned immeasurable things: Catherine Wagner, Martin Corless-Smith and Matthew Rohrer.

The writer who has remained a constant for me is Nietzsche. Other influences on me which haven’t waxed and waned much over the years are, strangely, most often painters. These are: the anonymous iconographers of medieval illuminated texts, Francis Bacon (I can still remember the day he died when I was an undergraduate and that Queen Elizabeth referred to him as that man who paints those awful pictures), Cezanne, Anselm Keiffer, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp (a heavy influence), Jasper Johns and Jim Dine (and others who I’m probably forgetting).

Other writers who are either always popping up or just about to or haven’t in a long time are: Eliot (at first The Waste Land, but more and more “Four Quartets”), Jon Anderson, Susan Howe (particularly, Singularities), Fanny Howe (beginning with The Vineyard and Saving History), Creeley, Olson (and behind him Henri Corbin), Anonymous middle English lyrics, Zukofsky, Oppen, Williams’ Kora in Hell, Meister Eckhardt, Thomas J.J. Altizer, John Dominic Crossan (his great book on parable), Celan, Hölderlin, Artaud, Roger Giroux, Deleuze, Martin Buber, Levinas, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer (especially Notes For Echo Lake), Samuel Beckett (later work), Guy Davenport, John Cage, various writings on Zen, Thoreau, Barthes, Bataille, Pound and Stein. I’m sure there are lots of others but these are the ones to which I return.

Other things, let’s see: both my parents are nurses and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the body itself as landscape and am interested in its terminology and what constitutes it. It’s possible to see images of the body in every conceivable position and eventuality with a few keystrokes. All this adds up to, at least in my mind, thinking of the body not as the conventional vessel it’s taken to be but as part of the process, part of what happens, the results of which are occurrences like Soul (pluralized, and an event rather than an object) and Self (disembodied, also an event).