Carl Phillips and Eduardo C. Corral kicked off the 2012-2013 O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Monday night. Phillips was the judge for the last Yale Series of Younger Poets and Corral was his chosen winner.

Corral was introduced, both by Phillips and by the program with some beautiful, haunting, and challenging lines from a poem in his debut collection. And it was all down hill from there. His poetry never hit those heights again, which is why I purchased a book by Phillips (I limit myself to buying just one book at these things, no matter how much I want to splurge; discipline, discipline).

Can I admit to being a bit hierachical? I found Corral to insufficiently respectful beside Phillips. Or maybe I found his efforts to portray himself as Phillips’ equal too forced and overdone. Corral may become a great poet. But he just published his first book and the man beside you has been there and done that, as it were.

During the question and answer portion, the last question came from a local poet, Sandra Beasley (well, sort of local; I suspect she doesn’t live in SE). She asked about how first books and publishing had changed.

I rather felt her question was more about the contest culture of getting first publication and perhaps the greater difficulties of the process now (but what the hell do I know? I’m inserting myself into the mind of a stranger; but she spoke like she’d memorized the question and seemed to orate as much as interrogate, which leads me to believe that there was some point in there that I don’t think was addressed). The answer given was actually about ‘project books,’ as both men called them – things like books about just one thing (fleas were mentioned – though Virgil wrote a poem of that title and Phillips did say he liked Virgil; also collections of just sonnets).

Many of Phillips’ poems spoke lovingly and elegically of sexual love and desire, frequently tinged with memories of when sex and love between men was more verboten than it is now. His known for the influence of Greek and Roman literature on his work (though he dismissed that being overemphasized; he also said that, excepting The Iliad, he didn’t much like classical poetry, but preferred to read the great orators, like Cicero and Quintulian) and of the two books available (the other being Double Shadow), I made my selection because Speak Low featured more poems the explicitly referenced the classics.

When I asked Phillips to sign my book, he was extremely personable and reached out to me (I tend to be a pretty basic, ‘here’s my book’ kind of guy when it comes to getting autographs) and spoke for a bit. Certainly, I can see him as very generous teacher in many respects (he does teach university).