Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. But I still, once in a while walking around here, wonder: ‘Where's the ocean? What is wrong with this place?” “And still do, and I love the work at the university. Louis for Massachusetts, which he has long considered home after a peripatetic childhood as a military brat. Phillips said he is planning to retire from Washington University in another two years, and that will mean leaving St. We just have to be vigilant.’”Īfter the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd, he finds himself more aware of the need to be defensive - “to not have anything lying around that even looks like it could be problematic.” In the words of the poem, the idyll can so easily be disrupted.
“As soon as I gave them my Wash U ID, it was fine,” he said. He’s been pulled over a few times - twice, he said, because the police wanted to make sure the car he was driving was his. Louis, Phillips said he has wondered about his interactions with police. I hadn't been planning to have ‘war’ in this at all - but having thought about the scene of tenderness and making a home with someone, and then thinking, ‘But it could easily be disrupted.’”Īs a Black man living in St. “I love watching them bring the horses out,” he said. The horse stables on the eastern edge of the park are a favorite spot. A longtime professor of creative writing at Washington University, he said he frequently gets ideas or phrases for poems while walking his dog.
Phillips said the image in his mind was not a battlefield, but the grounds in Forest Park that are home to St.
In the end, the lovers turn to each other (“they closed their eyes/if gently, hard to say how gently”) and turn their back on the bigger world: “Then the war was nothing that still bewildered them, if it ever had.” In the title poem, the contrast is between the life the poet envisions with a partner and the “mounted police” exerting rigid order over what the reader imagines might be a battlefield. “The poem sort of ends mid-sentence, because it’s a big ‘if,’” Phillips explained.
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