UND Writers Conference -- Carl Phillips

As usual this year, the UND Writers Conference is letting us host one of the writers for dinner one night. This year “our” writer is Carl Phillips:

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Double Shadow (2011) and Speak Low (2009). He has also written a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (2004) and translated Sophocles's Philoctetes (2004). A graduate of Harvard, where he majored in Classics, Phillips taught high school Latin for eight years, while writing the poems which would result in his first book, In the Blood, recipient of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.


Our dinner is scheduled for 5:30-7:15 on Tuesday, March 29, right before Phillips’ reading at the UND Union Ballroom at 8pm.

RRVWP dinner guests may contact Kim to get involved and you may select between the following two volumes of poetry: Speak Low and Quiver of Arrows

Here are some reviews:

Speak Low
“This 10th book from the prolific Phillips is a quiet yet wounded reflection on Phillips’ signature subjects: relationships, distances, identity, and damage. Phillips’ remarkable ability to be clear yet illusive, as well as his dizzying syntax, are ever- present…”


Quiver of Arrows
“Phillips is a scholar and translator of classical Greek and a writer of syntactically complex, desire-drenched love poems that subtly, and beautifully, reinvent classical tropes and forms.”


“Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive—and one of poetry's most essential—contemporary voices. Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.”

For February 2011 -- Q & A by Vikas Swarup

Q & A by Vikas Swarup

Meeting at Carmyn's place
February 16, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Date was switched to March 1st

I know we should have eaten Indian food, considering I did take those Indian cooking classes way back when but we opted for a soup night... perfect for a cold February night.

We (Pam, Brian, Carmyn & Andrea) did stick to the theme of the book in one way, however. I distributed a few trivial pursuit cards and we took turns asking one another questions. When someone knew an answer definitively, we asked him/her to explain the back story of "how" he/she learned that fact. It was fun to see how we each did have reasons or explanations for where we'd accumulated that nugget of knowledge.

Here's a bit about the book, from Publisher's Weekly:

When Ram Mohammad Thomas, an orphaned, uneducated waiter from Mumbai, wins a billion rupees on a quiz show, he finds himself thrown in jail. (Unable to pay out the prize, the program's producers bribed local authorities to declare Ram a cheater.) Enter attractive lawyer Smita Shah, to get Ram out of prison and listen to him explain, via flashbacks, how he knew the answers to all the show's questions. Indian diplomat Swarup's fanciful debut is based on a sound premise: you learn a lot about the world by living in it (Ram has survived abandonment, child abuse, murder). And just as the quiz show format is meant to distill his life story (each question prompts a separate flashback), Ram's life seems intended to distill the predicament of India's underclass in general.

Several of us had seen the movie and while the premise is the same the movie is quite different: the flashbacks, the relationships between the central characters, the level or type of violence our protagonist faces. Still, both were worth the time. Not only is the book on which the film is based a page turner and a fascinating look into the impoverished side of Indian culture, but the film was beautifully crafted and inspirational. I think we'd all agree that it's worth recommending.