John Phillips: Concrete

This pocket-sized, perfect-bound chapbook epitomizes the concrete abstraction of John Phillips' crystalline, very often minuscule lyric poems. 

"Phillips would have us look no further than the poem itself for the primary matter of its own accordant recognition as fact. So that to write is to read ourselves into being alive in forms we have no further proof of than the act of the poem's own declaration."

    —Patrick James Dunagan

"Many speak to me in that place that is beyond speech; that transcends the tyranny of words, which is the taste of true poetry. Some carry that resonance that results from the retrieval, retrospectively, of a moment of precognitive awareness of an object or event which perceives it revealed unadorned, prior to the arising of the conditioning, serial moments of conceptual, dualistic thought. Poems where the ego-self of the poet is absent. Those moments of true ‘poetry’ before what we call poetry."

    —Malcolm Ritchie

"Phillips has developed the mastery, so he can improvise from it – with impunity – as Chopin improvised after a thorough grounding in The Well-Tempered Clavichord and Mozartian sonata form. It is the improvisation of a master not the improvisation of an apprentice."

    —Clive Faust

"I love the book… And you lead me to places I recognise but have never been able to name – as you do!"

    —John Berger

"Phillips…writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work. At his best, Phillips is absolutely dazzling.”

    —Ron Silliman

“It is this which Phillips most rigorously explores in these tightly wound poems—the elusive and inherently negative otherness concealed in every act of linguistic indication. And in using the short poem to explore the ambiguities and tensions woven deeply into the foundational structures of language, Phillips synthesizes Eastern and Western traditions…Phillips packages issues specific to continental philosophy in a rhetorical poetic form specific to East Asian literatures. In doing so, he reveals a transnational otherness which lies at the heart of both his own poetic project and the very structure of language.

“The value of these poems lies primarily in their ability to delicately couch monumental philosophical issues in short verse."

    —Richard Owens