John Phillips

Shape of Faith John Phillips

"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