Now, now how come your talk turn cold?
Gain the whole world for the price of your soul
Tryin' to grab hold of what you can't control
Now you all floss, what a sight to behold
Wisdom is better than silver and gold
Lauryn Hill, “Lost Ones”
Some writers, like myself, see writing as a profession. Others, like the poet Phillip Williams, whom I interviewed in the fall of 2022, see writing as a calling. Each has its relative value as a framework that might ease the trouble of navigating the literary world, but neither can avoid the uncomfortable necessity of addressing others when something isn’t working. No one can avoid the idea of confrontation. But how do we do it? How does one right the ship and not take out the bridge in doing so?
On June 7, 2020, Phillip Williams, author of Thief of the Interior and Mutiny, wrote “A Letter of Apology from a Ruth Lily Fellow” in response to an organized petition addressing the Poetry Foundation’s response to police violence against Black Americans. To this day, it represents one of the most well-crafted, thoughtful, and downright wise examples of confronting others and confronting oneself.
Writers are all too human, making mistakes like anyone else, and having to hold institutions and individuals accountable like anyone else. But, in the graying spaces among accountability and authenticity, between performance and practical action, between friendships and transactions, many tough questions arise.
I thought Phillip Williams, with his capacity to be both elegant and legible with language, would be a valuable person to engage on the topic of confrontation, but I should also say I am an enduring fan of his work. I share this with you all, dear readers, so you can understand that I didn’t conduct this interview from a place of objectivity, but rather from a place of sincere curiosity.
What follows is a practicum (the tough questions I took away from the interview) and our conversation.
The Practicum
How does your understanding of authenticity affect your understanding of accountability?
If reparations and entitlements are not the same thing, how do you parse the differences?
When confronting someone (or an institution) are you evaluating your own complicity? Are you asking for tangible goals?
What are the ways we can reframe confrontation, given that readers are sometimes confronting their various reactions to a writer’s work?
Steven Leyva: Phillip, it’s so great to talk with you. Thank you for being a part of Tough Questions through Mason Jar Press, and congratulations on all the success with Mutiny. I've been following, and it's just so great to see poets I admire succeeding and thriving. So kudos to you.
I wanted to start by asking you a kind of simple question: From time to time we as writers have to enter into certain kinds of confrontations. It might be confrontations with the self, thinking about where we've been complicit. It might be confrontations with others' behavior and how they've treated us. It might be setting a boundary.
And what I wanted to ask you is, what makes those kinds of confrontations, those conversations, so difficult? Are there things that make us afraid to enter into them? What do you think is the initial barrier to having, you know, kind of having a tough conversation when it's related to something in the literary world?
Phillip Williams: The first thing that comes to mind is that there may be a belief that the literary world is exempt from the rules of the larger world in particular, because there's kind of a moral high ground we'd like to think that we have, like we're better than everybody. We think more–we think within and with an ethics and ethical reasoning better than any other art form or any other person in life. So that kind of arrogance and ego, I think, definitely gets in the way–the pride of it all like, Well, I’m a poet, and I think about feelings all the time, et cetera.
I think another thing is that the literary world is reflective of the larger world in as much as people just want to be liked so badly. This is across generations. I think there is a misunderstanding that the younger folks want to be liked more than any other generation. So I know everyone wants to be liked. Maybe they want it, or they express that want differently across generations. But everyone has this weird obsession with being accepted in a particular kind of way, that also keeps them feeling safe.
And so that leads to perfectionism. You can't have any blemishes. So there's a fear of being confronted, and then there's also a fear of confronting and standing up for yourself. Because you don't want to be–and this is the third part–kept out of things because of sabotage and all of that not being part of the clique or part of the chosen-whoever, because you've said something bad about a person's friend or things like that. So yeah, I think it all trickles down from that first point, which is, you know, the false idea that we have a kind of moral authority.
SL: Yeah, I mean, I've been saying lately, “You know a poet is not a personality. It's a profession.” We don't have any Gnostic insight. We're not occupying any rarefied air. We are regular folks, reflecting the same insecurities, the same–flawed–critical reasoning, all of those things feel very present and true. But, you're right. We like to have a mythos about ourselves.
Do you think the desire to be liked is also interacting with an obsession about authenticity? Are those things like overlapping and creating difficulty in having a kind of healthy confrontation?
PW: Authenticity is a hard word. In order to be authentic, you have to know who you are, and a lot of us don't. So authenticity is tricky, because I believe people oftentimes feel as though they are being authentic, and they're being anything but. I’m not sure authenticity is something that can be easily discussed.
SL: I like what you said about that, too, because it often feels to me presented as an uncomplicated value, right? And it rarely is. You know. Who's the best one to evaluate authenticity? Someone outside yourself. That seems strange, you know? But you, as the self, are kind of obscured from doing it well, too. So yeah, I think about that a lot in the ways we sort of suggest in our discourse, or in the conversations, or even when we're confronting someone about something, “You know you're not acting like yourself.” You know, that's a pretty bold thing to say, and sometimes we have to hear it. That's a strange sort of tension to hold those two things at once.
PW: I mean, we also have different selves which are all authentic…
SL: Okay, Whitman!
PW: I can't give my best-friend-self to my associate-self. And I don't want to. So if there are some things I have to negotiate or navigate in order to keep myself feeling, I guess, safe within that relationship, because you can't share everything with everyone.
SL: Truly.
PW: Then, I don't want to say that that's being inauthentic, though the person on the receiving end might take it that way.
SL: This is also where I land with it. I tend to think through those questions from the position of “I don't know how we can ever really be inauthentic.” All we have is who we are, and maybe it sounds severe, but the behavior tells the tale. You are what you do.
One of the things I wanted to ask is, you know something that I think is very personal to me, but also, I think, really important to the larger conversation. And I want to ask you a little bit about you writing “A Letter of Apology from a Ruth Lilly Fellow”…
PW: Oh, I knew that was coming up.
SL: I think some people you know will already know the context for [that piece]. But could you tell us? Could you speak a little bit about why you were compelled to write that open letter, which was something that had a profound effect on me. I think some people might be hearing and being informed about it for the first time, in this interview.
Although I’m not trying to blow up your mentions, either.
PW: [Laughter] No, I still get folks on Twitter who find it and like it and retweet it, and I don't know what year I did, maybe 2018 or 2019. If it was ‘19, and I think that's closer–
SL: June 7, 2020 is what Twitter says.
PW: Oh, June 7, 2020. That's more recent than I thought. Okay, well, that makes a little more sense. And so yeah, it has a longer life than a lot of my poems…
SL: Whoa.
PW: That's just the truth of the matter. But yeah, if I can remember correctly, there was an original letter that came from the quote-unquote Ruth Lily fellows, and a petition. And I can't even remember what it wanted. But I thought what it wanted, just from memory, wasn't sufficient.
I also didn't like the idea that it was this letter from Ruth Lily fellows and all of us were not included, which is a logistical situation–you can’t include all of us. And so, the framing of it for me was not right. And, you remember, we were talking about moral authority. I think I thought it had a little bit too much of that, because nowhere in there was anyone who had received the award, or benefited in that capacity from the Poetry Foundation, being transparent about those awards of those gifts or favors, or whatever. And that's just not fair, in my opinion, at least.
SL: Talk about it. I mean, there's a sentence early in the letter that’s talking about the persistent killing of Black folks by the police. And it says:
“That sadness did not go away when the petition to reform Poetry Foundation went around because the circumstances were still as such that the very people who benefited the most from the Poetry Foundation, have not apologized to those who have, who we have kept out of its resources by means of complicity, silence, and silencing of others.”
I remember being someone back in 2020, where–I don't even know if I had gotten the letter that my first book was coming out–I still felt a little outside some mainstream things, even though I was already a Cave Canem fellow, and I remember reading your letter, and I was like, Oh, shit…Phillip is about to talk about all the stuff we don't usually talk about with mixed company. That kind of reaction by me, it was all through the letter, but it felt so important to me.
I thought about that. I was like, Wow! What is it? It? It seemed to be obviously pointing at a kind of hypocrisy. But that idea that, if you're asking somebody to do something, it has to begin from confronting the self. Where have I been complicit? And do I need to apologize for that complicity?
Do you feel like that's something you learned to practice? Do you feel that's something hard lessons taught you? Why has that value, the value of turning inward and making sure we're doing it from a good place before asking someone to seek justice, if I'm paraphrasing correctly, become so important to you?
PW: Because when it's not done, then the request fails, right? The demand fails. And it's too often that the people who are making the demand–and this is not actually speaking on those who made the demands of the Poetry Foundation, nowhere near, this is just an example to answer your question–so often they are victimizers asking other people to stop victimizing other people when they have not held themselves accountable, nor given other people the opportunity to hold them accountable.
And so in this case, I don't see them being necessarily victimizers, particularly from those who wrote the petition. They, too, are victims of the Poetry Foundation, but there is a way that transparency is…
I mean, we're talking about authenticity. We talk about being liked. Transparency is really challenging for all of us. But transparency is a way that you build trust. And a lot of times people don't realize how much the outside world knows about them.
SL: [Laughter] It's true, right! We can have a polite fiction. But everybody knows–
PW: We can have a polite fiction, right. People are quietly seething and resenting you, and you don't know anything. You think that you're on good grounds. And I was exhausted.
And this was also the point where things were really at a peak with isolation. So what are we really doing? This is pointless. The Poetry Foundation can do whatever they want. They will do whatever they want. But if we're going to hold them accountable, which we should, there also has to be a way where we do not continue to be the benefactors of whatever transformation–the sole benefactors–of whatever transformation they make. And so it's just previous encounters with the lack of transparency, allowing for there to be repetition of that kind of harmful behavior, and I didn't want to be a part of that.
SL: There's a lovely moment here in the letter in which you write:
“…that I could be that self-righteous and self-centered, will always be a low point, for it is the collective, painful experience of others gone unnoticed and disregarded for so long that got us here.”
And I remember reading that and thinking as much as I might feel the same, having noticed some of these things, too, there was something graceful about saying I could be the one who could be so self-righteous in that moment. There's almost an invitation there, you know, to be self-reflective. You gotta go through that self-reflection if you want people to heal if you want to try to do better.
I just found that to be so powerful. But when you wrote this letter, were you afraid at all, or that it would affect your ability to move in the poetry world and your interpersonal relationships? Or did you think, I gotta do it to get free? [Laughter]
PW: [Laughter] I did it because I wanted to do it. I needed to do it. I mean, I wouldn’t say it was as much as “I gotta get free.” But here's the thing about interpersonal relationships, particularly in poetry, they're flighty. My friends are my friends, and then other folks that I get along with, I have no false investment that they'll hold me down. And so to answer the first question about repercussions, they have always been repercussions for me. This isn't the first time I’ve spoken my mind about anything. This might be the first time that it was in such a grand, like a large far-reaching way. But if I define myself–now I define myself as a writer, because I write in multiple genres–but when I solely defined myself for navigating just poetry, I was like the act of a poet is to tell the truth.
SL: Okay, June Jordan! Come on through!
PW: And I'm not an activist in any stretch of the imagination, but when there's an easy truth to tell, and this to be quite honest, this was an easy truth to tell. The pretending of it being difficult, is a machination I'm not interested in. I can't invest in that. I don't know where that comes from. This was an easy truth to tell, and so I defined myself as a poet then, and a writer still has the necessity to include the truth but it wasn't just “let's write some pretty shit and put it on the page.” It was “Oh, this isn't working y’all.”
This idea of putting my duty as a poet before I put any of those other careerist ideations.
SL: When I read this letter I remember talking with other Black poets I knew who were, on the whole, mostly people who hadn't had their first books yet. And a very dear friend’s pushback was like, well there's been a whole system of white folks, you know, using nepotism to hold other people out, to give awards to their friends, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you know her push back was, well, I just see this as a form of reparations.
To which I always bristle a little bit, you know, because I get very concerned about… like if you try to get justice unethically, when you arrive at that point you can't stop the poison in your veins. Right? You will continually be incentivized to act unethically. There's a point here in your letter that says,
“…but the problem lies in the desire to replicate, or at least the unwillingness to stop said replication of diverse and intrinsically anti-black, queer people of color practice, of pretending entitlement is reparations, and that our forwarding of power and resources is the same as power being given to all.”
Philip that laid me on the floor.
[Laughter]
I mean. I was on the floor. I was on the floor, just thinking. It's funny that you say it's an easy truth to tell right, but it's that moment where that makes so much sense. But it's the language that I couldn't synthesize right. I mean, I didn't have a response to “this is reparations,” But I hadn't thought about the fact that entitlement and reparations are not the same. They're not the same thing.
So that opened up a kind of lacuna for me to live in a little bit.
But I was wondering if you could unpack that just a little bit, because I think I understand,but how are entitlement and reparations not the same thing?
PW: Writing a book does not mean your book needs to get published. No one has the responsibility of giving you that platform. To feel that way is entitlement.
Repreparations is having something returned to you that was taken from you, be it generationally or recently. What was taken from us is at least the opportunity to be taken seriously as writers, right, to have the space shared with us, and to be allowed to have our own spaces not be interrupted by whomever. And so I think they get confused and mixed up, because people want to be the next Louise Glück, not knowing that, you know, there are a lot of people who stood up for Glück in lieu of not standing up for the people. And this doesn't take away from her talent, but this is to say, like there are many poets who are always made into the one to be like, and we don't necessarily know their journey. We don't know that they actually had really deep friendships. That may or may not be a kind of network that we say we want to be a part of.
And so, if you want your book published, you can self-publish it. There's no press’s responsibility to say, “oh, this person wrote this book, and they are all these identities” because then what you're doing is you're saying that it's all right for you to capitalize off of my identity, which is what a lot of presses do to the chagrin of the writer, because they don't edit the books properly. And so you have a bad book out, and then it becomes a cycle where it's like, well, my book hasn't been nominated for this, it wasn’t a finalist for that, and when you didn't imagine that you could have possibly written something that wasn't good. It's so bizarre. It's so bizarre.
Again, it goes right back to the beginning of the conversation. This need to be liked and to be perfect without there being any self-reflection, then there's nothing you can do about that, and that has no pathway toward reparations because it's about the self. You know it's not about the larger group who has been oppressed and had resources denied them. So, I think the difference is what helps the individual. The small group versus what helps the society, or the main community.
A lot of folks think that if they get something, then it's reparative.
SL: Truly. It's such a difficult thing, because you know, we are sometimes given social capital right for signaling in certain ways, or making petitions, or to be seen as doing what others might distill down into something courageous, you know, and at the same time we're often obscured.
I mean, in being here, visiting Iowa City, I've been talking with friends about the way certain programs teach things and other programs teach other things, different models of workshops. And you know, I just keep thinking that It doesn't do anyone any good to obscure how you got where you are, you know?
If you ask ten of your friends, eight of them got their books, not through the slush pile or a contest, but because they met an editor. And that doesn't mean that's nepotism, and it doesn't mean that someone needs to somehow be the best person at a cocktail party. It just gives people information, and it demystifies a process that can make people feel very small.
PW: And there is a flipping to all of this, too, though. So the letter, even though the majority of it was about, you know, our responsibilities as Ruth Lily fellows and my own responsibility as someone who has benefited, there's also a way that those who have been on the other side, have been mythologizing the information that they get. And so it's two ways. The bitterness of the public also makes it very challenging to share the information, because they do with it what they want, and they create all kinds of nonsense with it, like “well, my book didn’t get published because I didn't meet Jeff Shots at the cocktail party.”
SL: Which is a whole lie.
PW: That's a whole lie. It's like no, your book is not getting published because…there are many reasons, we can't go through a list of them. And giving the information would be easier if those who are receiving it didn't decide that they were going to weaponize it against the very people that they want to be part of.
SL: Truly. One thing I guess that struck me about the letter is… it’s not trying to win anything. It's not trying to say, y'all were wrong, and I was right, you know? There's too much self-implication in there. It's not trying to really moralize to the reader or the potential larger public. But it does have some practical things that you say you're going to do, not what everyone else should be doing but what you're going to do. And that for me was so powerful because it was sharing that information about what had been done earlier. Some people were submitting multiple times to the Poetry Foundation in a calendar year, knowing that there might be a fast tracking of their poems, knowing potentially those poems weren't ready to go. And you say then I'm going to limit myself. I'm not going to hoard resources. I can hold those things in tension. That just seemed wise to me, and it often feels like it's difficult to find some wisdom in these confrontations, right? Because it necessitates two sides.
I guess, my question is, why was it so important for you to set out a list of tangible actions that you were going to do as a way of rounding out what the rhetorical goals of the letter were?
PW: I can't tell other people what to do. Or if there is a belief that I can, I don't want that belief to exist, so I’m not going to exercise that. I can control myself. I know what I hadn't done, and I know what I could have done, and so that's answer number one.
Answer number two is: I did not feel like their original goals from the first petition were tangible at all. I thought they were relatively abstract…There is a way to say, these are the things that I want and here is how you can measure it. Here are the things I think the Poetry Foundation should do. And here's the measurement. There was no cap. It was like “Oh, hire more people.” But there's no point in hiring more folks of color if they're going to be invited into a violent environment…
SL: …in the burning house that you quote from MLK.
PW: And there was no way to shackle–and I mean that in a literal sense–to keep the resources from those who had already gotten them. And so who's to say that someone who has been part of whatever petition couldn't be hired for that job? That would be ugly.
And I just wanted to point that out. There are already folks who are still hired at the Poetry Foundation who need to go. They are part of the reason why it is a toxic environment. And so we can’t bring more of us there.
Also, we have to make sure that we are not the ones–we being fellows who are already associated, affiliated with the Poetry Foundation–we can't be the ones to fill in those open spots. Once they become available, they should be given to someone who has not already reaped whatever benefits. And so I just wanted something to be tangible for my own responsibility, to hold myself accountable–What can I do?–but also measurable as in this is how we can create a safer environment for us to work in, and also one where we can still be trusted.
SL: I remember reading those sets of goals, and thinking it seems like something that's not easy to recognize the need for, but not difficult to practice, you know? Like just simple to practice. But it required not taking advantage of every little thing that one could, which I guess, is another way of saying, not operating in an exploitative way.
I actually wanted to ask you about some of the reactions on Twitter. There seem to be a lot of people saying either, “I have a lot of soul searching to do” and that's the end of their public response or a kind of adversarial, “What's the problem with having friends?” You and I were like, “Now wait a minute. I was reading this letter. It doesn’t seem to say anything about a problem with having friends, but it does say We all mistook friendship as always innocent and always righteous. That's not friendship. That's a conspiracy.”
I thought, That's fire! But that's not an argument against friendship. That's an argument about naivete, and not always thinking friendship is righteous.
And so I was surprised to see how some people became so myopic about that word, right? It's like a hit dog will holler, as we say in Louisiana. But I’m also trying to be generous about how friendships have been very important to folks, and how they've felt like that's what kept them writing. So I was curious about whether or not you were following any of the reactions.
How did you take it when someone seemed misread or not understand the spirit of the letter? Did it matter to you at all?
PW: I muted it. I have no idea what the responses are. If I saw responses, it was accidentally, like it just popped up in some capacity, but I muted the Tweet. I didn't care what anyone thought. I posted it, I said it in the letter, that this isn’t for reaction or whatever. I posted, and I muted it, and I think maybe a couple of days later I typed something else, but I don't give a shit.
And you know, there’s another part of it too, like, if, let's say, there's a friendship or supposed friendship. If in that friendship I can't hold my friends accountable, then we're not friends. If you're offended by some of the things that I’m saying, and they're actually true, that means you want to be coddled, and well, I’m not a coddler. Even in this conversation. You can probably tell that's not something I'm good at. I am good at saying, Hey, this isn't working here. I've saved people a lot of public nonsense by being able to do that.
And I'll tell you what I discovered. I discovered from that letter that a lot of older, mid-career poets were not my friends, because they don't like being held accountable. They had very strange reactions to what I had written, and I think it is because they saw their own hyped-up histories debunked before their eyes.
It's part of perfectionism. This “I can never do wrong” or “Call in, don't call out.” I was like well, we called in before, and you didn't listen. And so now this call out is going to include you inevitably.
But it's really about me. I can't hold the idea that in my friendships, I have to always think that you are the ultimate. Like you're not, you're not perfect. That's not why we're friends. We're friends because we help each other grow. That's one of the lessons I learned from that.
And the response from folks who are in the petition was mostly positive, so it's not even like a slight at them. This general idea of you know, why is friendship being attacked.
It's not friendship that's being attacked, it’s the expression of friendship. You know. how it becomes a business in that way.
SL: I don't want my relationship to be transactional. You're so right.
I'm thinking about Mutiny, both your collection and the idea of rebelling against what you've been expected to do. What are the ways in which not behaving when you're expected to behave has enriched what you brought to the page?
How has it affected your poetics and your writing?
PW: We haven't thought about it in that capacity. So I have to just come up with an answer that will sound considered [laughter]. It's a maybe. Maybe something that has happened is it's freed me up to not only write about whatever I want, but, however, I want to do it and to not be so concerned about what is. Who's gonna like this poem? This is a poem that is publishable because it’s a poem in Mutiny. It's like, “Oh, that's not going to have a home. That's not going to help you get a prize. That’s fine.”
And it's been freeing; in a way I can just relax and do the thing that I feel like I've been called to do, which is write, as opposed to being the next top Black poet. So yes, it's been freeing for me psychologically.
SL: You see your writing as a calling?
PW: I do. There's nothing else that I want to do. There's nothing else I'm as good at. All the other things I was really good at, I stopped doing because writing had taken over. I used to draw very well. There were different talents that I had, and writing was the one that always snatched me back, and there's a particular way that people respond to my writing which does not feel performative.
I could be naive in that way to be misreading it. But it takes a lot for someone to send an email that is more than three sentences saying how Mutiny has affected them. And I think the calling is what brings that response out of people.
SL: So you're saying we’re not going to get the comic book.
PW: We are not. Not if I have to draw it, no.
SL: You know, thinking about reframing and broadening that idea of confrontation when someone writes that kind of three-sentence email, there is a kind of confrontation that's going on, in the fact that the writer is realizing how their calling is affecting other people. That we can't just wash our hands and say, “Well, whatever,” all from art. You know that it's relational. It's all relational.
PW: Thief of the Interior did very well critically, but Mutiny has been the one where even as recently as maybe a couple of months ago, people like sending me messages. That's new to me. There are people who send me pictures of folks who have it, and they don't know who the person is. The person isn't even a writer. Someone texted me a couple of days ago saying they were at their partner’s school reunion. It was a college reunion, and someone pulled Mutiny out of their purse and they were like What? And my friend was like, “Why do you have this?” It was a gift from their daughter.
That's new.
I've not experienced that before.