Finding Creativity

Poet Philip White likes to learn the names of things around him

Publishing is such a competitive field, it’s a wonder any poetry books get published at all. Most first books of poetry are now selected by grueling contests, says Philip White, a poet, Shakespeare scholar, and member of Centre’s English faculty since 1999.

“You submit your manuscript and a $25 reading fee, and it competes with hundreds of other manuscripts,” he says.

But a year or so ago he got lucky. Invited to send a manuscript to the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press, he did—and won. The Clearing, a meditation on love and grief after the deaths of his parents and his first wife, was published in the spring of 2007. In addition to writing the poems, he also took the cover photograph.

A future as a poet—or even as an English professor—did not seem obvious when he was growing up in Utah, the fifth of seven children. Most people “had me pegged as being a scientist,” like his father, he says.

But although he liked science, he knew early on that he wanted to do something creative. “I wrote a few poems but also drew, did photography, . . . played classical guitar,” he says. Poetry was “the one that didn’t fall away.”

He has been writing poetry seriously, if sporadically, he says, for 20 years. He’s achieved national success with a Pushcart Prize and publication in such venues as the New Republic, Slate, Hudson Review, Southern Review, and Poetry Daily.

White describes writing poetry as a bit like “making a cabinet.”

“I’m just nailing the boards together,” he says. “And I hope it looks good and is functional when I’m done with it.”

A graduate of Brigham Young University with a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, White says he decided on a teaching career after spending a year tutoring handicapped children. “I really liked it, but that touch with teaching made me realize I wanted to do it on the college level,” he says.

At Centre he teaches Shakespeare and early English literature, as well as humanities. He’s also finished a book on Shakespeare’s late plays, for which he’s looking for a publisher.

“I love reading the plays,” he says. “I don’t think I could teach anyone else, every year of my life, and not be bored.

“But I always find something new in Shakespeare. And the students’ fresh eyes often see things that I didn’t quite see.”

His favorite of the bard’s works is King Lear, although he admits to it only when pressed to choose just one.

How does he make Shakespeare relevant to today’s college students? The secret is to remember that the plays were written for the theater.

“If you’re teaching Shakespeare you must always remember that you’re teaching drama,” he says. “If you can immerse students in the drama, I think you’re more likely to catch them and to make them interested, even though the words are in an English remote from their own.”

In his leisure time, he likes to walk with his dog, which has led him to study wildflowers, trees, and bird

“I like to know the names of things,” he says. “I’m not the type of birder who would go to Costa Rica to add 20 more birds to his life list. But I like to know the birds that are around me. I like to know what I see.”

—D.F.J.

From the Country of the Sun
Like other lights, our sun flares and passes.
What luck then, mother, that we were ever here,
that we rose to it daily, unthinkingly,
putting on our clothes, tying our laces
as someone taught us to, forgetting again
and again the heaviness of our bodies.
I remember your visit east, the big cities.
You were girlish, I thought, even then,
like Miranda in her new world: “Such creatures!”
I almost hear you say. And your rapture
when you finally saw the sea, the brazen
everyday glare on the wet sand, and you
standing there scarcely containing your joy,
still strong enough to make a shadow.
—Philip White, The Clearing
© 2007 Philip White, Texas Tech University Press 1.800.832.4042

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