Art as Necessity: Notes on Carl Phillips “Ambition”

Triptolemus, Goddesses Demeter and Persephone a portraits from Greek money

Art as Necessity: Notes on Carl Phillips “Ambition”

Sitting with Phillips’s “Ambition,” I see something like a dialogue across time and across difference. Assigned for my poetry class, the essay rises like the Gothic arches of a cathedral- each stone a study on what motivates us to create, what makes art not just appealing but essential as breath. I am strolling around picking questions as well as notes for myself. As the architect of this space, Phillips presents his case not only as theory but also as testimony: that art is a perpetual reaching toward what cannot be completely understood, not ambition for its own sake.

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For my poetry class, this cathedral provides many chapels of enlightenment. A vocabulary for discussing artistic motivation. Revision becomes re-vision in one alcove – not only seeing again but also seeing anew, as if through water, where light bends and changes the familiar. In another path – permission to write from a place of uncertainty – before knowing, to let meaning arise like smoke rising from silent prayers. To treat an ongoing process of approaching rather than resolving life’s questions. Where doubt burns like votives. Walking about, the conflict between internal necessity and outside approval sounds like footsteps in empty naves. All of which, I think, are practical approaches to the writing process.

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However, the piece comes like a letter from a distant cousin, familiar in its issues yet coming from another chamber of experience. Phillips discovered in poetry a means of expressing his queerness. Like him, my first poems came from high school; yet, where his explorations were, mine were excavations, pecking through layers of enforced stillness. Being young and feminine in a nation steeped in religion meant inheriting a lexicon of unchangeable things.

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In high school, I wrote in margins, just as many girls before me. The margin of the notepad turned into a sort of border area where I could experiment with words that may bear. Cixous would refer to this l’écriture féminine – writing from the knowledge of the body. Then, though, I was ignorant of Cixous. I understood just about silence and its opposite. It helped me to unname what had been wrongly called for me: good girl, quiet girl, woman-to- be. Both of us are looking for language to hold what society would prefer to be formless.

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College brought different urgencies. While Phillips was discovering poetry as revelation, I was learning it as revolution. Not the blunt instrument of movement leaflets and mimeographed announcements, but something sharper, more precise. I found that truth could slip past defenses more easily when wrapped in metaphor. Poetry became my lockpick, my skeleton key, my way of opening doors that power preferred shut.

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Later, much later, as a housewife, I discovered writing as a path to clarity – but my clarity was about navigating rooms where silence had grown thick as dust, questioning my place in spaces that both confined and defined me. It was about questioning my function and usefulness in a world that prescribed both too much and too little for women. Thinking about it, it was something that always bothered me. In my poem, “What a Modern Woman Doesn’t Say,” I wrote these lines: “I am this new age woman, / carrying a silence so well-worn it passes for pride.” The writer Adrienne Rich might recognize this – how we learn to wear our silencing like jewelry, how oppression becomes ornamentation.

Phillips talks about revision as re-vision, but for women writers, especially those of us who write from the pits of motherhood or politics, revision is like resurrection. When I wrote about the CCTV footage in “Monochrome,” each frame becomes a kind of séance – not just witnessing but summoning, refusing to let power’s silence become the only story. Here, ambition takes the form of Antigone, challenging the government to name her dead. I think about my mother, who taught me how to watch news of violence without looking away.

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In my poems – “A Mother’s Vigil,” “To my daughter, on her first day at school” – I carve out different sanctuaries of resistance. It demonstrate how women’s artistic ambition often extends beyond personal expression to protection and preservation. When I write “I fill your backpack with laurel for luck, / a knife, whistle, pepper spray,” I’m building an ark of warnings, floating my daughter above floods. This is ambition as Demeter’s grief – not just creating but protecting, showing how art can be both warning and armor, how the ambition to create is inseparable from the ambition to protect.

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The domestic spaces in my “The Kitchen War” and “Not So Different” become battlegrounds where hearth and rebellion share the same altar. At the edge of counter is both nurture and violence. Here, ambition means finding language for what society pretends not to see: the small violences served with dinner, the daily resistances folded like napkins, the way women turn confined spaces into crucibles of creation. Woolf’s room of one’s own sometimes has to be built in the mind when physical space is denied.

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When Phillips speaks of art capturing what can’t be captured, he reaches for transcendence. But women’s artistic ambition often means expressing what power seeks to stifle. “She Wanted to Replace Kill with a Metaphor” exists because sometimes even the attempt to soften truth through art becomes its own kind of rebellion. We write with ink made from crushed silences, each word a small resurrection.

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He describes artistic ambition as a “constant calibrating and recalibrating of arrogance and humility.” For women writers, this calibration is even more complex – we must balance not just arrogance and humility, but silence and speech, personal truth and collective memory, individual survival and communal resistance. In poems like “Inheritance,” the artistic ambition isn’t just to express but to carry forward: “If this is madness, / then I’ll carry it, / like an heirloom pressed in my hand.”

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In the end, we’re both writing about survival, Phillips and I, but survival looks different from where each of us stands. His cathedral of ambition, viewed through woman-shaped stained glass, fractures light into colors of resistance. We write toward freedom, yes, but also toward each other – creating networks of words that become bridges, lifelines, maps through inherited dark. Our goal turns from Orphic to Persephonic: singing our way out of darklands while sowing pomegranate seeds for those who follow.

  • Antigone: Daughter of Oedipus who defied King Creon’s decree by burying her dead brother. She represents resistance to unjust authority.
  • Demeter: Greek goddess who searched for her daughter Persephone after she was taken to the underworld. Symbolizes maternal protection and grief.
  • Orphic: Referring to Orpheus, the legendary Greek poet who journeyed to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice.
  • Persephonic: Relating to Persephone, who was taken to the underworld but emerged annually, bringing spring. She represents both captivity and cyclical renewal.
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