An Interview with Dale Phillips, Winner of the Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest
At Dappled Things, we are blessed to be ever immersed in a world of literature—especially literature that points, overtly or subtly, to the divine. Jane Greer’s poems certainly did this, as did her entire demeanor. Pained by her loss, we were grateful to honor her with this year’s Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest.
A standout among our submissions was Dale Phillips’ “Saint Anthony of Padua Speaks to the Fish”—a wonderfully moving piece that weaves history with an imaginative approach, bringing to life St. Anthony in his humility and complexity. The piece, alongside the other winners, is available in our Saints Peter and Paul issue and on the Dappled Things website, and below, we include a brief interview with Dale Phillips.
Saint Anthony of Padua Speaks to the Fish
by Dale Phillips
You think I came to the water's edge
for my own sake—as if a man
who has misplaced his God would turn
to creatures who have never had
the problem, who have never known
the vertigo of choice.
You are attentive, which is more
than I can say for the learned men
who found my arguments too fine,
my fervor inconveniently warm.
You raise your heads. Exactly so.
The sea has schools for everything.
I do not know what I am saying
when I say the soul—I only know
it surfaces sometimes and sometimes
refuses to. Much like you.
The heretics have all gone home.
We have the afternoon. Stay
as long as you require. I will
preach nothing. Only stand here, listening.
Andrew Calis: To my knowledge, there aren't many poems about preaching to fish. And yet, here is one, subtle and powerful in its images and language. How did you encounter this poem? Did you know you were on to something significant?
Dale Phillips: I've always been drawn to the Anthony legend because of how strange it actually is. A man fails to get through to people, and instead of giving up, he starts talking to fish — and they're the ones who listen. Most versions of the story play that as a win, a rebuke to the heretics. I found myself more interested in the sadder side of it: what it might feel like to run out of an audience and find something like rest in that, instead of vindication. Honestly, I didn't know the poem had legs until the line "as if a man / who has misplaced his God" showed up. Once Anthony could lose God rather than just carry him around, the rest of the poem followed.
AC: I love how you use enjambment in this poem. Can you explain some of your choices here, and what you were trying to achieve?
DP: I wanted the breaks to feel like the "vertigo of choice" the poem talks about — where you think a line means one thing, and then the next line shifts it. "As if a man / who has misplaced his God would turn" does that, and so does "I do not know what I am saying / when I say the soul." I liked the idea of the sentence itself surfacing and going back under, the way the fish do.
AC: The poem plays with the idea of knowing and not knowing — understanding and resting in unknowability, or what Keats termed "negative capability." How much is this a poem about types of knowledge, or the interaction between faith and reason?
DP: Yeah, I think that's really the center of it. Anthony's "arguments too fine" are the kind of tight reasoning Keats was pushing back against — and it didn't work on the learned men. The fish don't have that problem; there's nothing for them to not-know. But I didn't want Anthony to get off easy either. "I do not know what I am saying / when I say the soul" is him admitting that even his own words might not hold up. That felt true to faith more than doubt about it — you keep speaking even when the ground under the words isn't solid.
AC: In your experience, what is the relationship between a poem and a prayer? (Your poem seems to flit between the two at times.)
DP: I think they're doing something pretty similar. A prayer doesn't need you to have things figured out, just to show up and pay attention. That's basically what Anthony does at the end — he stops arguing and just listens. Maybe a poem is an argument wearing a disguise, and a prayer is what's left once you drop the argument.
