Born and raised in New York City, poet, literary and art critic, and translator Rowan Ricardo Phillips earned a BA at Swarthmore College and a PhD at Brown University. A contributing writer at Artforum, he has taught at Columbia University, Harvard, Princeton, and at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he’s served as director of the Poetry Center. Phillips lives in New York and Barcelona. His poems engage the acts of post-9/11 memory and ruin, lingering in interrupted or merged landscapes of art, rhetoric, and marginalia.
More By This Poet
Violins
He never saw a violin.
But he saw a lifetime of violence.
This is not to presume
That if he had simply seen
A violin he would have seen
Less violence. Or that living among
Violins, as though they were
Boulangeries or toppling stacks
Of other glazed goods...