Hudson Valley Writers' Center Reading on Sunday Features Competition Winner and Her Mentor

2010 Slapering Hol Chapbook Competiton winner Katie Phillips reads from her vivid collection of poems, Driving Montana, Alone, this Sunday, March 20, at theHudson Valley Writers’ Center.  

Katie's mentor, Joyce Sutphen, Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, whose degrees include a Ph. D. in Renaissance Drama, will read from her own work as well.  Sutphen modestly describes herself as a “fortunate witness to Katie’s wonderful poetry,” but Phillips describes Sutphen as a “terrific teacher and a powerful influence on my writing.” 

Sutphen is a prize-winning poet whose latest collection is First Words, and co-editor of an anthology of Minnesota women poets called To Sing Along the Way. 

Garrison Keillor read the title poem of Phillips’ book on February 25, 2011, on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac.  You can still hear him read it by clicking the link you’ll see as soon as you get on the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center website,www.writerscenter.org.  

“It was a surreal and wonderful experience to hear my words spoken in his voice,” Phillips said.

In the poem that gives its name to the collection, "Driving Montana, Alone," the presence of her familiar companion is repeatedly invoked, and each time she seems to understand, as if from a distance, that’s she’s alone. 

“I smile at the stack of Bob Dylan CD’s/ you are not holding in the passenger seat,/...and I pat my raincoat, loosely folded/ where your lap should be... / And it’s only when I get just south of Philipsburg/that your not being here feels like absence./ I want you to see these dark rotting barns,/ roadkill of Highway One…"

These are excerpts, not the whole poem, so you'll need to get the book to read the rest and see the visual design of the lines.

Many of Phillips’ poems have to do with loss and moving on, but they are never self-pitying or maudlin.  Reading them, you feel the acceptance of change and the hope of a new start.  There is trepidation mixed with excitement and the search for familiar elements among the newness, as in “Motion Sickness,” when she says, “It’s easy to get lost/ when your mind is in Montana/ and your car is in Iowa” and “….I go to all/ the grocery stores, the milk and bread/ always the same distance apart.” and “Church bells are everywhere./  All manhole covers are made/ inNeenah, Wisconsin.”

In “Raccoon,” there is curiosity in her description of the animal hit by her car, who “just wrapped his striped tail round and/ dipped the tip in the blood he was becoming.”  She puts herself in his head when she says “My headlights must have seemed/ like distant moons, then blazing suns—/then music of the spheres.”  She says of the moon, “…I thought if, heavy/ with haze, it crashed down/ on this paved planet,/ there would be no room/ for me.”

Phillips and Sutphen met last spring when Phillips signed up for a class taught bySutphen, whose work she had discovered in Poetry Magazine around ten years ago.  Sutphen told me that she noticed Katie right away at the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, where she was writing in her notebook while sitting under the pine trees.  Sutphen said they spoke briefly, and she found her “quietly smart and observant,” and “immediately sensed how much I would enjoy working with her.” 

When asked about what makes a poet stand out, Sutphen cited the course description, which read in part, “sometimes we can tell as much in the condensed container of a sonnet as we could in pages of prose.”  She said Katie Phillips excels in condensing experience and language.  She said also that she admires poets who “surprise us, awaken us, cause us to look closely at something that was just part of the background….Good poets remind us to pay attention, to remember, to love again.” 

The photos in Driving Montana, Alone, except for the one on the title page by Ron Rapp, were all taken by Phillips around ten years ago, while she was living in Montana. 

She said that she “was delighted to spend an afternoon digging through boxes and scanning” the ones she chose for the book.  The front and back covers are color, and most of the rest are black and white.  An exceptional color one lies opposite the poem “Alzheimer’s Unit” and captures the motion and atmosphere of the open road, mountainous landscape, and what appears to be approaching rain.  I can feel it, smell it, almost taste it.  Several of her photos feature quiet back roads, often with snow.  All are quietly evocative.

Driving Montana, Alone, is available at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, which is the location of the reading this Sunday, March 20, 2011, at 4:30 p.m.  It is in the cozily renovated converted Philipse Manor Metro-North station in Sleepy Hollow.  For more information see www.writerscenter.org or call (914) 332-5953.