The God of Stories by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Myth, Purpose and the Liberation of Interpretation
I learned to listen to what I see
But never quite to see what I hear
And something has always been missing
In the hearing: unglamorous truth
No that’s been there no it’s something else:
The origin story of the god
Of stories yes that’s it that headless
Moon not swollen with night but the moon
As it dissolves dawn’s haptic canvas
That self-portrait of the first silence
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast that takes a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is God of Stories by Rowan Ricardo Philips. The collection the poem is taken from is silver, published this year. There couldn’t be a more fitting poem to sum up the themes within it than this one.
The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh once wrote: gods make their own importance (“Poetry By Heart,” n.d.) and in Silver, Ricardo Philips offers us an interesting counterpoint to that line of thinking; no, we give them importance. Part creation myth, part hymn, at the heart of many of the poems found within the book is a search for meaning, particularly how we as humans choose where to place it. Each one questioning how gods find a purpose or how modern people and their achievements, be they everyday or extraordinary, can take on titanic significance.
There are classical retellings and odes to musicians and by the end of the collection, it's hard not to see an entity known as the god of stories as the main character. For my money, I’d hazard a guess that this particular deity could be a stand in for Ricardo Philips himself.
Rowan Ricardo Philips is a poet and translator who splits his time between New York and Barcelona (Poetry Foundation 2024). His work frequently features elements from multiple cultures as well as a host of mythological influences and homages. The topics he seems to come back to again and again seem to be music, sport (hardly surprising given his successful secondary career as a sports writer (McGovern, n.d.), belief and firsts and lasts.
It could be argued that all poets are obsessed with the notion of firsts and lasts but for Ricardo Phillips, this binary opposition is the driving force in many of his poems, albeit in a variety of forms. Indeed, a god of stories is more than likely the master of all beginnings and endings, and if that’s the case; there is very little that separates the gods of mythological pantheons from the capital G, robe wearing, beard sporting god of Judeo-Christian belief (“God as a White Man: A Psychological Barrier to Conceptualizing Black People and Women as Leadership Worthy,” n.d.) .
When asked why mythology was so central to his work, Ricardo Philips replied:
a powerful part of my imagination craves the feral simplicity of myth. Why is something something and not nothing? Why does the sun rise and descend? Why do those birds sing as they do? Why do the seasons change? What happens to us when we die? Why do these specific flowers always bear the same marks? Science has given us sufficient answers for most of these questions, but my mind is restless and skeptical of sufficiency. Likewise, myth is skeptical of symbolism and prefers allegory. ‘(Phillips and Joseph 2012)
That final distinction between allegory and symbolism is at the heart of this poem. Symbolism and allegory are both literary devices used to convey deeper meanings, but they do so in different ways. Symbolism involves using specific objects, characters, or colours to represent broader concepts or ideas, such as a rose symbolising love or a dove representing peace. For example, in William Blake's poem "The Sick Rose," the rose symbolises innocence and purity corrupted by experience.(Hirsch 2017)
Allegory, on the other hand, is a narrative technique where the entire story operates on two levels: the literal and the figurative. Each character and event in an allegory represents larger ideas or moral lessons. A classic example is Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," where characters like the Redcrosse Knight represent virtues such as holiness, and their adventures symbolise moral and spiritual struggles. While symbolism adds layers of meaning to specific elements within a poem, allegory uses the whole narrative to convey more structured and comprehensive messages.(Hirsch 2017)
If you’re wondering why on earth I chose Blake and Spenser as my examples here, it’s because both men have been cited by Ricardo Phillip’s as influences in his work.(Nathan, n.d.) This distinction between allegory and symbolism may feel a little too much like pointless semantics—the splitting of hairs. But really, Ricardo Phillips enjoys examining the ocean of difference between one fraction of split hair and the other. More importantly, he is very focused on building a multifaceted view of reality, one that encompasses every part of it, warts and all, as it were.
He makes that clear in the cryptic opening to God of Stories. Before I fully analyse it, I should note I’ve split the poem into two parts for ease of analysis. The poem begins with the reader being addressed directly by a speaker , either the god of stories or a follower of him:
I learned to listen to what I see
But never quite to see what I hear
And something has always been missing
In the hearing: unglamorous truth
No that’s been there no it’s something else:
This god is the observant kind, a watcher. Those first two lines show us, though, that this god is not some omnipotent being, he misses things, never quite seeing what he hears. The use of senses here—hearing and seeing—is important. It is how we as humans interact with our reality, and as such, there can be faults in how we interpret the world. There is nothing new in this notion. The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant touched upon the idea with his Transcendental Aesthetic (Kant 1998).
In Kant's philosophy, "transcendental" refers to the basic structures or conditions necessary for any experience to occur. Think of these as the lenses through which we view the world. "Idealism," on the other hand, means that our experiences are fundamentally shaped by our minds. This shaping process means we only ever experience "phenomenal appearances"—things as they appear to us—rather than "things-in-themselves," which exist independently of our perception.
For example, consider a poem about a sunrise. According to Kant, the beauty and colour of the sunrise are not inherent properties of the sun itself but are forms and interpretations our minds impose on the sensory input. We perceive the sunrise through our subjective experiences of space and time, shaped by our mental faculties, but we never truly experience the sun as it exists in itself.
The following two lines of our opening show just how limiting this perception of life can be if our goal is objective or, as Ricardo Phillip’s puts it, unglamourous truth. The pursuit of identity and meaning is a core pursuit of this week’s poet. Much of his work is focused on finding or creating meaning and forging identity from there (Kant 1998; O’Connell 2014). In this poem, that takes the form of something that has always been missing. The final line of this chosen section becomes a contradiction of sorts; No that’s been there no it’s something else:.
Our speaker acknowledges that they’ve experienced or taken in this unglamorous truth before, they disagree with themselves. There is something else missing from their experience of reality—a puzzle piece they cannot find.
The second section sheds light on exactly what form that piece might take:
The origin story of the god
Of stories yes that’s it that headless
Moon not swollen with night but the moon
As it dissolves dawn’s haptic canvas
That self-portrait of the first silence
Keen-eared listeners will notice that the momentum of the poem picks up considerably from here. That is because the first section we analysed was paced very evenly. Each line felt almost self contained, standing on its own logic. Ricardo Philips uses a number of techniques to steady his poem. A strict adherence to syntax, and strategic grammar. From the moment his speaker realises they’re still searching for something, the poet switches to the use of enjambment, a poetic technique where a sentence or phrase continues from one line to the next without a pause or punctuation. This contrasts with an end-stopped line, which ends with punctuation. Enjambment makes the poem flow more smoothly and increases its pacing. (Hirsch 2017).
To my mind, it makes the realisation of what’s missing feel like an epiphany moment. A sudden realisation that engulfs our speaker almost to the point of overwhelm. A flood of meanings, layers of interpretation and aspects not dissimilar to what was discussed earlier in the episode. As readers, we might ask ourselves how Ricardo Phillips, or rather, his speaker here, settled on the god of stories as the something missing. Rowan Ricardo Phillips provides us with a possible answer in another interview he gave some years ago, in which he stated; Myth is pattern recognition of the natural world expressed in narrative form. (Phillips and Joseph 2012)This is a useful summation of the quote at the top of this episode, the series of questions around: why is something something?
The meaning missing from his life is that of the story, embodied here by its god. The speaker's life is filled with cold hard fact, the unglamorous truth and still they feel a void. Perhaps it is time to turn to another form of truth, one that thrives in allegory, nuance and interpretation. It is this realisation, that causes the cascade of enjambment. The rigid pace of the opening lines is abandoned and heavy metaphor is unleashed. The logic of deciphering falls apart as that headless moon, a potent storytelling symbol(Brunner 2011) takes on myriad possibilities, like a moon looked at through a prism. It is not the beacon in the middle of the night, the towering orb that seems, paradoxically, synonymous with the dark. More than that, it is not the eternal touchstone, found in countless pieces of folklore and campfire tales, an endless constant in all cultures, like the god of stories.
Instead, it becomes a soluble thing, temporary and ephemeral; the moon As it dissolves dawn’s haptic canvas. It is simultaneously nothing more than the moon's reflection in water, vanishing as it ripples and also something that still influences everything else, in this case, dawn’s haptic canvas.
This is among my favourite images of the poem, the notion of a day coming to life, brimming with movement, stirrings, sounds of birds, and smells of rain and damp lifting from the grass. The notion of the senses being a grounding force, returning again to close the poem, creates a tactile image for us the audience, to enjoy; a haptic canvas.
At this point in the poem, a reader could be forgiven for feeling a slight sense of frustration, Ricardo Phillips imagery is often dense, and requires real engagement to make sense of it at times. The final line of this poem, however, gives us an idea of exactly what is being expressed in it:
That self-portrait of the first silence
Breaking down to its simplest terms, we have the first silence , a void by any other name and then the self portrait, an attempt to define the self through perception on the beholder's terms. The last image, then, is the yearning for identity in a world that does not readily provide it. This entire poem has focused on addressing the empty spaces many of us feel in our lives. Not always a gaping rift in our souls, so often showcased by ‘’tragic poets’’ but sometimes just the disquiet we feel in moments of loss or uncertainty.
In essence, The God of Stories is an invitation to forge our own meaning through interpretation, confronting the world and choosing to use our own senses and perceptions to make something of it. At its core, it is a poem that worships the transformative power of storytelling, where the act of interpretation itself becomes a powerful tool for self-definition and exploration. The poem's paradoxes invite readers to find their own balance between seeing and hearing, truth and mystery, reinforcing the idea that identity is continuously shaped by our perceptions and the stories we tell. Through this nuanced interplay, Phillips' poem becomes a profound meditation on the nature of understanding, the fluidity of meaning, and the liberating potential of embracing ambiguity.
What did you think of the poem? As always this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.
Citations:
Brunner, Bernd. 2011. Moon: A Brief History. Yale University Press.
“God as a White Man: A Psychological Barrier to Conceptualizing Black People and Women as Leadership Worthy.” n.d. Paperpile. Accessed June 22, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/88d546fe-c64e-00e7-bfd2-fb590ce0c87f.
Hirsch, Edward. 2017. The Essential Poet’s Glossary. HarperCollins.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press.
McGovern, Jack. n.d. “‘The Ball’s Not Bouncing but the Game’s On’: Professor Rowan Ricardo Phillips on Sports, Politics and Writing.” The Williams Record. Accessed June 22, 2024. https://williamsrecord.com/405778/sports/the-balls-not-bouncing-but-the-games-on-professor-rowan-ricardo-phillips-on-sports-politics-and-writing/.
Nathan, Jesse. n.d. “Rowan Ricardo Phillips.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accessed June 22, 2024. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/rowan-ricardo-phillips.
O’Connell, Alexandra. 2014. “The PEN Ten with Rowan Ricardo Phillips.” PEN America. December 17, 2014. https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-with-rowan-ricardo-phillips/.
Phillips, Rowan Ricardo, and Lawrence Joseph. 2012. “Q & A: Rowan Ricardo Phillips with FSG Poet Lawrence Joseph.” Work in Progress. FSG Work in Progress. June 7, 2012. https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2012/06/07/q-a-rowan-ricardo-phillips-with-fsg-poet-lawrence-joseph/.
“Poetry By Heart.” n.d. Accessed June 22, 2024. https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/epic.
Poetry Foundation. 2024. “Rowan Ricardo Phillips.” Poetry Foundation. June 21, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rowan-ricardo-phillips.