Poetry. Though known today mostly as an essayist, Phillip Lopate worked seriously as a poet for fifteen years during the 1970s and 1980s. As Henri Cole writes: Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems–plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous–quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty.