Interview with Philip Metres on Shrapnel Maps — February 7, 2020
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020). His other works include The Sound of Listening (essays), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems), the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Christopher Nelson: For readers unfamiliar with your work—or readers for whom Shrapnel Maps is their first experience of your work—could you contextualize these poems? How are they informed and shaped by history and political realities?
Philip Metres: Well, after writing about the War on Terror in Sand Opera, I figured I'd work on something less controversial: the Israel-Palestine conflict. In all seriousness, I've been thinking about this contested place for nearly thirty years, writing poems along the way. Shrapnel Maps is my journey to clarify the question of belonging in a land with so many different names that to try to speak them all is to become crowded with history: Canaan. The Land of Israel. אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל. Palestine. فلسطين. The Holy Land. The Levant. The Middle East. The journey began at our family dinner table, questioning my sister in the late summer of 1993. She had just returned from Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, and burned with stories: settlers shooting at crowds, checkpoints, house demolitions, prison torture—a litany of atrocity, as if she’d been flung into an upside-down world behind a mirror. I wondered if she’d been brainwashed. It was the opposite of what I’d read in the newspapers. Her courage to stand in the truth of what she saw compelled me to look farther. Subsequent friendships with Palestinians and Jews corroborated, complicated, and added texture to her stories. In Shrapnel Maps, I take myself, and the reader, on a journey into understanding—and to find and widen the place where peace and justice meet.
Nelson: In the terrifying and beautiful long sequence “A Concordance of Leaves,” you write about the risks taken to travel to a wedding, and you do so in fragmentary couplets, which struck me as a brilliant formal choice. Can you talk about the form of these poems and their relation to the events they describe?
Metres: “A Concordance of Leaves” details my family's 2003 visit to the village of Toura in the Palestinian West Bank, on the occasion of my sister Katherine’s wedding to Majed, a native of that village. Though I kept a thick journal from that trip to Palestine and Israel, years passed before this poetic sequence came to me. I’ve taught Israeli and Palestinian literature since the mid-2000s, and at some point, I decided that the last day of class should include a presentation of my visit, to talk about my personal journey. I showed photographs from the wedding, and talked about the flecks of reality that I saw with my own eyes and feel with my own body. The bits of language translated from my journal remained in an untouched Word file for many years, before I returned to the poem—for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct. The poet Catherine Bowman once said that her Tarot reader had told her that the soul lags seven years behind the present, and that’s been my experience, more or less. That the lag of the soul rhymes with the poetics of recollection. In other words, some poets may be doomed (or blessed) to work over the past. That summer, when I looked at that file and started working on it again, this poem kept calling to me, and I kept answering. Once something like a form emerged, more and more sections, like iron filings, kept drawing to its magnetic north. Ever since reading Robert Hass’s Sun Under Wood (1998), I’ve been attracted to the idea of the poem as an intersection or occasion for multiple meetings. The poetic sequence, the long poem, the epic poem—all have been attractive extensions of the lyric and narrative impulses in poetry. I’ve been puzzling over and inspired by “The Waste Land” and Paterson and “The Book of the Dead” and Omeros and The Changing Light at Sandover and Darwish's State of Siege. I’ve always wanted to play with narrativity and with ritual, the idea of the poem as a ceremonial event. In this poem, the form became its own occasion; if at first, one tries to find the form, after a certain point, the form begins to find you. In other words, what first may have been obstacle later becomes invitation. A certain momentum takes over. Couplets, of course, seem to be a natural form to celebrate a couple's union. There are all sorts of other features, including the use of Arabic, open parentheses, and virgules (slash marks)—I'll leave the reader to decide how all of it impacts their experience.
Nelson: Your poems seem to me deeply felt, and they induce in me rich feeling. You have written that the word for poetry in Arabic (الشعر) comes from the word for feeling (شعور). Is feeling your compass when writing a poem? And how does feeling contrast with making—in the Greek sense of poeisis?
Metres: Isn't it just a beautiful door to the way poetry is both cultural and transcultural? There's a good essay by Gregory Orr called "Foundational Documents and the Nature of the Lyric" that offers readings of early poetics statements from the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian traditions, as supplements to Plato's banishment of the poets as rousers of unreason. All of these traditions make a beautiful argument for poetry as a technology harnessing emotion. I thought I'd add that the Arabic tradition offers the same. There is no question that what brought me to poems in the first place was that it offered a language for the seethe of emotions I felt as a young man—awe and confusion, attraction and anger, longing and grief. Of course, I found my footing in poetry when I embraced the notion that a poem was a made thing, a kind of architecture inside which I—and then a reader—could dwell. That Tweet you mention speaks to the shared experience of poetry writers and readers, and perhaps a bit of our poetic zeitgeist, a reaction to the Anglo-American literary (and perhaps cultural) idea that emotions are messy and embarrassing and unmanly. In general, I agree with Chekhov that one should create a space for the reader to feel. One should note, as well, in Arabic a poetic line is called a "bayt," (بَيْت.) which also means "house." Imagine every line is its own dwelling space.
Nelson: The haunting image by Tammam Azzam on the book’s cover perfectly conveys a juxtaposition in your poems: the mundane and chaos side by side, love and destruction, the bakery and the bomb. I imagine you live in the knowledge of another difficult juxtaposition: being intimately aware of the Israel-Palestine conflict and being in the U.S., where there is much blindness to the conflict, some probably willful. Is poetry a way for you to navigate that?
Metres: I was attracted to the playfulness of Azzam's work—how it both looks directly at the abyss of war and yet finds the human. In the cover image, a building that has been bombed still has so many signs of life. Each dark-windowed aperture into the rooms inside invites our eye. It seemed like the objective correlative of Shrapnel Maps, opening into intimate worlds, almost unimaginable from the stark outside. The truth is that Orientalism has trained us to imagine the Middle East as a war zone and Arabs as monsters or victims, but that is a projection of our own perverse fantasies (and often aided and abetted by our hard flex of imperial power). The dominant American lens on Israel-Palestine (for lack of a better name) is similarly violence-colored. The narratives tend to fall into a mythic morass about irrational hatred, religious fundamentalism, and unremitting conflict. It's a grotesquerie of misprision and the consequences are dire, both for Palestinians (in a directly brutal way) and for Israelis (mostly in a psychological way). Poetry, for me, has been my primary technology of imagination, of investigation, of trying to see people and places and realities that reside beneath these grim projections. I don't have any evidence that poetry is inherently more capable of slaying these mythological chimerae than any other artistic or truth-seeking practice, but it's the mode that has chosen me. I admire poems that demonstrate a commitment to listening, to precision, to the notion that a single voice is worthy of our complete attention. When poetry abides in these ways, it can be an antidote to racism. To all the isms. My hope is that Shrapnel Maps finds the place where peace and justice meet. Perhaps poems, as a technology of the moral imagination, can open us to other worlds. That’s my hope. For many Americans, Israel-Palestine is not a popular topic of conversation. In fact, we approach it like the stages of grief. Denial: Oh, it's far away, literally and figuratively, and doesn't really concern us. Just look at U.S. foreign aid. This concerns all of us. Anger/Bargaining/Depression: once you begin looking at it, it may anger us ("how could X or Y…"), or appear complicated and depressing. It is, but no more complicated or depressing than any number of human problems. Then, after a further inquiry, people have to confront the discomfiting reality of knowing both the history of Jewish persecution and the history of injustice and erasure of Palestinians—and what to do about that. Part of the grief struggle is to recognize and face what's happened and happening, and then to act with full knowledge of our partial understanding.
Nelson: A section of the book is set in Jaffa / Yafa / the City of Oranges. Why is this place so richly emblematic? And perhaps you can tell us about Nahida Halaby Gordon.
Metres: For about ten years, Nahida has come to my course,Israeli and Palestinian Literatures, to share her historical analysis and personal testimony. In the first years, Nahida would talk almost entirely about the history, as if her story were insignificant. It perplexed me, honestly, because I wanted her to talk about her personal story. That's what awakens students to the reality of exile. But when she started sharing her story, I could feel her pain, etched into her voice and face. In 1948, her family fled Jaffa. Nahida discovered a Haganah flyer in her father’s papers after his death, which she would share with the class. The flyer speaks to the level of planning in the military operation against Palestinians and Jaffa’s municipal records—which have disappeared. This document needs to be included in the historical debate about responsibility for Palestinian refugees and the right of return. Because of Jaffa’s size—100,000 residents, 65,000 of whom were Palestinian—the UN Partition Plan (1947) actually designated the city as part of a future Palestinian state, but its geographical placement in the heart of the planned Israeli state made it particularly vulnerable. (Among some circles, one might hear that the Arabs always reject peace plans. I would invite readers to examine the 1947 plan, particularly around the fate of Jaffa. It was an absurdity.) Jaffa exposes the lie that Palestinians were a backward people, and that the land was "without a people." This was a modern city! In a footnote to City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (2009), Adam LeBor notes, “it is a curious footnote of the 1948 war in Jaffa that the municipal records until the end of the British Mandate no longer seem to exist. They are not at the Tel Aviv municipal archives…. Some Palestinians believe they were captured and either destroyed or locked away by the new Israeli authorities, to prevent any future claims over land ownership” (372). Nahida published a book,Palestine Is Our Home: Voices of Loss, Courage, and Steadfastness (Palestine Books, 2016), that shares her story and the stories of Palestinian refugees, that I recommend to you.
Nelson: In Issue 4 of Under a Warm Green Linden we published a poem from the “Unto a Land I Will Show Thee” sequence. I immediately fell in love with its form—how it enacts an explosion or a closed circle or a kind of bloom. Many poems in that sequence use columns, italics, and spacing to suggest multiple voices. Tell us about who you imagine the various speakers to be.
Metres: Thank you! Shrapnel Maps is a book of shrapneled forms, fragmented frames, documentary traces, and polyphony, because traumatic violence (both physical and epistemic violence) is radically undoing.In the book, I work with documentary flyers from the Haganah, vintage postcards from the Tourist Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, cartographic language, and first person testimonies. The poems themselves range from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities (in three or four voices). There are so many voices in the book—voices of victims and perpetrators, of bystanders and activists, of all manner of human being and becoming. They spoke to me, and through language (my own and found text), and helped me abide with them as I attempted to understand what I could not understand in any other way.
Nelson: Toward the end of the book you’ve placed two poems side by side, one for Yehuda Amichai, and one beginning with an epigraph by Mahmoud Darwish and then, presumably, addressing him. Both poems are evocative and mysterious, and with my next question I hope not to diminish that mystery. When you consider the oeuvres and legacies of these two modern poetry giants—one Israeli, one Palestinian—what stands out to you as remarkable?
Metres: The first thing I want to say is that I love both of them as poets. They are distinctive, original, breath-taking poets, unofficial poets laureate of their respective countries. "My Heart Like a Nation" wrestles with the legacy of Amichai, who served as a soldier during the War of Independence/Nakba, which established the state of Israel and also exiled 750,000 Palestinians and led to the destruction of over 400 villages. The poem alludes to at least five Amichai poems that have haunted me. Ultimately, Amichai was a great poet who, despite his considerable gifts and wisdom, never seemed able to see Palestinians as Palestinians. It's painful to say that, given my admiration of him, but the poetic erasure of the other is real. Darwish is a more difficult poet in many respects—but, to my mind, he's more visionary and cosmopolitan about the future of Israel/Palestine.
Nelson: In your acknowledgments you thank an extensive list of artists, scholars, activists, and colleagues. How do you see Shrapnel Maps informed by or in dialog with these people?
Metres: I wrote that epic catalogue of names because I wanted to leave a trace for others to pursue the work of so many brilliant writers, artists, and activists who deserve to be read. I would invite everyone to read a work like Side by Side, a binational parallel history text that will open some eyes. Some amazing Palestinian poets have published books in the past year: Fady Joudah, Hala Alyan, Zaina Alsous, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and George Abraham. I love Aaron Davidman's play (and film) Wrestling Jerusalem. In some respects, I think of Shrapnel Maps as a companion to that project. I also included some people with whom I've disagreed, but who taught me something that I didn't know. I benefited from engaging with Yossi Klein-Halevi, who helped me see a number of things, including the importance of the concept of peoplehood for Jews—to be acknowledged as a people, not just as a religious group. Shrapnel Maps is not merely in conversation with these other writers and books, it is a conversation. It is an attempt to model listening. And, of course, it's not even close to "the whole story"—nor should any book even pretend to try. That's the false projection of imperial cartography, filling in "empty" spaces. The poetry of Shrapnel Maps persists in the interstices of narratives, showing how even compelling national stories hide, erase, and damage. And I'm not talking just one side or the other here, even as we must acknowledge the dramatic power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians. Every narrative excludes. Yet each life, each voice, has dignity and is worthy of our attention.
