Interview with Philip Metres on Fugitive/Refuge — January 14, 2024
Philip Metres is the author of twelve books, including the forthcoming Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015), and five volumes of poetry in translation; the most recent is Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Green Linden Press, 2023). His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. Recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Hunt Prize, Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, and magnetically original.” He is Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Christopher Nelson: You dedicate Fugitive / Refuge “to the ancestors,” and the book includes familial documents and ephemera, like a genealogy chart, old photos, an immigration card, etc. While your previous books of poetry include personal experiences, too, this one seems the most personal. What drove you to this kind of exploration of your past, and did you have any profound discoveries while making this book?
Philip Metres: The mass human migrations due to the Syrian Civil War, Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017, the ongoing crisis along the southern border of the United States, and the war on Ukraine—over the past decade, I’ve found myself poring over news story after news story, reading with a particular fury, angered by the indifference of those in power who use borders to divide us and use the other as political fodder.
These images and stories bothered me the way it would bother anyone, to see people caught in the fire zones of global violence. But it also triggered one of my earliest memories. When I was five, in the blazing heat of Camp Pendleton outside San Diego, I walked past row after row of burlap tents, the dust stinging my eyes and tickling my nose. We were there to meet the Vietnamese family my parents had promised to sponsor, to take them to our home and help them start a new life. But where is their home? I asked my mother. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a home. They lost not only a home, of course, but a whole country. A country they would never return to. Yet, my parents helped them find a place to live. We’d visit their new home and they’d receive us like family. We are still family.
It wasn’t until I started writing these poems and drawing together family history that it came to me how much these stories of refugees that I have known or read about rhymed with our own family stories of migration, particularly the one passed down from my grandfather and father (both also named Philip).
We never used the term refugee in my family. But my grandfather was a refugee, who fled Lebanon after his father, my great-grandfather, Iskandar ibn Mitri Abourjaili, was exiled for disobeying the Ottoman army. It’s a story I tried to tell in “The Ballad of Skandar,” published in To See the Earth, and explore in another way here.
This is what I know: after leaving Lebanon, the family wound up in the growing port city of Salina Cruz, Mexico, around 1908. It was a time of civil unrest, but that didn’t stop Iskandar, known locally as Alejandro, from establishing a dry goods store. However, in 1923, Iskandar was robbed twice. The first time, he bought off the bandits. The second time, he was murdered, causing the family to flee their home once again, this time north into the United States.
Many of the poems in this book are a conversation with Iskandar, an attempt to make peace with all that he and his family endured—and what they could not endure.
Nelson:I think of your poem “American Family Photograph, circa 1929,” in which you describe your great-uncle as “Naguib in Lebanon, Miguel in Mexico, and now Jimmy in New York—as if each new country requires a new identity.” It is a book about belonging, not belonging, trying to belong, not being allowed to belong. If your great-grandfather Iskandar or your great-uncle Naguib were young and undertaking their journeys today, how do you imagine those journeys would compare to what they experienced over a century ago?
Metres: Wow, time machine questions—if I were myself in a different century—boggle my mind. Most of us tend to view the historical past with a flattening lens—as if people were cardboard cutouts of people, not living, breathing, dreaming creatures like ourselves. One of the many reasons that I’m haunted by Iskandar is that I have no photos of him. It’s impossible to imagine a human being not being photographed today. Yet it’s that blankness, that aporia, into which I’m writing. I have only a few stories about him, yet his exile from Lebanon and murder in Mexico have everything to do with why I’m here today.
Today, I imagine immigration—particularly from Mexico—would have been much more difficult. I don’t even know how they got the paperwork done to make the journey north. But they made it right before the 1924 Immigration Act, when immigration was seriously curtailed. Like most immigrants throughout time, they settled with family, moving first to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where my great-aunt Adell’s husband’s brother (and about 3000 other Lebanese immigrants) had come to live and work in the textile mills at the end of the 19th century. After a period of months or a year, they moved to New York City—again, likely because of family and work opportunities. The only reason I know why they moved to Lawrence is that my eldest relative is the daughter of Adell, and she was able to fill in the gaps that my genealogical research could not.
Nelson: One of my favorite pieces in the book is “The Ballad of Skandar II”—I say piece not poem because it is largely prose commentary in the footnotes of the Arabic translation of your poem “The Ballad of Skandar” from fifteen years ago. It seems in some way the perfect touchstone for the project of this book, for in the original poem and the notes, personal and historical realities are inextricably knotted, and above and within them are languages, which stand as both doors and walls, admitting and excluding. One note tells us that “Once upon a time” in Arabic translates as “there was and there was not.” This paradox not only haunts the poem but the whole book, perhaps the immigrant experience broadly. Can you say more about the paradox?
Metres: “The Ballad of Skandar II” was born out of a desire to revisit the narrative of the first “Ballad of Skandar” and also to explore the question of translation (linguistic and geographic) and the unsayable. Since “The Ballad of Skandar” tells a certain origin story of my family’s exile from Lebanon, it was essential to bring the poem into this book’s wider meditation on migration. I toyed with including the poem in English instead of the Arabic translation, but I was so delighted by the fact that the story of my family’s exile from Lebanon made it back into Arabic, a language that I know only in the most rudimentary way; I could not resist. I’ve been learning to read Arabic for the past decade or so, but as the poem states in one of its footnotes, “what I know of Arabic I’ve scraped together from curses and caresses, from the Babbel app.”
For some, the Arabic will be a welcome addition, a dialogue between Arabic and English. For others, it will be a beautiful cipher of that which we cannot know. For still others, a source of consternation—what am I missing? I’ve been thinking about all of these readers and readings—of inclusions and exclusions, of walls and doors.
We all like to feel included—part of some central text—but so many are excluded, footnotes as best. We’re all footnotes to empires, and sometimes even footnotes of footnotes. I love the footnote as a found form (see Jenny Boully’s The Body and Nabokov’s Pale Fire), one which smuggles in a scholarly argot, something deeply personal. (Truthfully, my favorite footnotes in scholarly books are not citational but digressive, personal, and idiosyncratic.)
You mention the Arabic fairytale opening “kan ya ma kan,” this “there was and there was not”—how it lovingly offers us a very definition of fictionality, of the fictive, as one of existence and nonexistence, presence and absence. Like our ancestors. All our family stories are both real and fictions—all the more so when a certain distance or trauma are involved.
Nelson: The striking cover image, Chiharu Shiota’s The Key in the Hand, seems a perfect visual metaphor for Fugitive / Refuge, with its boat, floating keys, and atmosphere of danger or blood. Will you reflect on the art and how you see it working in relation to the poems? How did you come to using it on the cover?
Metres: I’ve been drawn to the work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota for many years. In this image from her 2015 show, The Key in the Hand, we see a boat, its hull tilted upward to the sky, surrounded by a red cloud of yarn. From this cloud, keys dangle like metal fruit. The hull is like a heart, bathed in blood, holding invisible people and their invisible homes. The world is full of keys and blood and boats facing high waves, sometimes capsizing, taking down untold lives, grieved homes. The migrant and refugee experience is often marked by conveyances—boats, trains, lifejackets, backpacks, shoes. But they are more than these vehicles of movement. I am in awe of the people who must leave everything they know, everything that is home, to face an unknown future. Fugitive/Refuge is a book filled with such journeys, including of my own refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States.
Fugitive/Refuge is a book about trying to claim home, to remember the past and to forge new poetic forms and ways of being in language. I want to connect our disparate and divided lives through poems, their language forms and invitation to imagination. Like Shiota, whose strings are lines of connection. In her words, with string, “I can connect everything… The string [is] sometimes tangled, or tension, or loose. It’s like human relationship. I want to connect people to the universe. I have also a universe inside my body and there outside of the universe. It’s all connected. My string is visible but I can see that we’re connected with invisible lines.”
The strangest thing is that another poet, Jessica Jacobs, also chose this precise image for her forthcoming Unalone (2024)! She reached out to me a few weeks ago after I’d shared a cover release image. It would have been very late for either of our presses to change the covers, so we decided to embrace this happy accident, these twins (one Jewish, one Arab) separated at birth. Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles recently reviewed them together.
Nelson: In your poem “Song for Refugees,” you call upon the oud—the ancient Arabic stringed instrument—to “ease hearts whose eyes sink low.” The poem concludes echoing Robert Frost’s famous lines “miles to go before I sleep,” but for the refugees it is “miles of ghosts before their sleep.” It is a brilliant and haunting turn of phrase. Frost being such an iconic and beloved American poet, there is a challenge here—am I correct?—to not only be receptive to refugees geopolitically but literarily as well.
Metres: For sure. In point of fact, “Song for Refugees” is a homophonic translation of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” A homophonic translation is a translation by way of sound alone—so if you re-read the poems next to each other, you’ll hear it. I’d been playing with homophonic translations like this one for years. It just so happened that I returned to the poem and found the title when learning about the Syrian oud player Mohamad Zatari and his exile during the war. I’m haunted by the stories of deaths of refugees at sea. So many people fleeing their homes and homelands, only to end up drowning. In far too many instances, their rafts and boats go down within sight of coast guard ships who could save people.
The oud’s a lovely ark that leaks with tales and bromides we can’t keep, and miles of ghosts before their sleep. And miles of ghosts beneath our sleep.
All of our art—our poems, our music—can guide us, but it cannot save us. We must world our words into being.
One of the things that I love about Frost’s poem is that it’s written in the Rubaiyat form, adopted by Edward FitzGerald for his translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), so in a sense Frost’s poem is already a callback to Eastern poetry.
Nelson: It’s such a compelling and interesting book, not only the subjects but the forms too. Woven throughout are poems that have little text on the page, and the text is spotty, scattered, as if what remains after erasure or hungry moths. This form clearly felt appropriate or inevitable to you, given your subjects.
Metres: One of the minimalist poems, “This Sea, Wrought & Tempestuous,” is spread out across the book, and it’s in fact an erasure of an urgent email sent in 2014 calling on activists to place pressure on governments to rescue migrants at risk of drowning in the Mediterranean. Another boat has capsized, killing everyone onboard. A decade later, the same problems continue, of course. I’ve been working with erasure as a technique since Sand Opera but had largely abandoned it because I felt that I learned what I needed to and didn’t want to repeat the gesture. Still, there was something about that email that caused me to keep coming back.
Nelson: Another way in which the cover is a touchstone—all those lost at sea.
Metres: Indeed.
I had to come back, as well, to Palestine, the work of Shrapnel Maps. Though the book’s contents were locked in before the traumatic events of October 7th and the ongoing massacres of Gaza that are now the subject of a genocide trial in the International Court of Justice, Fugitive/Refuge has a poem for the Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha, “Remorse for Temperate Speech.” The title, a riff on a poem by Yeats, explores my grief that I have, at times, spoken too softly, too tentatively, about what Palestinians face. Little did I know that his house would be bombed to pieces and he himself would be detained, interrogated, and tortured, before his release, and before his family was allowed to cross the border into Egypt. Palestinians and allies are doing everything they can to avoid a repeat of the Nakba, an exile piled upon all the previous exiles (1948, 1967, 1982, and onward).
No poem can recover what’s being lost. Yet poems, at least, must mark those losses, must refuse that refusal to see what’s happening. Mosab and many other poets and writers have been writing through this nightmarish present, believing that the words matter, that words can change things.
I’ve been writing to my congresspeople or calling them every week, sometimes every day. I sign petition after absurd petition, trying to get a ceasefire, to bring in humanitarian aid, to call for negotiations, to return the hostages and the indefinitely detained, to end military aid unless human rights are respected and real peace negotiations are in place.
Poems, and the words of poets, nourish me in such a desert time—a time where one feels deserted, knowing that others are out there, still speaking, still taking action, like those outlandish acts of Jewish Voice for Peace blocking roads in New York City.
At the same time, I heard it said by Norman Finkelstein, the child of Holocaust survivors, that he used to write to change things. Now, he says he writes, perhaps, that others will know that people wrote the truth at a time even when it was not being told. This is also necessary. We write for now and for the future so that others may not lose faith.
Nelson: Well said—and thank you for your words and sense of humanity and justice, impossible as they seem at times. The personal, the political, the far away, and the local—the book has an ambitious reach. Thematically different from what we’ve discussed so far are “Disparate Impacts” and “The House of Refuge,” two poems about housing discrimination, incarceration, homelessness, and the system that perpetuates these. Can you say something about the speakers, Joseph Gaston and Christiana Gamble, and why you’ve included them among poems so often about your own family lineage?
Metres: In May of 2020, I’d reached out to Alissa Quart, of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, who funded a project of mine during the pandemic lockdown. Maria Smith, a friend of mine and an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, has been working with ex-prisoners to find housing in Cleveland, with the Greater Cleveland Reentry Leadership Coalition. The organization produced a document exploring what’s called the “collateral consequences” of a criminal record—among them, routine discrimination in housing by landlords. This disproportionately affects people of color. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fair Housing Act included disparate impact claims, which now makes it against the law to exclude an applicant simply on the basis of having a criminal record. However, landlords too often continue to ignore it. This is, of course, on top of all the other discriminatory housing practices in the U.S., like redlining, bank loans, variable interest rate mortgages, etc.
Maria and my other friend Chris Knestrick, of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, both connected me to Joseph Gaston and Christana Gamble, and I talked with each of them a few times, either via phone or Zoom. My goal was to bring their stories to life, to put a story next to this experience of disparate impacts. I consider both of these pieces co-authored, as both Joseph and Christana read drafts and offered revision feedback. I wanted to be more of a medium in this process, a listener, an amanuensis. Joseph said something really beautiful to me—that the poem astonished him and made him emotional to see his story like that, in that shape.
To me, these two poems “come home”—a theme of Fugitive/Refuge in two respects. They are about my neighbors in Cleveland, and they are also concerned with the question of home itself, and all the ways it’s difficult for people to find refuge in our society and world. The fact that Christana now wants to help others going through the trials that she went through, with her nonprofit The House of Refuge, made her an essential voice as well.
Nelson: Recently (October, 2023) Green Linden Press publishedOchre & Rust, your new translations of Sergey Gandlevsky’s selected poems, which received the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. You wear many hats in the literary community: teacher, poet, scholar, translator. Does your translation work inform your own poetry? And what about Gandlevsky himself? I know you’ve had a long relationship, having translated an earlier selected poems of his twenty years ago. What brought you to his work, and are there resonances between it and Fugitive/Refuge?
Metres: Translation was how I cut my teeth as a poet, how voice began to emerge. Although I wrote hundreds of poems as an undergraduate, when I lived in Russia, interviewing and translating contemporary Russian poets, I lost my way as a poet. The reality I faced there was simply too complex, too thorny, too overwhelming. I lost my way as a person as well, stripped down to my existential. My poems, when they came, were simply a series of images. Vision without vision. So translating during that difficult year was a refuge to me, a chance to hunker down in other poets’ voices and visions, their sketes or cathedrals, such as they were. (Often I preferred the spare but cozy sketes.)
Of all the poets I met that year, Sergey Gandlevsky was the one that struck me as the most memorable, the most enthralling, both as a poet and as a person. I was a shy twenty-two year old, trying on Russian language, and he was so gracious to me, inviting me to his dacha in the country and answering all my questions. I found in his poems a vision of life that was both uncannily familiar and vividly original. Take this, in translation:
It’s time to change the record—but I’m dreaming again Of the motherland. Bored, shouldering past crowds At the station, I wait for the train, since I intend to grow Some apples or gooseberries. September’s leaving. I dream that I’m just dreaming of crossing a wide country To nail some important scrap of board to a shed. Perspective of dreams is a dream within a dream within a dream. I smoke, squat down in a potato patch, burn off time. And over the muddy road I head home, From my small dacha plot toward the train’s plaintive cry. But damn, no matches, and it’s bad luck to go back. So I knock at random doors along the way. Matches. And a strange old woman leans through a low frame And blinks and mumbles as if she were to blame That the weather’s bad and there are no smooth roads That Saturday at the club the guys came to blows That I wander the halls of the world like a fool An unlit cigarette in this hard autumn wind— As if she were to blame for this and that, And for the rest, for the troubles of the motherland.
I was a lost soul (sometimes literally) riding train after train in Moscow and its environs, witnessing the wayward lives of those around me, but it was Gandlevsky’s poem that made it human for me. That made life bearable. That’s what poetry can do.
At the same time, he’d been (and sometimes still was) a rebel who’d opted out of the Soviet system, a prodigious drinker and carouser of the first order. He seemed to live a quantum life, both on the page and off. About twenty years ago, we did two reading tours in the U.S., and the shit that happened was so funny and so painful that I wrote a memoir (still unpublished) about our adventures. Needless to say, though he’d tell me that he was not drinking anymore when we started the tour, by midway we’d begun to go sideways in more ways than one.
Something he said in that interview back in 1993 has stuck with me, a quote of a quote. He said, “My homeland is Russian literature.” I’ve never forgotten that. Sometimes we’re most at home in literature. That is our refuge. That sensibility is deeply entangled with the longings for home explored in Fugitive/Refuge.
Nelson: In the final section of Fugitive/Refuge, the poems become more difficult, formally and syntactically. “Map the Not Answer,” for example, begins, “exists everything here / belonging except // desire you means / have you what for,” and “Learning the Ancestors’ Tongues,” for example, weaves, polyvocally, italicized and non-italicized lines with deliberate disregard for syntactic expectations. Do you see these formal decisions working in the service of meanings, themes, moods, etc.?
Metres: The final section, “Of Return,” is also the third part of the book-length qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form that predates Islam’s arrival to the Arab world. After considering the predicament of memory (“Of Fate and Longing”) and loss (“Of Exile”), the third section of the book concerns how we come home, and wondering what we’re returning to.
That difficulty of which you speak emerges most fiercely in the three poems that employ the arabic form: “Map the Not Answer,” “Learning the Ancestors’ Tongues,” and “You Have Come Upon People Who Are Like Family and This Wide Open Space.” Invented by Marwa Helal at a Cave Canem retreat, the arabic is meant to be read from right to left, as one might while reading Arabic language. However, since it’s written in English, it moves against the grain of our usual Western habits, causing us to confront what appears to be total gibberish, or near gibberish. (By the way, I highly recommend Marwa’s two poetry collections, Invasive species and Ante body).
My small innovation is that I’ve been trying to write arabics that can be read in both directions simultaneously—an arabic simultaneity, as it were. These are poems that, when read aloud, meet in the muddled middle. So the lines you quote in “Map the Not Answer” can also be read as:
here everything exists except belonging
means you desire for what you have
Or rather, it should be read both ways at once. We are always sojourning in space and time. Today is Saturday, the Sabbath for my Jewish neighbors, and I see them bundled up against the polar vortex that has descended upon Cleveland. The wind is so loud the windows rattle, and the trees protest. Yesterday, taking notes on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath, I wrote down, “Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.” What it means to me right now is that coming home is not only about geography—it is also about temporality. How do we inhabit the moment, inhabit our bodies, in ways that are a homecoming? What if the great fruit of our lives, our great rest, resides in this very moment? Not in some far-off place, but as near as our heartbeat, our breathing? Maybe, here, everything does exist.
