NOTES FROM THE WILDERNESS
A conversation with poet Philip Metres about his new collection Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, April 2020) that takes a deep dive into the Israel-Palestine predicament, which, as the poet quotes a friend in saying, “is not complicated like a car engine, but complex like a forest.”
I first encountered Philip Metres in the 2012 anthology The New American Poetry of Engagement alongside Robert Bly, Bob Hicok, Yusuf Komunyakaa, the late W.S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, and my teacher Timothy Liu, among others I admired. “Testimony” (which appears in 2015’s Sand Opera) was the poem that stuck with me due to its bleak, dark-humored ending, with a heroic couplet rhyming “donkey” with “Iraqi,” as Metres paid tribute to artist Daniel Heyman’s “Portraits of Iraqis” through his lyrical sketch of an innocent detainee testifying about torture at Abu Ghraib. Blackened lines in the poem resemble redactions in U.S. Department of Defense reports, as well as omissions that might happen while jotting down a testimony real-time.
Although best-known as a present-day pioneer of such erasure poetry compiled in his 2011 chapbook abu ghraib arias and its full-length successor Sand Opera, Metres is as accomplished a scholar of political poetry as he is a practitioner. Just as he does over four original and four translated books of poems, Metres explores the scope of “warresistance poetics” in two sprawling critical works: 2007’s Behind the Lines, and 2018’s The Sound of Listening. In the latter’s introduction, after meditating on Seamus Heaney’s somewhat fatalistic line, “In one sense, the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank,” Metres replies by likening poetry to grassroots activism, where “change is not always visible,” heeding Rebecca Solnit’s call to write about “invisible victories.”
As a poet capable of limiting neither form nor content to a single subjectivity, Metres takes on the many dimensions—humane and inhumane—of the Palestine-Israel predicament in Shrapnel Maps, showcasing academic discipline, lyrical mastery, and gracious humanity in accounting for every perspective that needs accounting, to tell a story that, as he puts it, “is not complicated like a car engine, but complex like a forest.” Walking us through this forest in Shrapnel Maps, more than wanting to prove his point, Metres “hears the wilderness listen” (in WWII conscientious objector poet William Stafford’s words), and acting “in accordance with the larger architectures of the universe.”
I wanted to find out what exactly it is that Metres “heard” in this forest, so I sat down with him for a two-hour Zoom call. Below is a condensed version of that conversation.
KARTHIK PURUSHOTHAMAN I want to start with the length of Shrapnel Maps. What got you to write something that’s two and a half times the length of an average poetry book?
PHILIP METRES I think I have this maximalist impulse with my books. I said in an interview with Kaveh Akbar that I have this fantasy of a total poem, that impulse moved beyond acting as a counterpoint to dominant narratives during the War on Terror. As the book began to take shape, I felt an internal pressure on me to include experiences around the wars, in the middle of the wars, that the wars touched and did not touch.
