Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: My Heart and its Borders

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "My Heart and its Borders." For many, many, many years, Philip Metres has been thinking about Palestine and Israel. And not just thinking. He worked on peace and justice initiatives, taught the literatures of Palestinian and Israeli people, mentored young writers in Gaza, published a poetry collection titled Shrapnel Maps about the situation. He traveled to Palestine for his sister's wedding and made Palestinian friends, including a man who will come up a few times in the episode. His name is Mosab Abu Toha, a 31-year-old Palestinian poet and father of three who's become quite famous lately for his pieces in the New Yorker about what life's been like for him and his family in Gaza after October 7th. For the past several months, Philip Metres has gone to bed and gotten up with their horror on his mind. It's made ordinary life seem a little ridiculous. In a numbered essay he wrote for Lithub titled "Dispatches During the Genocide," he tries to capture some of this cognitive dissonance. And I'll just read you a little bit. Let's start with number 20.

"20. In February, Abu Toha wrote, humans, my family, are telling me they don't have wheat, flour, or rice. There's not enough food, please help. Already in January, many people in Gaza had resorted to eating animal feed, mixing it into flour to make a bitter bread. 21. Did I savor each bite, or did I scroll through my phone and fog eat during the genocide? Did I remember to floss my teeth each night despite my fatigue during the genocide? 22. On February 20th, the US vetoed the third UN resolution for a ceasefire. Did I tire of reading posts about the genocide during the genocide? I did. Was I watching my weight during the genocide? I tried. Did I say when I saw the girl who made Cinnabon during the genocide, 'see how resilient they are, they will survive' during the genocide? I did. 23. On February 7th, Abu Toha wrote from Egypt. It's shocking. I feel utterly outraged to watch a video of a child from Gaza drinking from a pool of polluted water in the street today. 24. Did I stay hydrated during the genocide? 25. There are now over 120 mass grave sites, not 120 graves, 120 mass grave sites. All the cemeteries are full, one headline reads. A trench in the earth bulldozed open. They are covered in white cloth. When white cloth runs out, they are wrapped in bright blue tarp, zip tied at the top and bottom and laid on top of each other. 26. Did my bald spot grow wider during the genocide? Did I worry about the shadow on my father's CT scan during the genocide? Did I see the bodies wrapped in white, lowered into the hole during the genocide? Did I bathe enough and shave enough during the genocide?

Okay, I'll leave it there. But there's more. And I urge you to read the full piece titled "Dispatches During a Genocide." You can find it on Lithub. But for now, here's my conversation with Philip Metres.

Helena de Groot: I know that you have a many-decades-long deep engagement with the Palestinian cause and with the Palestinian-Israeli . . . What is even the correct word at this point? Palestine-Israeli, um, troubles. And I'm just wondering how that lives in your family. Do you all check the news and then talk about it? Do you try to shield each other? How does this issue live inside your family?

Philip Metres: Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that came out in conversations I had with my daughter Adele, when she was quite young, she said, "what does it mean, refugee?" "What does it mean, amputee?" And it shocked me. It struck me with such force, that she would be receiving an education without our knowing simply because the radio was on, NPR usually. So, I became a little bit more intentional about curating the news. However, just by virtue of being part of our family, we understood and we have had many conversations about it. I think the most poignant thing that's happened of late was that my daughter, who's in high school, really wanted to do something around what was happening since October 7th. And I think her initial attempt was to do a day of mourning for Palestine. This would have been probably in November. The school said it wasn't the right time to do such a thing. So, she tried again a day of mourning for Israel and Palestine that was also said to be not the right time. So eventually they did something very mild and very incomplete this spring. But it's not the right time, to me, is exactly what is said to Martin Luther King [Jr.] in "Letter from Birmingham Jail." It's not the right time. And he says, "I've been told it's not the right time for my whole life, and it is the right time."

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And do you have the sense that your daughter gets supported by her peers? 'Cause I know that there is like an ideological difference, let's just call it, between often a more established, older generation . . .

Philip Metres: Sure.

Helena de Groot: And younger people who often get their information from places like TikTok, where civilian journalists in Gaza are livestreaming their way through this invasion and showing you the things that you can then not deny later. Or, like, these kids are not fooled, I think, in the same way, that is easier when you have just a mainstream press that filters what information gets to us.

Philip Metres: Totally. As a friend just said, it's like we're carrying a war in our pocket, and every time we want access to it, we can see the most horrific things. And it's hard to unsee those things, and it drives people crazy. It's driven me absolutely deranged, and I know that my daughter was accessing some of that content, of course, and naturally wants to do something about it, and sees adults and institutions around terror, incapable of doing anything, and it's absolutely enraging. It's funny, when I was at AWP, I got a call that she had chalked some messages on the external sidewalks of the school saying Save Gaza, Ceasefire Now, and Free Palestine. And . . . I'm just proud of her. I mean, I'm not interested in propagandizing or partisanship. I'm interested in education. But sometimes education is dangerous and challenging and troublesome and difficult for individuals and for communities. But that doesn't mean we should walk away from those moments and opportunities.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, your work, both your poetry and essays, but also your peace work and the teaching that you've done for many, many years at the university where you teach the literatures from Palestinian people and Israeli, there seems to be a real effort on your behalf to not make this into a one-note issue. And what I found so interesting is that this kind of conciliatory approach has really become more complicated since October 7th. And I'm really wondering how, with your temperament and your long experience and your efforts to try and be like, these are two people whose realities we're trying to understand . . .

Philip Metres: Right.

Helena de Groot: . . . how you do both that, and speak out clearly on the side of where the greatest injustice lies. How do you bring those two in the same reality?

Philip Metres: It's been a journey for me personally. I mean, one of the things that I had to confront was that my natural desire to be a peacemaker was being challenged by the moment. And although I do believe that ultimately the only future is a shared future, that I can imagine a situation in which Palestinians and Israelis live together—and there are many examples of that—it is also true that the response to October 7th has been a level of violence that has not been known by Palestinians, and in some sense surpasses the trauma of the Nakba of 1948, which is just absolutely wild to say. All of which is to say that it's all well and good for me to say the only future is a shared future, and it's all well and good for me to say that there are two people with two stories that we need to understand. At the same time that my government is participating, by virtue of its weapon sales and political cover, in what the International Court of Justice calls a probable, plausible genocide. And so, there are times when we must speak up and speak clearly, and speak out to stop that, to stop our complicity in this genocidal response, in which 75% of the houses have been destroyed in Gaza, in which 32+ thousand people have been killed, most of whom are civilians, many of whom are children. In which all the universities have been destroyed, most of the hospitals have been destroyed, mosques have been destroyed, churches have been destroyed. It is a horrific situation, and we need to speak clearly about that. But it's painful for me, just because . . . It's not painful for me, it is uncomfortable for me to adopt this kind of thing, which is to know complexity, but at the same time, to speak clearly at a moment when clarity is needed.

Helena de Groot: Yeah

Philip Metres: But for me, it's nothing. My level of risk and precarity is so small. I have been reported, the subject of a bias report at my university, simply for saying some of these things. But the university supported me, and knows that my teaching and what I do on campus is designed to create space for people. And that although some things are discomforting, education is discomforting. This moment is deeply discomforting, for all of us. And to call out the genocidal action, is not to also say that Jewish people should be unsafe at our campus or anywhere. And that suturing that happens over and over again, that criticisms of Israel are taken as criticisms of Jewish people, to me, is deeply dangerous and deeply unfortunate. Because I know that some people cannot, because of the virtue of the way that they think of themselves and the world, they're unable to make that distinction. But we need to constantly articulate that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I was wondering if we can get to a poem. And it's interesting because you wrote a poem where you apologize to a friend, a Palestinian friend of yours, for having been too temperate in your speech. It's called "Remorse for Temperate Speech." But what I found interesting is that the poem is already included in your collection. A collection that's coming out later this week, I think.

Philip Metres: Yeah. April 9th.

Helena de Groot: And since it takes so long for a book to make its way to the . . . You must have written this poem before October 7th. So, can you tell me what the context for this poem was, who was the friend, and what compelled you to write it?

Philip Metres: Sure. So, in 2021, there were bombings of Gaza. And I had met in 2020, the now very-well-known Mosab Abu Toha, who's been a profound, and profoundly energetic advocate for and spokesperson for what it's like to live in Gaza. He was the one who, after the bombing of 2014, decided that his life's work would be to find ways to share that experience that he was going through in English. And so, he decided to found an English-language library, the Edward Said Library, in Gaza, and began to write poems in English, and published a book of poems that came out in the last few years. And I was just aware, with some conversations with him and a Palestinian I met in Lebanon, that I could get myself caught up into having conversations about realities that they should be leading on, and I should be listening on. So, this poem was written as a kind of apology to Mosab Abu Toha in 2021. And what's so haunting to me about it is although his house was not destroyed in '21, it was destroyed this past December.

So, I'll read the poem. We can talk more about it. The title is a riff off of a Yeats title, "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," in which he confesses to having been intemperate.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, "ranting" as he says, right?

Philip Metres: Yeah. That's right, exactly. Mine was another sin. So.

"Remorse for Temperate Speech."

For I spoke as if I knew

to you who know

how a house looks

clothed in flames

from the inside, you

sitting in the smoke

as if watching my prose

only stoke the flames

in that stagnant room

among stagnant rooms

where the powerful

talk for your people

bound in the margins

of empire's book,

who speak and speak and speak and

pretend to listen.

May you find the wadi

where water flows

into future, and greet

what has come before,

where you did not know

you knew before,

The unmapped hidden wadi

where past and future meet.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Philip Metres: Sure. It's haunting to read, how metaphor becomes reality. And . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah, the burning house.

Philip Metres: Yeah. Metaphor becomes prophecy.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I can only imagine how much closer this all becomes when you have years-long, deep friendships with people who are actually living through it.

Philip Metres: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I am so at awe of is the way that Palestinians, by witnessing the disaster, the genocide that they're enduring, have demonstrated a kind of political hope, not simply to cry out about one's own circumstance, but that they imagine someone who could listen, and who could change these conditions. Everything is abstract until it becomes impossible to not see. And knowing Mosab, and knowing friends like Fady Joudah, whose extended family has had 50 members of it killed in these attacks. Knowing other people who I've worked with with a program called 'We Are Not Numbers." Palestinians who are writers, young writers sort of developing their skills to tell their own stories, and just WhatsApp messaging them, and just asking them how they're doing. And the impossibility of the whole thing, it's absolutely so surreal. I feel such a tremendous responsibility to do whatever I can to make it stop for them. And so, my remorse, you know, in this poem, was at that moment already activated. And now it's just like I've been a zombie for the last five months, kind of sleepwalking through this nightmare.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. What I found so interesting, too—in Yeats's poem that you riff off of, his "Remorse for Intemperate Speech." The last stanza he writes, "Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart." So, if Yates came out of his mother's womb with a fanatic heart, where would you go to find the origin of your inclination toward temperateness?

Philip Metres: Yeah. I mean, some things are probably just built in our genes, but also, we come from families where we have roles to play, or we find roles to kind of survive in. And I was certainly, from a very young age, a kind of a peacemaker, a balancer. My father was a veteran of the Vietnam War. His father witnessed the brutal murder of his father, an exile from Lebanon. So, there's a lot of family trauma, and a lot of intergenerational stuff there. And trying to navigate around that pain, I found a way to be a soother, a calmer, or someone who could step back from the conflict or the mood or the pain of a moment and try to help everyone just feel OK.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Philip Metres: And so, well, I mean, for me, it's a very early survival mechanism that has not left me, but in some sense doesn't always serve me well, because that is a gesture of self-erasure. It's like I can't have feelings. I'm going to take care of everybody else's feelings.

Helena de Groot: Totally.

Philip Metres: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And how do the poems work with this? This new feeling of like, oh, this conciliatory tone can actually be an injustice in and of itself, how has that changed the writing of your poems? And I'm asking you this because you sent me not just your book that is coming out, but you also sent me some recent things that you've been writing, some recent poems, essays. And you've written those so recently that it was like after October 7th and I was struck by—oh, OK, this is gonna sound so silly, but I was struck by how good they were. And I know for a fact that I would not be able to write something good when I'm feeling at this high-pitched level of emotion. And the things that you wrote, the poems, the essays that you wrote, are deeply emotional. Very, very moving, without being saccharine, without being kind of sloganesque, without being any of the things that we just sort of naturally become, I think, when we feel too much. And so, I'm wondering, when you write a poem, how do you calibrate your feelings, complexity. How do you come to a place that feels true to you?

Philip Metres: Thank you, because obviously, I have deep fear about writing about any of this, for the same reasons. But I think your big question is, what does poetry as a technology offer? Why did I choose it? Why did poetry choose me? What does it offer us as people? And for me, I think it was a technology of dealing with my inner turbulence, and also my wonder, about the world in its beauty and its indifference, its cruelty. And it was a way for me to, in a sense, manage the unmanageable, to order the storm of the world and of myself. And that's what poetry does for me. It gives me a space to create the terms of my engagement with the world, and to modulate the unmodulatable, I suppose. And as for the recent work and this moment . . . It's not like I began writing right away. I mean, what could one say? It took a long time. But there was an occasion for the first poem, "To Go On One's Way." I was asked to write a poem that was responding to a word in Aramaic called Yazil, which means to go on one's way. I had no idea what I was going to write about it, but Aramaic is the root language of both Hebrew and Arabic, and I thought that there was something beautiful about that, to imagine a moment prior to the split of the tongues and other people. Yeah. So, one of the many things that I tried to do to respond to this moment was a peace walk, which would bring our community together, to walk together in silence, to bear our griefs together, which were not one people's griefs, but many peoples' griefs. My Palestinian students, my Jewish colleagues, one of whom had a friend who was kidnapped, my Palestinian friends whose families have been devastated in Gaza. And that was a really a beautiful moment, but it wasn't enough. And so, we keep having to sort of reinvent how we respond to a moment in an ongoing situation. And so that was my peace moment, I suppose. But my justice moment, I think, has been trying to create more space for having us have real conversations about: what is the United States doing in supporting what is happening right now? But to answer this question about emotion. I think that, if I understand my own emotional life, grief is easier for me than rage. But I know that anger and the grace of rage is a response to deep grief, and a violation of our sense of dignity and personhood. And so I'm trying to create space for a grief that contains the thirst for and the call for justice, but also has a space for not forgetting everyone's humanity, despite whatever complicity or active engagement they have in violence or whatever. So, all of us feel like terrible failures, that the helplessness that we all feel is so pronounced and so vivid and that doubles the pain. But what else can we do?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And, you know, again, for what it's worth, and however insufficient this all is—your poem, "To Go On One's Way," that is based on this Aramaic word, it did give me a way forward. Because you write: "The path is grief, the destination unknown." But it was so helpful to read that grief can be a path. Grief doesn't have to be this paralyzing condition that just envelops you and entraps you in place. Like this poem that you wrote, "To Go On One's Way," is so much about movement. It's so much about keeping on, moving through grief, with grief. Not even despite it, but thanks to it, like it's the grief that compels us to move. Honestly, this felt to me like one of the few things that I've read that I felt were actually practical, like, "Oh, OK, I can actually let this keep me in motion." And it's only in motion, I think, and in keeping on doing things, "in keeping on falling forward," as you write in the poem, too, that you can keep on living. Do you wanna read that poem,"To Go On One's Way?"

Philip Metres: Oh, sure. OK.

"To Go On One's Way."

From the Aramaic word Yazil.

Before the peace pole, we gather peace in a dozen tongues, a flutter of hands

to wing this word we want to make in the absence of the world. Where I and you translates to we, where we arise and go walking the wide diameter of grief.

Inside is an open field we see but cannot enter. Without words we walk, cradle shared sorrow. Are we always too late?

The world is a narrow bridge and the important thing, as we walk the abyss that is in us,

is us, Rabbi Nachman says, is not to be paralyzed by fear.

Clouds descended to earth, not fog this, but not rain either. A kind of impossible meeting, to arise and go on our way, to find one foot before the other. If pain cannot be housed, we must circle its circumference. Walking, its said, is a series of controlled falls. We fall again and again. When Isaac Jogues failed to find his friend's grave, he declared the whole ravine a reliquary. Everywhere he stepped could be his friend's body. The whole earth is reliquary.

Elsewhere, under the same sky, is crying metal, converting buildings to rubble. How to find the tongue beneath the tongue before it split at the root. I walk inside the number 40, years and days, counting one by one. In those days, he went out to the mountain to pray, the verse says, and all night he continued in prayer.

Some forests are countries of fire in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of an open-air seaside prison. Some drink, when thirst begins to burn, the undrinkable sea. Some love what they cannot see is prison, one foot before the other. So many photographs, digital iconostases we hold in palms, victims and victims. Under the bombs we walk, under the bullets, under the rubble we walk, unable to reach the hurt place. Inside the technology of vengeance, of fear, whole family trees uprooted, no, evaporated. Trade away all night, even when it is day. We go on our way without. Some images are paths, some are dead ends. We are crazed and cracked vessels. The Lord has poured so many tears in us, our faces can't hold them.

The path is grief, the destination unknown. To say salaam is to say shalom, is to wish wholeness upon another the world otherwise fails to offer. We offer up our emptiness, surrounded by emptiness, our open palms lifted to emptiness. The Imam says the everlasting peace is from you, God, and returns to you. One footstep for self, one for kind. The Rabbi says, may it be your will. I lie down in peace and rise up in peace. One for self, peace I leave with you, Jesus said, my peace I give to you. Like that, we lean into future.

Pray all day, even when it is night. God, what is this silence? This infinite well? There is no bottom. Arise and go, Micah says, for this is no place to rest, this present tense. God, what is the silence? God, the silence.

We walk on our own path, beloved name still on our tongue, no place to put them. Our cracked lips part, filling with the sea, this ocean we open with our mouths.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: It's hard—you know what I mean, it's hard to be like, "Alright, on to the next chapter." But you wrote this beautiful book titled Fugitive/Refuge and it includes poems about your own family's migration story. It has a lot of documentary evidence. It's almost like a scrapbook from a family that I don't know. And I'm very nosy, so I love seeing the real stuff. So, it was a real joy to kind of look at faded family pictures and handwriting from a long time ago. And you write these poems about whatever snippets have survived from your family's migration story, first from Lebanon, then to Mexico, and then the US. But you do this other thing that really surprised me too. You broadened radically the scope of exile. You include things like when you're sick, you're exiled from the land of the healthy. When you're an adult, you're exiled from the land of your own childhood. So, what made you want to engage with this feeling of exile in that broader sense?

Philip Metres: That is a great question. Yeah, so the book is definitely both considering this predicament of exile, of the political problem, and the existential problem of human migration, and the seeking for hope that I think is a common experience of all, of us coming home to our communities, to our homes, to our own bodies, which I think I've found particularly hard. It's been—the work of midlife for me is to try to welcome myself to myself, in a sense, as navel-gazing as that sounds. I remember being in a bookstore in Washington and coming upon a book called—it's a Thich Nhat Hanh book. It's called How to Rest. And there was a page in that book that literally made me start to weep, where he says, like, most of us are afraid to come home. And he talks about the practice of meditation and contemplation as an avenue to return home. And that just struck me so profoundly that I knew that it was something I needed to be exploring. And in some sense, I think that poetry has been an avenue or a path for me to try to figure out what that coming home looks like, all those layers and levels.

Some people who read the book in manuscript were saying, I find when you define the work of this book, specifically around exile, migration, refugee experience, that it's very coherent and clear. And I'm wondering why you include all of these other poems. So you saw it as a gift of a kind of broadening, other people were just confused and slightly disturbed by it. But I see it everywhere. I see all of the ways in which we're divided from ourselves and from our communities. And when I have experienced illness or injury, the pain of that just is something that I felt needed to be in the book.

Helena de Groot: I love that, and I think it's so relatable. We all haven't fled a war, but we've all been sick.

Philip Metres: Yes. I'm still wearing a mask in public places, and I don't wanna be separate from people, but people perceive it as a separation. But my daughter has had long COVID for two years, so we've all lived in a collective story of this own miniature version of exile, the COVID lockdown, and everything since. So yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I'd love for you to read that poem, "The Republic of Pain." It's on page 64.

Philip Metres: OK. Thank you. So, like every jock or former jock, I don't know, I have had my share of injuries. I think this was a period where I experienced extreme back pain, which—if you've ever had it, I'm sorry. And if you haven't, please never do if you can avoid it. But I went to my share of physical therapy appointments, and there was one time [I was] going and just sort of looked around at everyone, and saw all of us in our various states of bodily exile, psychic pain. And the poem just kind of emerged from that. So, it's called "The Republic of Pain."

In the Republic of Pain,

we bloom,

ice bags and crutches

for limbs.

We plod, doze,

audition for the final repose

on therapy tables.

Joints lock without keys,

muscles seize,

refuse to give back,

bones crack.

We lack, lull

like eyeballs under lids,

reading the electrical map

of our brains.

In this state, everyone has

"I," "I," "I,"

lodged on the tongue,

a swelling pill none can swallow.

Windows turn out to be mirrors.

Even the trees painted on the doors

are frayed nerves.

Beyond the glass wall,

the healthy unfurl limbs,

mute impatient slaves.

We watch them gallop on endless black treads,

hoist dark barbells overhead,

imagining the inevitable revolt.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I love how you start this poem like a song. It's very, like, "the doze," "final repose," "joints lock without keys," "muscles seize," "refuse to give back," "bones crack, we lack." I just felt like you were having so much fun there. Tell me about this poem and how it was to write, because it seems like you had a good time. It's not, like, about a fun time in your life. So, like, again, I wanna know a little bit about how poetry sort of does this, and how it layers things that are like fun and not fun for you.

Philip Metres: As a teacher of creative writing, I tell my students, one of the weird gifts of poetry is that no matter what we face in life, the poem is this opportunity to transform it. And I hope that that's something that the work can do. Thinking, like Stevens, and "death is the mother of beauty"—like, injury here is the mother of a song, you know what I mean? So . . . yeah, I think I write to sort of survive just being human. And in this particular instance, this particular moment, was just feeling so uncomfortable in my own body, so profoundly exiled from my healthy self, which I imagined was my immortal and eternal being in the world. Like we all do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. That's our rightful—like, we deserve to be healthy. Everything else is an aberration.

Philip Metres: Right. That is our throne, our birthright. We are the royalty. One of the things that this poem does at the end, is the realization that I had that I was pushing my body so hard. I was torturing the, as Mary Oliver says, the soft animal of our body. I was torturing the soft animal of our body. I wasn't listening to its cues. I wasn't in relationship with it. I was in a master-slave relationship with it, as uncomfortable as that metaphor sounds. I think that so many of us are so dissociated and numbed from our physical selves, we become cruel to ourselves in that way.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I love that you talk about, like how dissociation makes us cruel. I think it's so true. And I'd never really thought about the way we talk to ourselves and like, for most of us, it's not nice. We wouldn't talk to a person we love that way. And it's so astute, I think, that it does come from a certain level of dissociation. Like, what is a way in which you try to reverse that dissociation? How do you reconnect?

Philip Metres: I mean, I think that I always used exercise as a way of grounding myself in my body. But there's this moment where that becomes something else, and I'm not sure what that moment is.

Helena de Groot: You mean, like where that, too, becomes punishment?

Philip Metres: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Philip Metres: So this voice that you spoke of, it's sort of like the anti-poetry voice, the voice that says, "You are not enough," "There's something not right about you." There's this wonderful thing that I think Sharon Olds said in a reading—which is such a kind of hippie-dippie move, and yet I love it so much. Now that I'm a certain age, I don't worry about not being cool anymore—so she invited everyone to kiss the inside of their arm, their wrist, where the skin is softest, as James Wright observed in that poem “A Blessing,” right? So just kiss your wrist. It's like, love yourself and love your body. And wow, what an invitation. And she saw that as foundational to her own practice, that she needs to talk back to those voices, to say, like, "That's not the voice that I need to hear." And to open up a space for that other voice, which is there, which is perhaps more at the core of our being. Our love, our spirit, why we're here.

Helena de Groot: I love that. But you called that cruel inner voice, you called that the anti-poetry voice. It's really good. I love that. That just sort of has a minimum . . . or, like, the starting place for any poem. If it's not cruelty, what is it?

Philip Metres: Yeah, like a sense of maybe wonder or curiosity. That sort of observant pleasure that we take in something. But, also, a deep listening. This space where we can sort of settle in and begin to see how we're connected to everything else. I mean, of course, poetry comes from lots of different things. Anger, love, grief, wonder, all the things, right? But I do think, as you say, that that other voice that tells us that we're not good, that we should shut up, that we shouldn't take space, that we don't have anything to say—that the voice that defeats the, like, "Alright, thank you. Thank you for showing up, but now I'm gonna tap with somebody else." In a nutshell, that's what writer's block is. It's the superego saying like, "This is not good enough. You are not good. You can't do this." The page wins. You lose.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, totally. This is so silly—I had a deadline yesterday. I was supposed to write a thing. I couldn't write the thing. My confidence was absolutely in the toilet. And I was texting with a friend, and I was saying to him, I'm gonna tell my editor that I'm not gonna write the thing, that I couldn't do it. And he was like, how about you give it one more shot, and you write the angry version of the thing that you have to write? You know what I mean? All this frustration that you feel, all this self-hatred, just put it on the page! Just make it—you know what, it worked. It was just allowing myself to feel as uncomfortable with having that deadline and being like, "I'm not saying the right thing"—just allowing that actual true feeling on the page. Open that door and poof, before I knew it, there . . .

Philip Metres: Somebody called it the "grand permission." Yeah, "the grand permission."

Helena de Groot: You talk about reconnecting with yourself in this poem, about being sick or having these back problems. I find this similar sort of drive for connection in so many of your poems, especially also the poems about your family. A family that's long dead, a family that you cannot talk to in any other way maybe than through a poem. And I'm thinking of this poem that you wrote called "Tweets to Iskandar from the Capitol, One Hundred Years After His Death." And what I love about this poem so much is that it's just this conversation between you and your long-dead great-grandfather, and there's a real connection that happens. One of the sorrows of your book is how little we actually know of our family and how much gets lost. Like here we are with some, not even stories, just a corner of an anecdote. That's what we know from our great-grandparents. That's what we carry on, generation after generation, until inevitably we lose that too. Before you read this poem, can you tell me, given that we know so little of the family members that came before us—how do you go about creating a real connection between you and, in this case, your great-grandfather?

Philip Metres: Yeah, that's a good question. I think one of the things that I was trying to do in this book was to—this goes back to my peace work and stuff—how to let our ancestors rest. How to process the trauma of what has come before, and that which we've internalized, or that it's coiled in our very genetic information. And one of the things that I really wanted to do was to go to Salina Cruz and see if I could find where he's buried. Because the family left very quickly after he was murdered and went north, because they were afraid that they would be killed, too. He was killed, probably, because he was running a store and they were gangsters, banditos is what my grandfather would have said, that just held up the place and were not satisfied with whatever they got. But I was unable to go at the time because of COVID, and I had connected with a local from Salina Cruz, she was in Oaxaca, and she said that, you know, there are very few foreign graves because the cemeteries are kept up and people pay an annual fee, it's a very Mexican tradition. And so I don't think we could find it. And it made me very sad, until writing these poems, I just felt that I didn't need to anymore, that the poems became my reburial, in a sense, of him. And to try to process all of the toxic masculinity of feeling like the need to protect requires us to discipline boys, and discipline myself to do a certain kind of fierce power and sometimes rage, I think that that's part of the emotional journey for me in terms of the writing of this book. And this poem was like almost imagining, "If I could just talk to you, a man I don't have a photograph for."

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that's really what it read like. Yes. Just before you read, there are two mentions of war. So you already mentioned that your father was a Vietnam veteran. And then there's another war that you mentioned, the war that your grandfather fought in, a war before and after the war. Anyway, what war is that?

Philip Metres: World War II. "The war called good."

Helena de Groot: Alright. Yeah.

Philip Metres: I think my father was so deeply disappointed I didn't go into the ROTC, because for him, being a man meant to serve one's country in armed services, and I was just like, I could not have been less interested in that, and felt like it militated against something in me. I associated that with the toxic parts of my father. So, I dissociated myself from it. So yeah, that's another part of the story, I suppose. I respect my dad and love my dad so much. And he did what he felt like was right. And he recognizes all the ways in which he felt used and abused by empire and the rest of it. He to this day is a psychologist and still works with veterans trying to do their work of processing their own trauma and grief. So, he's done the work. I have other work to do.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Wow. And you've really rebelled all the way. I mean, I don't know if you could get further away from the military than being a poet.

Philip Metres: (UNINTELLIGIBLE), where he said to me, I never really understood poetry until you started writing about my family. And then I understood it.

Helena de Groot: I love that. So you were not just having a conversation with your great-grandfather, you were having a conversation with him.

Philip Metres:

"Tweets to Iskandar from the Capitol, One Hundred Years After His Death," the Capitol being Washington D.C.

1.

Great-grandfather,

I wish you could see

this land your children’s

children now wander—

how from three directions

you can’t even perceive

the palace of the emperor

for the leaf-lush trees.

2.

The dredged reflecting pool

looks roughly like the flesh

beneath my ruptured nail.

The stone tower unleashes

and roots down its double.

If you could see my face

would you see your face

hovering back like a skull?

3.

This is the stone and water

for the millions who died

fighting in a war called good.

Your son warred a war

before and after the war

against everyone who didn’t die.

For my empire, should I

object or volunteer?

4.

The war no one won

almost drowned

my father your grandson

in its black stone.

He carries the stone

hidden in his spine

and all the names

he couldn’t save.

5.

When they came for you

and brandished their guns

in your store in Salina Cruz

you could not imagine

El Norte any more

than I imagine I hear

you plead in two tongues

to spare your children.

6.

Are you the secret reason

my father’s at home

speaking any tongue

of all the migrant people

he welcomes as kin?

He holds the umbilical

passage to the homeland

beneath his olive skin.

7.

In the heart of empire

I swallow my sword

and exhale a great fire,

hollow out my words

until they can float

you over the stolen river.

My heart and its borders

swarm with migrant hope.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Philip Metres: Yeah, sure.

Helena de Groot: I want to ask you about home and hope. The last word of this poem is "hope." "My heart and its borders swarm with migrant hope." In one of the essays for The New Yorker that your friend Mossab Abu Toha wrote, he writes about hope, and he writes about what hope means to Palestinians. I think he says that in Arabic, the word "hope" has some root in common with the word for "cultivate." I might be wrong, but it was something along those lines. That's what he says, that hope is something that has to be painstakingly and every day cultivated. It doesn't just exist, you have to make it exist. And home, I wonder if it is like that for you too. That home is something that you have to, against all odds, every day again, create for yourself. And if so, how do you do that work of making a home for yourself, for yourself and your family . . . However you want to take it.

Philip Metres: It's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, "home" is a verb, you know. Home is to create a space. Yeah, I think one of the things that I realized . . . A lot of my early work and scholarship was around poetry as resistance. And I realized over the years that resistance is a very powerful and active and important term and way of being in the world and activity of culture and art. But it didn't speak to the wholeness that I had longed for. And to see a poem not simply as a mode of resistance, but also as a mode of existence, of shelter, of sanctuary, of refuge. And this book was an attempt, I think, to try to create little sanctuaries and refuges where people could find space. The poet Sergey Gandlevsky, one of the Russian poets that I've translated, introduced me to the idea, which was from Korolenko, a poet—or, a writer from the 19th century. He said, my homeland is Russian literature. And I just, I love that so much. I felt like, yes, this is me. Literature is a space of belonging, of homeland. And it doesn't replace all the necessary work of creating just societies. But it is such a refuge. I don't know about you, but every night I try to read something that helps me feel like it's gonna be OK.

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: You were talking earlier about, like, how the work of middle age for you has been to come home to yourself, or to try. Can you say a little bit more about that? I'm a little younger than you, but not that much, so I'm always looking forward to it.

Philip Metres: Yeah, there's a wonderful documentary called the Up series by Michael Apted. I don't know if you've seen it, but it tracks the lives of seven British children.

Helena de Groot: Right. And like every ten years or something—or every seven years, I guess—yeah, sorry, they meet again.

Philip Metres: So almost one, there's seven, and the next one, 14, 21. And the people around 42 were the most unhappy. No matter class, condition, gender, they were the most unhappy. The people who are 49 were the ones who'd kind of made peace with what life was. And so you have that to look forward to. (LAUGHS) It's so weird, though, right, that we think of ourselves as so different. But there are these milestones that we're all kind of working through as we age, and moments of crisis that are sort of just built into us as human beings. OK, so maybe I shouldn't over-universalize, but it has definitely spoken to me in my life. And accepting, as the beautiful translation of the Psalms by the Buddhist Norman Fischer says, "the sovereignty of what is"—I just love that so much—it's sort of the sovereignty of what is. It's something that takes a long time. So, the practice of that for me has been multiple. I mean, first of all, me just finding it, every inch of the way for a lot of times, right? Winding up in therapy, both physical and mental, seeking help from all sorts of people, spiritual, psychological, otherwise. So that work is so absolutely essential. I see a therapist. We did couples therapy. We did marriage work. I try to stay healthy. I try to eat well. I try not to drink. I try not to do things to my body that make me feel unhoused. I try to find joy. I try to connect as much as I can to the outside, to the environment, to the people that I care about, who care about me, and in whom we are in a nourishing sympathy. And since the pandemic, walking every day with my wife, with my family, we don't do it quite as much as we used to, but that's so grounding, like so much grounding in our reality as being creatures on this earth, of this earth, and to return to this earth. I'm praying a lot. As weird as that sounds, particularly post-this October 7th, I started praying the rosary, which is so . . . It makes me feel like I've graduated to, I don't know, to being elderly or something. But yeah, just finding practices of self-care, self-calm. And the act of praying for other people has been so powerful for me because it makes me actually act differently in the world. It's not just about, if people say, "thoughts and prayers," you're done with this person. But if I pray for somebody, I actively am curious about how they are right now, and I reach out to them. So those are some things I do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. No, I love that. And you're right, accepting all the stuff we cannot accept, the daily practice of that. As you correctly surmised, not that you made it about me, but I'm not there yet. I'm 40, so I'm right on schedule by being not there yet. Fighting reality very hard. So far, reality is winning.

Philip Metres: It's OK, that's the work.

Helena de Groot: Philip Metres is the author of 12 books, including his most recent poetry collection, Fugitive Refuge, Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening, Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, and Sand Opera. He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation, and won an Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He's professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.